Jennifer Siegel, Photo Credit: **Joel Conrad Bechtolt**

Jennifer Siegel grew up being a ballerina. By the time she was 15, her chiropractor warned her that she was going to have a lifetime of pain if she didn’t find a better way to navigate her physical health. This led to yoga, which evolved into a whole series of healing work: massage, yoga therapy school in 2011, yoga teaching, and becoming a certified alcohol and drug counselor.

I first met Jennifer more than ten years ago in Portland, Oregon, where she lives and works. I was struck by the creativity and thoughtfulness she brought to her yoga teaching. In her career, she’s often combined yoga with recovery, drawing both on her studies and her own experience quitting weed and dealing with the alcoholism of loved ones.

I always appreciate how Jennifer’s yoga tries to be true to what is happening at the moment—not what she wants other people to perceive, and not how she was 10 years ago. Her approach is slow and patient, rather than a flashy series of poses. As she puts it, “In recovery, I can’t care about looking cool. If I need to really check in with 15 different things to make sure that I’m not hurting myself, I need to take that time. And I need to normalize taking that time. Again, it’s so easy to convince myself I have to do this right now, there has to be urgency. But not when it comes to taking care of myself. I have to relearn what it is to prioritize my needs and to be able to listen to my body.”

She let me interview her for this month’s Sobriety in Flow. Our conversation was edited due to space constraints.

Teresa: How did you get interested in using yoga to help people with addiction?

Jennifer: Coming from [name redacted: a corporate yoga chain with a fast-paced style], initially, I could see how people going through the motions of yoga just caused more and more damage and destruction. So, I didn’t want to perpetuate more harmful yoga. I couldn’t see the reason to do handstands or other things when you’ve got wrist pain. It just didn’t make sense to me. So, I kept refining my niches more and more.

I started to do more corporate yoga and speaking to people whose job it is to restock the shelves at grocery stores, or teaching yoga to people who are secretaries all day. And so, I kind of recognized, like, if I can get really niche about this. What are the things that I care about?

So, I whittled it down, and I realized my three favorite demographics were working with veterans, working with martial artists, and then working with people in recovery. And I know it doesn’t make sense initially, but there’s a lot of commonalities between those three groups, including trying really hard to reconnect the physical, the mental, the emotional, and the spiritual to create whole-body efficiency.

Teresa: What parts of yoga are most helpful to people who are newly sober?

Jennifer: A lot of times, the most important thing is for the body to feel like a safe place again. Because if someone is coming in and they are recovering from an opiate, all of a sudden, they are now feeling all the pain that they had not felt in a long time. And it’s overwhelming, especially because their pain receptors are so raw, it’s almost like double amplified. That is not the time to build a foundation for vinyasa or even hatha, really. That is a time to try to make the body safe again. Try to decrease the heat and get grounded.

I really liked what I learned in terms of somatic retraining and Feldenkrais technique from yoga therapy school because it changed the way a person understood their body. It’s like a phantom limb situation. If I have five fingers and all of a sudden, I lose two fingers, my brain still thinks I have five fingers. So, it’s going to continue to send messages down the neural pathways to the two fingers that are missing until enough time passes that that neural pathway changes. So, between somatic retraining and Feldenkrais, the idea is to send different signals down those paths and, again, maybe change the way I’m relating to my body. Because I don’t want to be in the mindset that my body is wracked with pain. I want to be in the mindset that my body is healing.

And it’s not just with people recovering from opiates. People recovering from amphetamines, again, they’re always on fire. So, to be able to calm that down in the nervous system is super critical.

So, as boring as it was to make a room full of adults lay on the ground and just breathe, it really was the most appropriate thing as far as I could tell in terms of actually facilitating healing and recovery. But trust me, it was boring, and everyone hated it. But I still get calls from people who were like, thank you for that.

Teresa: What kind of yoga is helpful after people have been sober a little while?

Jennifer: I really felt like yin yoga [long holds of stretches on the ground] was super helpful. Because again, once I’m safe enough and once I can change the way I’m experiencing my body, then it’s possible to let go of some of that stored trauma or some of that stored pain and be able to literally move through it. But to do so gently and to do so on the ground.

Teresa: What about for people who are long-term sober?

Jennifer: That’s when it’s really good to start to build foundation. I’m not a kundalini [a spiritual practice that aims to awaken energy through repetitive breath, movement, and chanting] practitioner, I really am overwhelmed by all the scandals and the nonsense. But when I just look at the physics or the practical application of some of the movements and some of the kriyas [a series of breath and movements designed for a specific effect], it kind of checks out in terms of scientific method. When you create vibration in your body, it really does help create healing. If you think about why cats purr, it’s to help with cellular repair. When we do the human equivalent of purring, we’re creating cellular repair. We’re helping to rebuild the nervous system. Like all the times we chant, and we hum, and we do the kriyas, you’re kind of doing the human equivalent of purring.

Teresa: What else should readers know?

Jennifer: I’m speaking to what worked for me in my recovery. My substance abuse was rooted in trauma, and I went through a lot of talk therapy and a lot of physical therapy to try to process some of that. It didn’t serve me well because I was not ever able to articulate what was happening for me without being re-traumatized. For me, having to go inward and transform from the inside out was how I was able to then become sober. I don’t know that that’s true for everyone.

So if a person reading this is like me and literally can’t verbalize what the talk therapist might be asking them or has failed EMDR [eye movement desensitization and reprocessing] because it’s too, too painful to go back to the places, to be able to elicit the appropriate response that the EMDR therapist is trying to get, then maybe these types of processes will work. I don’t want to suggest that this is going to be true for everyone. Like anything in recovery, take what works and leave the rest. Find your thing and do it. Then don’t be surprised if you need to find a different thing. Your recovery is your recovery and it’s the only recovery that matters.