Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk. 

Today I’m welcoming Lieutenant Colonel Shaye Mullen Dyke, a 27-year Air Force Veteran. She is the Creator and Director of YogaFit for Warriors and YogaFit for Warrior Kids.  

These trauma informed yoga programs are designed to help and empower anyone struggling with PTSD or unresolved physical and emotional trauma, including yoga teachers, mental health workers, educators, veterans, their families, first responders, and all those who help and love them.  

She is also a yoga therapist through the International Association of Yoga Therapists and specializes in working with groups and individuals to help process unresolved traumas. 

Shaye earned her Master’s in Counseling from the University of Maryland in 2003, while she was in the military and spent a year working directly with veterans returning from the Iraq War. In 2012, she combined her military and counseling experience with her love of yoga into the program she’s in charge of today. 

Welcome Shaye.  

Well, thanks, Jeanne. That’s a lovely introduction. Now retired Lieutenant Colonel. I retired this past year during the pandemic. It was perfect timing with the transition to being at home. I got to focus on the warriors programming and leading workshops online. It’s been busy, and yet perfectly timed so I could focus on helping people during this difficult time and to help myself.  

It may be harder to come out of it than it was to go in because we don’t know. We’re walking out of the cave into a new world. What are the operating instructions? How do I walk and talk and interact with people? We all have some healing to do. Not just people with a diagnosable disorder, like PTSD.  

I thought I knew mental health, but it got magnified with everybody dealing with stress. We were dealing with the unknown and the human brain doesn’t like that, it likes to predict. If you can’t produce a story that makes sense in the world, that is, by its definition, a stressful place. Our kids are struggling, I was struggling, everybody became a caregiver, I’m a homeschooler. I work from home and roles changed. In hindsight, the silver lining is we were all going through it together. 

Coming out of this year, people are more willing to ask for help because stress and trauma became normalized, and everybody was talking about them. Now it’s more acceptable to say, I’m dealing with some anxiety, some depression. In fact, suicide rates dropped last year but the numbers of phone calls to the suicide hotline quadrupled.  

It must’ve been a different experience when you decided to introduce yoga-based programs to military veterans. I’m guessing that there was not as much willingness to address trauma in our troops.  

We started creating the Warriors Program in late 2011, 2012, because 22 veterans a day commit suicide.  

We saw this dramatic increase in PTSD is because we had this thing called the surge. We sent over 125,000 troops into Iraq and Afghanistan to ‘finish the war.’ We had an enormous amount of troops deployed during the next four to six years. Then, everybody started coming home and that’s where we saw a big shift, not only in PTSD, but things like traumatic brain injuries, TBI. 

It was a desperate time in the military. The only paradigm that the military has, because we’re bound by evidence-based research, the Western medical model and insurance model, was cognitive behavioral therapy, which is fantastic, but doesn’t always work well with trauma. 

Then, of course pharmaceutical interventions, psycho-pharmaceutical interventions, which are great in some instances, but just a disaster, many times, for PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder.  

Military wouldn’t come in and say, I want that pill for PTSD because they wouldn’t really admit it. They would come in and say, I have chronic pain. What you get is an opiate. Then, oh, I can’t sleep doc. Okay, here’s some Trazadone. Oh, I have some anxiety now. Okay, here’s some Valium. I’m having trouble focusing. Here’s some Adderall.  

They would walk out, very commonly, with six to 12 medications as cocktail that either made them a zombie or, unfortunately, many overdose deaths and addictions and increased suicidal ideations. 

Again, not all drugs are bad, but that was all they had. I knew yoga could help and that’s what gave birth to the Warriors program. That was not sustainable and is actually not helping anybody.  

Also, you’re really not open to going to mental health when you’re in active duty because you’re judged for it. We’re trying to get rid of that, but the truth is there’s security clearance concerns. You’re the perceived weak link. You can’t hack it. You can’t cut it. That’s still there. And, that’s just a necessary part of what our military does.  

