The Normalcy of Not Feeling | Mayday Yoga

Every body in the room is carrying something. That's the whole premise behind trauma-informed yoga, and it's why so many of us who teach it lean on cues like "notice how that feels" or "see what sensation comes up." Marie has used those cues plenty herself. But somewhere in her trauma-sensitive yoga (TCTSY) training, she had to sit with an uncomfortable truth: not everyone can feel what she's asking them to feel. For some people, that's not a gap to close. It's protection doing its job.

Why Some Bodies Stay Quiet

There are a lot of reasons a body might not register sensation the way a cue assumes it will. None of them are a malfunction.

1. Physical injury or chronic pain. Nerve damage, surgery, or ongoing pain can change what a body can register, sometimes permanently. Asking someone to "notice sensation" in a part of the body that no longer sends clear signals isn't a gentle nudge. It's asking for something that may not be available to them.

2. Neurodivergence. Interoception, the sense of what's happening inside your own body, works differently for a lot of people. That difference isn't something to correct in a single class with a stranger leading it.

3. Mental health conditions. Depression, anxiety, and dissociative experiences can all mute the connection between body and awareness. That muting is often the mind doing exactly what it learned to do to get through something hard.

4. A trauma history. For many trauma survivors, not feeling is the nervous system's oldest strategy, the one that got them through whatever happened. Asking that system to drop its guard on command in a room full of strangers isn't a small ask.

5. Grief. Grief can flatten sensation the same way it flattens appetite or sleep. It's not avoidance. It's what a body does when it's carrying something heavy.

None of this is something to fix in the fifty minutes we have together. If our culture can make room for people who aren't okay, it has to make room for people who can't feel that they're not okay too.

What This Actually Changes in Practice

Once Marie sat with that, she couldn't teach the same way. Cueing sensation is still a useful invitation for a lot of people. It just can't be the only door into the room.

Here's what Marie wants anyone in one of her sessions, or reading this at home, to know:

1. You're welcome to notice shape instead of sensation. If sensation isn't available, position is. Where are your feet right now. Where are your hands. That still counts as showing up.

2. You can modify without asking permission. Every session she lead starts with the same reminder: any amount of participation is welcome, including none at all. You can see exactly what that looks like on her what to expect page.

3. You can stop early, and you don't owe anyone a reason. A session that ends at minute ten because that's what your body needed isn't a session that failed. Marie gets into this more on the FAQ page if you want the longer answer.

4. You can ask to focus on something specific, or ask to skip something entirely, before we start or halfway through.

5. You're allowed to not know what you're feeling and stay in the room anyway. Not knowing isn't the same as not showing up.

For the Instructors Reading This

If you teach, some of this probably lands close to home. Marie still catches herself defaulting to sensation language because it's familiar, not because it's inclusive. Getting this right the first time was never realistic. Here's what she started asking herself instead:

• Am I offering sensation as one option, or treating it as the only option?

• Is there a way to describe this cue that doesn't assume a body that can feel it?

• Would this instruction still make sense to someone who's dissociating right now?

• Am I treating silence or stillness as a problem to solve?

Imperfect language isn't a failure of trauma-informed teaching. It's what learning trauma-informed teaching actually looks like. The people who trained Marie at the Center for Trauma and Embodiment, the organization behind TCTSY, talk about this constantly: the work is never finished, and that's fine.

Where This Started

This piece, co-created by me, Anne-Marie Hutter, grew out of something Marie Nutter originally wrote for Midwest Yoga Magazine, because the normalcy of not feeling is bigger than any one class she teaches.

If any part of this sounds like your own body, seated or standing, in a session with Marie or on your own, you don't need to feel anything in particular to belong there. If you want to see what a session actually looks like before you book anything, Marie's free video miniseries is a good place to start with nothing required of you.