Inside STARTTS’ Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Program

Supporting Recovery Through Safety, Choice, Movement and Connection

The effects of trauma are not limited to thoughts and memories. They can also be experienced through the body, in disrupted sleep, chronic tension, a nervous system that remains on high alert, persistent fatigue, or a sense of disconnection from physical sensation. STARTTS’s Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TSY) and Psychoeducation Program was built around that understanding.

What We Built

The program brings together trauma-sensitive movement, breath, grounding and psychoeducation to support participants to develop a greater sense of safety, choice and connection with their bodies. The emphasis is not on performing postures or achieving a particular physical outcome. Everything on offer is invitational: participants are invited to explore movement and breath practices at their own pace and are supported to make choices throughout the practice, including changing a movement, pausing, resting or choosing not to participate. They are encouraged to notice their own experience and respond in ways that feel appropriate for their body in each moment. Repeated opportunities to notice, choose and take effective action can help strengthen a sense of agency — something that may be disrupted by experiences of trauma and chronic stress.

A core feature of the program is that psychological concepts are not only explained — they are also experienced. Participants might learn about the stress response or the Window of Tolerance, a concept that describes the range in which we can think, feel and respond effectively, then explore through movement and breath what activation or settling feels like in their own body: Understand → Notice → Experience → Respond.

Between an experience and how we respond to it, there is a space, and the STARTTS TSY program aims to help participants strengthen that space through greater awareness, choice and the capacity to pause, notice and choose how to respond.

The program runs across two eight-week terms. Term 1 focuses on establishing safety with the practice while strengthening self-care, present-moment awareness, choice, effective action, rhythm and self-compassion. Term 2 builds on these foundations by helping participants understand the stress response, how it affects the brain and nervous system, and how this can influence their Window of Tolerance. They are supported to explore a range of ways to support regulation, including movement, breath, attention and grounding. Heart Rate Variability (HRV) biofeedback allows participants to see in real time how breathing can influence their body’s stress response. Participants are also encouraged to identify what works for them and begin developing a home practice they can use in everyday life.

Who It’s Reached

STARTTS TSY Program data, April 2023–August 2026

Since 2023, STARTTS has run TSY groups in Sydney metropolitan offices and outreach sites including Lakemba and Ryde.

Languages spoken include Dari, Hazaraghi, Arabic, English, Khmer, Rohingya, Pashto, Ukrainian, Russian and Assyrian Neo-Aramaic. Nearly half of participants (47.5%) are Australian citizens and a further 40.4% permanent residents, a reminder that the door stays open regardless of visa pathway.

Sessions themselves are delivered in six languages — Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Ukrainian, Rohingya and Khmer — matched to each group. The eleven primary languages above reflect the broader language diversity recorded in participants’ STARTTS demographic data, not the number of languages a single group is taught in.

What Participants Say

Feedback collected across program iterations, mainly through post-term questionnaires and, where that wasn’t feasible, focus groups, points to recurring themes: better sleep, reduced pain and tension, increased awareness of physical sensations and emotional states, improved ability to notice and manage stress, greater self-compassion, and stronger social connection.

“The class is really good for me. When I come to the class I feel calm.”

— Afghan participant

“I do a little yoga before going to bed and it helps me to fall asleep.”

— Rohingya participant

“My back pain improved.”

— Rohingya participant

In the 2025 Afghan program evaluation, all 16 Term 1 participants and all 17 Term 2 participants agreed or strongly agreed that their psychological wellbeing had improved. At Lakemba Public School, where the program ran alongside a parenting course, Schools as Community Centre Facilitator Leonie Williams offered her own reflection:

“The program has been such a success and the ladies have blossomed under your guidance.”

— Leonie Williams, Schools as Community Centre Facilitator, Lakemba

Reading These Findings

These findings represent self-reported experiences from relatively small community groups, so they should not be taken as proof that Trauma-Sensitive Yoga alone caused the changes participants described. What is notable is how consistently similar themes, including improved sleep, calm, body awareness, self-compassion and connection, have emerged across different cultural groups and program iterations.

Why This Matters for Multicultural Health Week

This year’s Multicultural Health Week theme is improving mental health and wellbeing through physical activity. For someone whose sense of safety and control has been shaken by trauma, that’s rarely as simple as moving more. TSY asks a different question than most fitness programs: not how well can I perform this movement, but what am I noticing, what does my body need, and what choices do I have right now. With practice, this way of noticing and responding can begin to extend beyond the TSY session and into everyday life, helping participants recognise when they are becoming activated or shutting down and what may help them return towards greater steadiness. In offering movement as something to be felt and chosen rather than performed, TSY gives people affected by trauma a way into physical activity that starts with safety, not exertion — exactly the kind of pathway Multicultural Health Week is asking services to make visible.