People can come to yoga class and never have to self-identify or say I have PTSD, and yet they come on their mats and heal. 

The motto that I live by the credo, ‘You don’t have to talk to heal. You have to feel to heal.’ Healing comes first. Talking may come second. It’s that lack of feeling that’s the problem.  

Back in 2012, it wasn’t well accepted, but I knew it could help. Yoga was on every base. I didn’t call my classes, yoga for PTSD, but they knew who I was. We’re still not there but we’ve come a long way.  

From what it sounds like you were teaching this to military, not necessarily like in a therapeutic way, but it was therapeutic.  

Yeah. I had gotten my master’s in counseling in 2003 and started yoga in 1998 and it finally all came together. I was like, wait a minute, I know yoga could help. I knew it was mental health therapy on the mat but didn’t have the ability to explain how to people, which is really important in the West. We want to know why and the mechanisms that make it healing. We have that now, so it’s an exciting time.  

If you have trauma PTSD, you should get on the mat and find a trauma informed yoga teacher or a clinical therapist, like yourself, who specializes in somatic therapies because we know exactly how and why yoga and mindfulness work. It dials into the part of the brain and the nervous system where trauma is stored. The biggest message is you don’t have to feel this way. 

For a lot of people, once they hear the science behind it, they’re like, all right, I’ll give it a try. Continuing to talk about our story can be re-triggering and can add to our toxic stress load. When there’s something as accessible as yoga, that takes away the fear of treatment. You leave a yoga class, and you feel good. You might not know why, but you do.  

Prolonged exposure therapy. I think for some people it’s been a lifesaver, but in some ways  it kind of makes you a declawed cat. It’s a desensitization as opposed to what we do in yoga, which is integration. We’re not trying to get rid of the trauma. That is completely Western, sort of reductionist, cut it out, get rid of it. We don’t believe that. We believe it can be a source of strength. We believe in post-traumatic growth, that trauma is eventually going to be a big strong root system for you. The way out is through, and yoga gives you the skills, the strength, predominantly through breath practice and self-regulation skills. The mindfulness, stay present. Then, when I get triggered, I don’t check out, I don’t disassociate, I don’t go shut down. That’s where the healing happens.  

With things like MRIs, we can now see what happens in the brain. A person who disassociates or checks out is re-experiencing, which is not productive. Instead, we trigger a little bit, but we stay present. You’re going to feel it again, you have to. Just like when you stub your toe and hold your breath, eventually you take an inhale. When you stay mindful, you own it, it doesn’t own you. It’s there still, but now you can pull up that experience when you want, and you can retell that story from a place of strength. 

What are the unique ways that PTSD shows up in our military?  

A lot of people join the military at age 18 because they’re not from the best situations. The average military person has an ACE, adverse childhood experiences, score of four or more. They’re coming in predisposed to PTSD.   

If you’ve been through a lot of stress and trauma, one of the responses is fight. We get the fighters. They’ve been fighting their whole lives. They tend to do well, but they’re rewarded for that fight response, and it’s normalized in the military.  

That creates complex PTSD. You’ve come in with previous childhood stressors and traumas and I’m going to intentionally traumatize you before we send you to war. It’s one of the few things we know we’re going to do and yet we do nothing to inoculate your nervous system or brain from it even when we know you can. That’s martial arts. That’s Eastern mindfulness, control, resiliency. We don’t do that. We train you to fight and to follow rules. We don’t train you on how to control the weapon of yourself. Control your nervous system through your breath. Control your mind. Some of the special ops and other elite forces get that training, but it should be mandatory at all basic training. Let’s make you do meditation, so we don’t send you unarmed out there to have a traumatic experience and a dysregulated nervous system. 

Then, we get mad because you can’t regulate yourself and your emotions. You come home and you’re a hot mess at work, in your family, your finances, your relationships, and we’re surprised? It’s actually quite logical. 

