What a New Neuroscience Paper Means for How We Teach

My Personal Story

As someone who experienced childhood trauma and sexual abuse, the phrase "trauma is held in your body" did not feel empowering. It felt like my body held dark secrets that betrayed me, and my sense of shame became visceral. Every area of hip pain or SI joint tightness felt like a residue I could not reach and was powerless to change however hard I tried, however flexible my hips became. 

I had already begun to shift that narrative for myself before I came across this research. I came to understand that the trauma lives in the nervous system, and the nervous system manages the body. The body is not a passive container of old pain. Once that clicked, I had something to work with, because I know how to support my nervous system- yoga practice has given me movement, breath, philosoohy, and even self- love slowly becames possible.

A New Paper

But this week I came across a new paper making exactly that argument, backed by brain imaging studies, mathematical models of brain function, and large-scale population data. So i was thrilled to see these ideas finally being challenged at a serious scientific level and to share it with you.

The paper It is called The Body Does Not Keep the Score: Trauma, Predictive Coding, and the Restoration of Metastability, published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience by Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Grace Fox, and the neuroscientist Karl Friston. It is a significant paper and every yoga teacher should know what it says.

How the Research Was Put Together

Before we get to the findings, it helps to understand what kind of research this is, because the methods matter.

The paper draws on three bodies of evidence.

The first is neuroimaging: brain scans, specifically the kind that show which areas of the brain are active and how strongly they are communicating with each other. These studies have now been done with thousands of people with PTSD, and the patterns are consistent enough to tell us something real about what trauma does to brain activity.

The second is computational modelling: mathematical models of how the brain processes information, makes predictions, and updates its understanding of the world. The core idea is that the brain is not a camera passively recording events. It is constantly generating predictions about what is going to happen next, checking those predictions against incoming sensory information, and adjusting. These models help researchers understand what goes wrong in trauma at a precise, mechanistic level.

The third is resilience research: large-scale studies tracking populations of people over time after traumatic events, asking who recovers, how quickly, and what the different trajectories look like. The systematic review the paper draws on covers 54 studies across multiple populations.

Together, these three strands point in the same direction.

The Key Findings

1. Trauma is a prediction problem, not a storage problem

The brain's primary job is to predict what is going to happen next. It generates an expectation, checks it against what the senses are reporting, and updates when something does not match. In a healthy system this process is fluid and continuous.

In trauma, the updating process breaks down. The brain becomes locked into over-confident threat prediction, assigning excessive certainty to danger signals even when the danger has long passed. It predicts threat, the body responds with arousal, the brain reads that arousal as confirmation of danger, and the loop repeats. The neuroimaging evidence is consistent: in PTSD, the brain's threat-detection centre, the amygdala, is chronically overactive, while the area responsible for context-reading and regulation, the medial prefrontal cortex, is underactive. The system has lost its balance.

What looks like trauma stored in the hips or the chest is the nervous system generating those states continuously, driven by a prediction system that cannot update. The body is absolutely involved. But it is the messenger, not the storage location.

2. Most people recover without any intervention at all

This is the finding that yoga teachers most need to sit with. A systematic review of 54 studies (Bonanno et al., 2015) found that approximately 65% of people exposed to trauma follow a resilient trajectory and do not develop chronic PTSD. The brain, given ordinary life conditions, tends to rebalance itself. Recovery is not the exception. It is what the nervous system is trying to do.

This does not mean that trauma is not serious, or that the 35% who do struggle are somehow failing. But it does mean that chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD is not the default outcome of trauma exposure. The nervous system is oriented toward recovery, and the language we use with students should reflect that. There is a meaningful difference between "your body is holding something that needs to be released" and "your nervous system is working to find its way back to balance."

3. The brain loses flexibility, and practices that restore flexibility work

The paper uses the concept of metastability to describe what trauma disrupts: the brain's ability to shift fluidly between different network states in response to context. Think of it as neurological range of movement. A healthy brain can move between states of alertness and calm, focus and openness, activation and settling. Trauma narrows this range, trapping the brain in a defensive configuration.

This is directly relevant to how we design practice. A nervous system that has lost its flexibility does not primarily need more stillness. It needs varied, graduated experiences of shifting between states, demonstrations that it can move. The paper's argument is that what all effective treatments share is the restoration of this flexibility, the brain's capacity to keep moving rather than staying stuck.

