Welcome to Nervous System Literacy for Yoga Teachers — where science, philosophy, and embodied practice meet in the yoga classroom.
Before we explore the work, here’s how it came to be.
On paper, I’m a yoga teacher, massage therapist, somatic practitioner, author and founder.
But none of that is why this space exists.
This space exists because I once lived at the furthest end of the stress continuum — with misdiagnosed Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
For nearly eight years, I cycled through medications at staggering doses, navigating side effects I never fathomed could happen to me. When I was eventually referred for electroconvulsive therapy, I sought a second opinion instead — a decision that changed the trajectory of my life.
Getting the correct diagnosis of CPTSD set me on a path toward body-based methods rather than pharmacological ones. If I was going to heal, I needed to understand what was happening inside my own body.
So I began studying the nervous system — not academically at first, but experientially. I applied every somatic tool I could find and that was available at the time. I learned to track regulation and dysregulation in real time:
In my thoughts, reactions, sleep, appetite, ability to sit still, illness, and energy.
It was everywhere.
That season of my life became a kind of self-directed doctorate in awareness. I started to recognize patterns. I began to understand stress not as a vague concept, but as a continuum — one I had personally inhabited at its most dysregulated end. And day by day, through working with my body, I slowly walked myself back toward regulation.
Healing made me curious. Curiosity made me study.
I immersed myself in anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, stress chemistry, neurobiology, somatics, and philosophy. I wanted to understand not just that the body changes under stress — but how and why. I wanted language for what I had lived. And as that language developed, I found myself doing something I hadn’t expected: I started seeing the stress continuum everywhere. In the people around me. In the yoga rooms I consistently inhabited. In the way a student’s shoulders carried their week, or the way certain bodies couldn’t soften no matter how beautiful the sequence.
What began as self study turned into a lens through which I started to see the world and hold compassion for it.
Yoga was one of the somatic tools that profoundly supported my healing. But what truly moved the needle for me wasn’t only movement or breath. It was skillful, contextual, consensual touch.
Touch was a huge part of my life growing up — my mother was a massage therapist and massage educator–but I never considered touch as a tool that could be applied to anything other than soft tissue therapy. When I encountered touch as a somatic mind-body tool — it was at first by accident, then with growing intention — and it did something nothing else had managed to achieve. It invited a felt sense of safety — one that arrived in the body first, and only then reached the mind. It didn’t require me to cognitively reframe or analyze. It bypassed the thinking mind and spoke directly to the nervous system in a language older than words.
I later came to understand this through the science of co-regulation, afferent signaling, the vagal pathway, and the neurochemistry of oxytocin and cortisol — mechanisms we’ll unpack together in future posts. But at the time, I felt it first. In my body. As the missing link.
So when I became a yoga teacher in 2011, my intention was simple: share what helped. That was a combination of many somatic tools — asana, breathwork, meditation, mantra, but most importantly, consensual, skillful touch.
When offered with precision and awareness, touch can organize tissue, communicate safety, refine proprioception, and support regulation in ways words cannot. That understanding, refined over years in real yoga classrooms, eventually became Rubber Band Method® — a structured methodology for hands-on yoga assists grounded in consent, anatomy, and nervous system awareness.
But this Substack is not simply about a method. Yes, it’s a somatic tool we will explore here because I feel it’s greatly undervalued and underutilized, but it’s not the primary focus. This Substack is about the foundation underneath RBM — what led to its formation. That foundation is nervous system literacy.
I’m sharing this because I think you deserve to know who is asking for your attention and why. Everything I teach, I have lived. The stress continuum isn’t an academic framework to me — it’s a map I drew from the inside. The science of co-regulation isn’t abstract — it’s the explanation for why touch was my missing link when years of other interventions hadn’t been enough. Rubber Band Method® exists because what helped me heal is teachable. And this space exists because the foundation underneath that methodology deserves its own exploration.
What I hope to share here is my unique lens on the yoga space — colored by decades of healing from severe dysregulation and nearly another decade moving back towards regulation. It’s still a daily journey that insists I continue to explore my internal state and how my environment affects it.
Having been practicing yoga since 2002, most of my healing journey was performed inside the yoga classroom. This led me not only to see the nervous system and its scientific frame emerge on the mat — it led me to connect yogic philosophy with modern science. To recognize where others might be on the stress continuum. To understand yoga as a living, breathing space for regulation.
And so, it is my sankalpa, my intention to explore three pillars through the lens of the yoga classroom:
Science — anatomy, physiology, stress chemistry, biomechanics, and how regulation and dysregulation manifest in the body.
Philosophy — how awareness shapes perception, how compassion arises from understanding, and how ancient frameworks intersect with modern neuroscience in ways that are, frankly, astonishing.
Application — what this looks like in real rooms, with real students, on real days.
My hope is that these posts inspire in you a fascination in the nervous system like it has for me. This inquiry is where I get to grow and expand alongside you as I put fingers to keyboard and articulate the science as I see it showing up in my classrooms. My hope is that what you learn here helps you have compassion for yourself and your students — even the ones who skip or fall asleep in savasana, insist on doing a thousand chaturangas even when you haven’t guided them to do so or find stillness an incomprehensible thing.
I’m not an academic or a scientist. I’m more like a living case study — I’ve lived the spectrum of the stress continuum and can attest to what works. Or, at the very least, share information about the mechanisms behind yoga and other somatic tools. Here, our inquiry unfolds in the living laboratory of yoga, where the nervous system is toned — or triggered. Through science, philosophy, and embodied practice, we explore regulation on the path toward samadhi.
Welcome to Nervous System Literacy for Yoga Teachers.
Let’s begin.
This newsletter is the science behind the method. The method itself is in the book — Hands-On Yoga Assists (Human Kinetics, 2025). If you're a yoga teacher ready to transform how you offer touch, that's your next step.