For some reason, there’s a barrier about incorporating it as mandatory training. I think it has to do with a lot of people’s notion of yoga as a religion, which it’s not. We need to look at it like training you physically, we’re training your mind. There’s some initiatives, but it’s a slow ship to turn around the whole military.  

To answer your question, I think it starts before they even enter and then we traumatize you in basic training. We’ve got to because you’re going to come under fire, and I need to know how you’re going to respond. 

When the firefight goes on, I need you to hold your ground and shoot. That is abnormal human mammal behavior. Your first response should be flight because that is the best conservation of metabolic resources to keep you alive and to live another day. 

We have to train them over and over again to counter that. That’s a trauma. I have to traumatize you to counter the flight response. Now let’s send you into battle. 

Why are rates of PTSD higher for men in the military versus civilian men?  

It’s a relationship trauma most of the time that happens because your buddy got blown up next to you. It’s a band of brotherhood. I would die for you if you’re my brother or sister in the military, but I don’t have to like you. I would die for you because we’re here for the greater good. That gives you so much oxytocin. Now, you get blown up or hurt and I feel responsible. It’s a moral injury, that’s much more powerful than any physical injury.  

We’re talking about chemical messengers. Oxytocin, the cuddle hormone, is a chemical process that bonds us to one another. PTSD is very much physiological.  

You can’t just give somebody a pill to alleviate those symptoms. The body has to be involved and there also has to be a greater meaning. There’s so much to explore. What is the greater good? How do I fit into that?  

That brings up an even bigger point. We don’t explore philosophically with our young troops, are you okay with killing somebody? Part of the Warriors Program is reading the story of Arjuna. The warrior is telling his dilemma. He’s darned if he does and darned if he doesn’t. Someone’s got to go out there and fight. Is it okay? Is it okay with my morals.  

We didn’t even mention the brain part. They’re 18 to 24 and the brain doesn’t fully develop until after 24. We’ve done great damage to their brains, and they come home, and we go, what’s wrong with you? Again, surprised when we shouldn’t be. 

We haven’t had the deep, moral, philosophical discussion about war. We’re just like, do what you’re told and follow orders. They do that and then come home and are like, what does this mean about me? I killed somebody. I was responsible for this.  

It really comes from not knowing who they are. That is another benefit of yoga, exploring energetically, emotionally, but also philosophically, who are we? Why are we here? No matter what culture or religious tradition or political standpoint you come from, you are all welcome on the mat. Over time, that’s the inner strength that yoga gives us. That’s resiliency. If you know who you are, then in any given situation, you’re going to know the right thing to do for you. Better to explore that before you’re faced with it. We can avoid some of those moral injuries.  

I also believe that we shouldn’t send people to battle until they’re 25. That level of damage to the brain is really tough to undo. Technology has gotten us past World War One brute strength. That’s kind of controversial. I think we should send them to go make peace, build a bridge, Army Corps of Engineers, something medical. We don’t need to put a gun into your hand to go shoot somebody until you’re 25. 

We talked about heart rate variability as being an indicator of our flexibility to recover from these catastrophic things.  

Heart rate variability is really a measure of the coordination of our nervous system with the autonomic nervous system functioning. You train people on heart rate variability, and it doesn’t lie, it shows if you’re resilient or not. We have a biomarker. Just like physical fitness can be measured, nervous system fitness can be measured. That’s what resilience is. How about that in training?  

How about we teach you to train your parasympathetic nervous system, which is where resiliency and awareness and healing come from. I know we have the nickname rest and digest, but it’s much more than that. It’s the calm strength.  

You’re either Mr. Miyagi in the fight or you’re John Kreese. His trauma actually made him a dangerous ineffective fighter and morally, look what it did to him. But Mr. Miyagi had resilience. That’s the difference maker. You’re connected constant awareness. You make better decisions, not reactive, scared, or angry decisions. He was calm. He did what he had to do and he’s going to recover faster. It’s not going to affect him as much as somebody who doesn’t have strength in their nervous system.  

