REBECCA MULVANEY

What's your professional experience that informs your teaching?

• Facilitating yoga in treatment centers for over seven years. The first five years I taught at eating disorder treatment centers, and these past two and half years have been at Lightfully Behavioral Health.

• My biggest education has been the 300-hour TCTSY (Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga) training I completed in 2024. TCTSY is the first yoga-based empirically validated clinical intervention for complex trauma.

  • TCTSY has an autonomy focused facilitation style. Although TCTSY employs physical forms and movements, the focus is on the internal experience of the participant – what the forms feel like instead of what they look like. This shift in orientation, from the external to the internal, is a key attribute of TCTSY as a complementary treatment for complex trauma. With this approach, the power resides within the individual, not the TCTSY facilitator.

  • Further, by focusing on the felt sense of the body to inform choice-making, TCTSY provides opportunities for participants to restore their connection between mind and body and cultivate a sense of agency that is often compromised as a result of surviving trauma.

When you take an exercise class, what are things you look for that make you feel comfortable?

• For live exercise classes, I feel at ease when a teacher communicates encouragement to make the movement one's own, if they're inclined to. That the expectation is not for the group to be a synchronized movement team. When a teacher lays the groundwork that it is welcomed for participants to move a little differently (e.g. opt out of forms, add in their own exercises), it reassures me that those types of choices won't be distracting or offensive to the teacher.​​

What do you uniquely bring to your class?​

• Shared authentic experience with participants. Co-creating the sequence, in the moment, based on the needs and preferences of participants and from what I observe non-verbally.

What do you look for in a teacher?

• The teacher's own relationship with movement being in alignment with mine. A motivational remark from a group leader can at times be informative of their relationship with movement. I feel a sense of fellowship when a group leader relates to movement as a means of mental relief, a cathartic energizer, or self-efficacy rather than coming from a diet culture perspective. 

What do you do when you're not teaching?

• Daytime muses: listen to audiobook, learn a challenging dance choreography, rock lace with hiking boots, impromptu virtual workout with fellow cofounder, Anna.
• Evening muses: listen to vinyl during dinner, read on the couch with my family, watch a movie at Aero theater, game night with friends.