Shadow & Light Yoga

ALEX CORDOVI

Lead Facilitation, Founder Shadow & Light Yoga Miami, RYT-500, YACEP

Throughout her 17-year yoga journey, Alex identified a direct link between trauma healing and yogic philosophy and began teaching in 2014. She specializes in trauma informed yoga and merges embodied yoga practice with social and environmental justice work. From this lens, she is able to meet students with compassion and curiosity and normalize sensitivities and discomfort so they can move through what they need to at their own pace.

ALEX CORDOVI DEFINES TRAUMA-INFORMED YOGA

Trauma-informed yoga - seeks to create safe/brave space for yoga students to cultivate self-awareness and self-regulation practices to understand trauma and its impact on the entire mind-body system. This is done through specific alignment cues in each pose, breathwork, and meditation techniques that the student always has the choice to participate in or not.

Through practicing and teaching through the trauma informed yoga lense, Ive come to believe that patterns of behavior can be an expression of something much deeper. So deep that it’s held in the nervous system and energy body as unresolved trauma. When unresolved trauma is experienced, patterns develop… many of which play out for years. Some are inherited through lineage and culture, others instilled through society, and others a product of life experience, what you’ve gone through.

I’ve found that Yoga is one of the most effective ways to support the processing of trauma. Through this practice, I’ve seen how students are able to create space for stagnant energy to move, in order to acknowledge, process, and transform in a way that instills love, empathy, and freedom. As a yoga teacher, I feel it’s necessary to understand how trauma is stored in the body and how movement supports the processing of trauma so that I can cultivate a brave space for my students.

When I provide a space for my students to get real about what’s going on inside, I am stepping more fully into the role of spiritual activism and social justice. AND in order to ask my students to embody these experiences for processing their own trauma, I need to be doing the work too! I practice what I teach and I teach what I practice.