4. Flow state is the neurological near-opposite of PTSD

Flow state is the experience of complete absorption in a meaningful, well-matched challenge: that quality of attention when thinking drops away and you are simply moving, breathing, practising, without the usual running commentary. In neuroscientific terms, during flow the brain's self-referential circuits, the ones that generate rumination, self-criticism, and threat-scanning, quieten down, while the networks associated with attention, coordinated action, and adaptive response become rapidly integrated.

In PTSD, the opposite configuration dominates: threat-detection circuits are loud, regulatory circuits are quiet, and the brain's range of movement is narrow. Flow and PTSD represent, in the paper's framing, divergent responses to the same physiological stress signal. One collapses the nervous system's range. The other expands it.

A randomised controlled trial (Walter et al., 2023) assigned 96 active duty service members to six weeks of either surf therapy or hiking, both known to produce flow states. Both groups showed significant improvements in depression, with surf therapy participants more likely to achieve full remission at three-month follow-up. The researchers note that exercise, nature exposure, and social connection are likely contributors, so the specific mechanism of flow cannot yet be isolated. But the direction of the evidence is consistent, and the theoretical case is strong.

5. Every effective treatment works through the same mechanism

The paper makes a unifying argument: exposure therapy, EMDR, mindfulness, exercise, psychedelics, and flow-based movement all succeed through the same underlying process. They all restore the brain's capacity to shift flexibly between states, to move out of rigid threat-prediction and into a wider range of responses. The specific content or technique matters less than this neurological effect.

This is not a minor observation for yoga teachers. It means yoga is not an alternative to trauma treatment, offered apologetically alongside the real therapies. It is doing what all effective trauma treatment does.

6. Interoception is training the brain to hold sensation lightly

One of the most precise and useful mechanisms in the paper is sensory attenuation: the brain's normal capacity to hold incoming sensory signals with appropriate weight rather than treating every signal as high-priority data. In trauma, this capacity is disrupted. A racing heart or tight chest does not get processed as one piece of information among many. It gets full weight and is automatically read as confirmation of danger.

When we guide interoceptive awareness in class, we are not simply helping students relax. We are training the brain to notice sensation without automatically assigning it threat status. The capacity to observe a sensation as just a sensation, without the threat label, is precisely what trauma disrupts. Yoga nidra, somatic movement, and breath awareness practices are all doing this work.

7. The interpretive story can make things worse

This is where I want to be direct with yoga teachers, because it has implications for how we talk in class.

Interoceptive awareness is valuable and the research supports it. But the clinical literature, and in particular David Treleaven's work on trauma-sensitive mindfulness (2018), documents clearly that body scan and interoceptive practices can increase distress in people with active trauma when delivered without careful attention to the student's regulatory capacity. And the predictive processing framework in this paper offers a precise explanation for why.

If a student's brain is already in a threat-prediction loop, directing their focused attention toward uncomfortable sensation while framing it as "trauma coming up" or "the body releasing what it has been holding" gives that loop exactly what it is looking for: confirmation. The brain predicts danger, finds the sensation, and the prediction strengthens. The body is not releasing anything. The nervous system is being handed more evidence for a story it was already telling.

The problem is not interoceptive attention itself. The problem is the combination of interoceptive attention and the interpretive story that something is stored in the tissue, waiting to be found. Guiding students to notice sensation with curiosity, to observe without immediately interpreting, and crucially without suggesting that sensation equals stored trauma, is a meaningfully different practice. It trains sensory attenuation rather than threat-scanning.

8. Approach, not avoidance, is part of what heals

The paper draws a clear distinction between approach and avoidance responses to stress. In trauma, the nervous system learns to brace, freeze, and withdraw. In flow, uncertainty becomes a call to act rather than a cue to retreat. Approach behaviour recruits the prefrontal systems that convert arousal into focused action. Avoidance amplifies threat signalling.

For yoga teachers, this is an argument for graduated challenge. Small, achievable moments of mastery, building difficulty incrementally, giving students experiences where they discover they can do something they were not sure they could, are not just motivational tools. They are recruiting the neurological systems that restore the approach response. A trauma-informed class does not need to be uniformly gentle. Appropriate, well-paced challenge is part of what restores the nervous system's capacity to move toward rather than away.

