The Camp, Safety & Kindness

Welcome to The Camp

I currently work in a public middle school with a remarkable mix of students. Some use wheelchairs or AAC devices. Some live with medical or developmental differences. Others are independent or academically advanced. Together, they represent a wide range of ways to move, learn, and communicate.

Four weeks ago, we rolled out yoga mats in our school’s sensory room and began an experiment. It was the first run of a yoga and speech-language therapy curriculum I’ve been tinkering with since graduate school. The approach blends yoga, speech-language therapy, and body-based communication supports in a way that’s inclusive and responsive for students who learn or express themselves differently. I’m not the first to explore this territory, and I’m grateful to those whose work has pointed the way. My hope to share what I’m learning as we move through this first run of yoga-based speech-language therapy in this series of blog posts, so that future educators can learn how to do the same!

The Camp: A Base for Safety

I called the first month The Camp because before we go anywhere new, we need a place to come back to, a steady starting point of safety. The name is personal, too. I love camping with my family, especially in places we’ve never been.

I layered in tools to support understanding and expression: AAC boards, a visual sequence of postures, and a written list of routines. My goal was to build a steady basecamp where students of all abilities could pause, regulate, and explore communication in a safe, playful way. We learned a basic sun salutation, practiced sounds and body shapes that support calm and focus, and ended with some chair yoga that could translate into the classroom. We also tried a concentration activity that included a craft project.

Overall, the sessions went well and feedback was positive. I was able to teach a range of speech and language skills to a large group while having fun, and without losing the sense of calm and curiosity that yoga brings.

Why Safety Comes First

We’ve all had moments when we couldn’t find the right words when anger, excitement, or anxiety took over and language slipped away. Communication isn’t just about vocabulary or articulation; it’s about the state of the nervous system. When the body senses threat or overwhelm, speech becomes harder. When it feels safe and supported, words return and with them, honesty and self-advocacy.

Our systems constantly move between states of connection, defense, and shutdown (Porges, 2011). Clear thought and communication happen only when we feel secure enough to stay in, or return to, a state that supports social engagement. When we’re in fight-or-flight or collapse, higher reasoning and expressive language go offline (Perry, 2006). Over time, chronic stress can even reshape the brain pathways that support speech, memory, and executive function (van der Kolk, 2014).

Language also depends on co-regulation and emotional attunement, the small, almost invisible cues of safety we exchange in every relationship (Brinton & Fujiki, 2017; Greenspan & Wieder, 2006). Without those cues, even well-practiced words can stay locked away.

For neurodivergent people or those with brain-based differences, shifting between states can be especially challenging. Sensory sensitivities, attention changes, or the effort of reading social cues can make ordinary situations feel unpredictable or unsafe. Many also have difficulty identifying internal body cues (interoception) and learning to communicate their basic needs.

Yoga-based practices can help people feel steady and regulated, setting the stage for learning and connection. These techniques support nervous-system balance through ethical grounding, movement, breath, and rest, giving students a dependable base of physiological calm.

In my classes this month, I experimented with a deliberate “gear-shifting” cycle between sympathetic and parasympathetic activation: using an image of the sun for energizing practices and the moon for calming ones. My hope is that students will learn to notice and influence their own state, becoming more capable of settling or re-energizing when they need to.

The Eight-Limbed Approach

Long before neuroscience described neuroplasticity, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras outlined a system for reshaping the mind and body through steady, intentional practice. At its core, yoga rests on a simple but radical truth: what we choose to pay attention to and practice consistently, we will change.

The eight limbs of yoga; ethical principles, personal observances, postures, breath, sensory awareness, concentration, meditation, and integration, were designed as tools to help practitioners transform deeply learned patterns, aligning thought and action toward the well-being of all living things, including themselves. Each limb supports the recognition that all beings share an inner light, a common consciousness that connects us.

Four key ideas within this tradition mirror what we now understand about neuroplasticity and how the brain changes:

• Abhyasa: steady practice builds new pathways through repetition.

• Vairagya: non-attachment helps us release habits that no longer serve.

• Viveka: discernment in choosing what patterns to strengthen and which to let go of.

• Samskara: the grooves of past experience that can be reinforced or rewritten through intentional practice.

Yoga isn’t a wellness trend or a series of calming stretches. It’s a centuries-old, observation-based science of mind-body regulation, developed and refined across South Asia through careful experimentation and direct experience. Generations of practitioners documented how deliberate breath, movement, and ethics could stabilize mood and focus, long before anyone could measure brain waves or heart-rate variability.

Honoring that lineage isn’t just about cultural respect; it makes our work more effective and meaningful. Modern research continues to affirm what yogic teachers observed: breath changes the nervous system, posture shifts emotion, and repetition reshapes the brain. When we understand yoga as both cultural heritage and practical science, we ground our experience in something both ancient and alive, a practice that continues to evolve, just as we do.

With that grounding in place, we can start exploring the eight limbs themselves and how each one supports safety, regulation, and communication for our students. I’ll be writing more about each limb and how it shows up in our sessions in the weeks ahead.

From Linear Maps to Living Models

I used to start every school year with a linear therapy map: this goal, then that one. But after years of working with neurodivergent students, as both a speech-language pathologist and a yoga teacher, I’ve learned to plan from the inside out.

At the core is regulation.
Then comes body–mind awareness.
Then meaningful communication.
And finally, social skills and self-advocacy.

This model has become the foundation for how I plan therapy, organize my lessons, and honestly, live my daily life as a human and parent.

Communication isn’t just output, it’s reciprocal. It’s a flow between two or more, even when that exchange is internal dialogue or a conversation between self and body.

We build from grounded safety and interoceptive awareness toward authentic mind–body communication. From there, expression grows in all its forms: speech, sign, gesture, AAC, music, movement, play, and laughter.