We have advanced technology inside of us. Stop focusing on the outside. Emotional intelligence is much more powerful. It’s more effective and efficient too to befriend somebody, to collaborate, than it is to fight. It makes a lot more sense. We save fighting for the last resort. 

You would think it would make sense financially too, to invest in this sort of training on front and back end so that we don’t have these kids coming back with these significant health problems that are then become a burden on our system. 

You have to practice it. You can’t just go through a one-week course on resiliency and I’m good. That’s not going to do it. How about starting your staff meetings with five minutes of mindfulness. De-stigmatize that. Make it normal. Introducing mindful moments in their units and squadrons every time they get together. That’s all it takes. Where we train our muscles in basic training and get stronger. We need to do the same thing with our minds. Mindfulness is so affordable and easy, and it counters the past and future orientation of trauma. It keeps us in the moment. 

What about coming back? What can we do to support the military?  

Talking about it more. The military has been used for social change for a long time and I believe we can use the military for good. You may not teach military directly, but you are educating your communities. Start at the schools, go teach to kids. Let’s introduce this earlier. I would challenge all yoga teachers or mental health therapists to articulate how it works. I love polyvagal theory. Teach Vagus Nerve. Teach mindfulness. Teach about the triune brain. Teach about the medial prefrontal cortex. Talk about the fight, flight, freeze response. Talk about how breath practices hack into our nervous system. People want to know why.  

Another big problem with PTSD that we don’t have a good answer for in Western medicine is anxiety and hypervigilance. You know, things like tapping, The Emotional Freedom Technique is a body-based intervention that costs you nothing. Turn your Apple watch on and start tapping. Watch what your HRV does. It goes up every single time. The science behind it is clear.  

When you’re stressed and traumatized your brain is listening to the emergency broadcast system. It can only tell one story at a time. Tapping is like giving it a different signal, different channels. Then it can’t tell the same anxiety story. You’re recalibrating slowly over time. Bringing people back into homeostasis.  

We have things out there that are easy, everybody can do them, and affordable. There’s an app for it. There’s a YouTube video for it. I will put information on heart rate variability and the Emotional Freedom Technique, which is tapping, in our show notes and also a link to YogaFit and Warriors Trainings.  

If somebody is interested in doing some of this yoga teaching or just learning more at YogaFit, Shaye has created this amazing program. I’m a trainer for YogaFit and I believe, very deeply, that this is part of our answer. This is our healing.  

Here we are 2021, Warriors launched in 2013, just for the military. Now, it’s expanded way beyond that. I have military and military spouses, mental health professionals, yoga teachers, educators, parents at home, people have been through trauma–All are welcome. I think, look at what the military did for us. They’re the reason it’s here. So much gratitude for our military and what they do for us on a daily basis.  

Keep following what you love right now. There’s a reason you’re doing what you’ve been doing. There’s a reason you’ve had your specific trauma. You’ve got to find that reason. 

For those that don’t know YogaFit, you can come to us not knowing anything about yoga. We speak yoga, but we also speak Western science. It’s medicine. In fact, it’s really effective medicine.  

I think all yoga teachers need to be trauma informed. Your words have an impact on someone’s mind. We have an energetic signature that we bring with us, and you can’t fake it. I’ve seen so much damage done by teachers who triggered people unintentionally. We have to do our own work. We have to be grounded in our own experience in order to hold that healing space for another person. We train ourselves to be able to be regulated so that we can hold that space.  

We have a good group of military that comes to our studio through Team RWB. It’s very much community. Of course people get triggered, but they know they’re in a safe place because of the community that they’ve established and just the work that we’ve done at Insight as trauma informed yoga teachers to be regulated for them. 

Whatever we can do to get the word out there to everybody and let them know that they have hope. We don’t have to stay in this place. Someone does care about you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. We would love it.