9. Pranayama and meditation are training cognitive control

The paper cites research showing that reduced working memory capacity, the ability to hold information in mind and direct attention, predicts the severity of intrusive symptoms in trauma. Practices that train attentional control reduce this severity. Pranayama, the rotation of consciousness in yoga nidra, and seated meditation are all training the same underlying capacity: the ability to direct attention, notice when it has wandered, and return it. This is cognitive control training, and it has a direct effect on the brain's ability to regulate threat responses.

What This Means for How We Teach

1. Use optimistic language about the nervous system and recovery. The resilience data supports framing the nervous system as capable and oriented toward recovery. Replacing language about holding and releasing with language about learning, flexibility, and rebalancing is not a cosmetic change. It shapes the story students tell themselves about whether recovery is possible, and that story affects the nervous system directly.

2. Design for flow. Flow arises when challenge and capacity are well matched: demanding enough to absorb full attention, manageable enough not to trigger overwhelm. It is not one fixed experience. For one student it might arise in a dynamic breath-led sequence. For another it might be the absorbed inward attention of yoga nidra. For another it might be the focused, unhurried attention of slow somatic work. Practically: vary the challenge across a session, use rhythm and breath as an anchor, give enough repetition that students can drop into movement rather than spending the whole class in effortful learning, and leave space between cues rather than filling every moment with instruction.

3. Move between states deliberately. A uniformly calm and slow class may feel safe, but a sequence that moves between dynamic and gentle, effort and ease, activation and settling is asking the nervous system to keep shifting, and that shifting is exactly what restores flexibility. The evidence supports including bouncing, swinging, or dynamic movement before slower somatic work, not just as a warm-up but as a therapeutic sequence in its own right.

4. Guide interoceptive awareness without the interpretive story. Invite students to notice sensation as sensation. Warmth, pressure, movement, tingling, tightness, without immediately reaching for what it means or where it comes from. Avoid language that suggests the body is holding something that needs to surface. If a student has a powerful experience on the mat, help them stay with the sensation itself rather than building a narrative around it.

5. Include pranayama and meditation as core, not optional. Breath practices and meditation are training cognitive control, the brain's capacity to direct and sustain attention, which directly affects the severity of intrusive symptoms. These practices belong at the centre of a trauma-informed approach, not at the edges.

6. Build in graduated challenge and moments of mastery. Appropriate challenge, well-paced and achievable, recruits the approach response and the prefrontal systems that convert arousal into focused action. Students who discover they can do something difficult in a safe environment are not just building confidence. They are doing genuine neurological work.

Conclusions

The somatic traditions have not been proved wrong. The body is absolutely involved in trauma and in recovery. Every physical, breath-led, and attentional practice in yoga is working directly with the nervous system, because the nervous system runs through all of us and there is no part of the body it does not reach.

What has changed is the story we tell about where trauma lives and what recovery requires. Trauma is not an archive buried in tissue. It is a nervous system that has lost its flexibility, caught in a loop it cannot yet update. And a nervous system that has lost its flexibility can and often does learn to adapt again on its own. We can support this further through varied, embodied, absorbing practice, through the repeated demonstration that arousal and safety can coexist.

That is what yoga has always offered. We just have better, more precise language for it now. And that language, I think, makes us better teachers.

Train with Laura If this resonates with you, the Laura Gilmore Yoga 300-hour training is built around exactly these ideas. A trauma-sensitive approach to yoga and somatic movement, breath and bandhas, anatomy and fascia, the nervous system and creative sequencing for flow. Because better science makes better teachers. Find out more - here. 

Key references

Bonanno, G.A., et al. (2015). Trajectories of resilience, recovery and distress: a systematic review and quantitative meta-analysis. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology.

Kotler, S., Mannino, M., Fox, G. and Friston, K. (2026). The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 20:1812957. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957

Shin, L.M., et al. (2006). An fMRI study of anterior cingulate function in posttraumatic stress disorder. Biological Psychiatry.

Treleaven, D.A. (2018). Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing. W.W. Norton.

Walter, K.H., et al. (2023). Surf therapy versus hike therapy for active duty service members: a randomised controlled trial. Journal of Affective Disorders.