Two Paths, One Practice: A Journey Toward Integration

I came to meditation at eighteen, not through postures, but through a torn copy of Chakras for Dummies handed to me by my best friend. That summer, I sat on a rock along the breakwall of Lake Erie, meditating as a way to survive. For years, meditation was my anchor, reaching beyond the shallow western interpretation that opened the door. 

In my mid-twenties, yoga asana entered my life. Urban cycling and Muay Thai training with my now-husband had left me with seeking calmer ways to move, ways that could hold both strength and softness. One day my wandering brought me to a dusty aisle stacked with crooked piles of books. There, I found a used Iyengar Hatha yoga manual. Using a Ravi Shankar vinyl as my timer, I began to move, I practiced until I felt the readiness for meditation. Alone in my front room, I practiced almost every day, expanding my meditation, reshaping old samskaras (learned pathways) through abhyasa (steady practice), viveka (discernment between the real and the unreal), and vairagya (the quiet detachment born of wisdom). I had a lot to unlearn and a lifetime of work ahead.

Eventually, I gathered the courage to step into a shared space, conditioned by years of living in a cultural space promoting smallness for women while living in a bigger body, I had never felt at ease in traditional western yoga settings. Some of the first in-person classes I remember were prenatal sessions with my doula while my eldest daughter grew inside me. With cycling and boxing suddenly too dangerous, I switched gears to yoga-asana. After my daughter’s birth, I kept going to adult classes, brought her to kids’ classes, and started working at my studio. Eventually an opportunity came to attend a training and I became certified to teach kids and family yoga. I was able to lead all ages, family groups, and baby and me classes at a lovely non-profit studio in the heart of Buffalo New York. 

Somewhere in the swirl of Muay Thai, falling in love, and new motherhood, I switched my major from art therapy to speech-language pathology. I was drawn to the science of human connection: how language develops, how communication shapes learning. Yoga and speech ran parallel for years. Both offered frameworks for attention, regulation, and care, but I didn’t yet know how to let them meet.

For my master’s thesis, I joined a research project that tried to quantify yoga, to break it into measurable outcomes. I felt an unnamed discomfort. What I did know was that something essential was missing: context, ethics, lineage. It felt extractive. I stepped back, keeping yoga personal and clinical work professional, leaving behind only a long, meandering literature review on yoga’s potential in speech therapy. I began to shift to lineage-based study, especially during COVID, when I sought South Asian teachers and scholars who challenged me to confront appropriation and deepen my understanding. I stopped asking, “How can I use yoga in therapy?” and began asking, “How can I practice yoga ethically, wherever I am?” 

Then came years of therapy in Western New York and across the country as a travelling SLP in Colorado and Washington states. I worked in: skilled nursing, inpatient rehab, early intervention, public schools, private homes. I wanted to learn it all and I did! Slowly, yoga slipped in, not as a curriculum, but as presence. I taught breathwork to voice patients in skilled nursing, used rhythmic movement with preschoolers, and wove rest and sensory routines into school-based therapy. I realized I wasn’t merely applying techniques. I was living my practice. When I noticed teachers not understanding and causing dysregulation in their students, I sat on the floor and sang and breathed and held space for them. 

Today I have practiced not only in my speech therapy practice, but in studios across the country, continued to offer small classes for families and young ones, added toddler jiu jitsu to my resume in Colorado, and this year I finally decided to bite the bullet and spend the time and money to obtain my 200-hour yoga teacher certificate.

Yoga is not a Western wellness tool. It is an ancient tradition rooted in South Asian spiritual and philosophical systems. What many educators and therapists call “yoga” is often just a sliver, mostly asana and pranayama, lifted from a much deeper lineage. That lineage includes the text I most closely try to follow through svyadyaya (self-study), Patanjali’s eight-limbed path: yama (ethical disciplines), niyama (personal observances), asana (postures), pranayama (breath control), pratyahara (sense withdrawal), dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (integration or absorption).

Gradually, I began to see the eight limbs not as abstract ideas but as daily commitments. They were already guiding my work: shaping how I wrote goals, entered classrooms, and regulated myself before co-regulating with a student. The path had never been separate.

The work and resources I hope to create in the future that integrates yogic techniques, mind-body work, and somatic practices isn’t a substitute for that lineage, nor can it replicate the full depth of traditional philosophy. But I believe we can adapt these tools with care and respect: naming their roots, refusing to flatten their meaning, and staying accountable to their principles. 

Still, doubts linger. I’ve never been fully comfortable directing a group or standing at the center of attention. These aren’t natural skills for me, and I still rehearse them. But I’ve learned, especially with neurodivergent students, that leadership doesn’t have to be loud. Clarity can arise through presence, not performance. Safety is something we build in relationship, not demand through control. I am not on a stage, I am striving to facilitate  a space and community for communication and connection. 

I’m still learning. I still make mistakes. But I know now the question isn’t whether these practices belong together. It’s how we hold them, with care, context, and a commitment to do less harm.

Let the immense waves of gratitude to the lineage, all good-hearted teachers past and present, and to all those who may learn this way in the future, shine through the work that follows. To my lovely teachers: the inspirational Megan Callahan of Yoga Parkside, and the staff of now closed East Meets West (Sasha Bayba and Carrie Jacobson - Buffalo, NY), Sakshi Gupta (@SakshiGuptaYoga, India, thank you for your accessible online offerings across time zones), Buka Yoga (Castle Rock, CO), Yoga OM (Auburn, WA), BJJ Enumclaw (Enumclaw, WA), True Self Yoga (Olympia, WA), Firefly Yoga (Hawks Prairie, WA), Mandy Lawson (Costa Yoga), and most especially, my loving partner and children holding me through all things.