The recent article in The Independent titled “Dance teacher wins payout after yoga course triggers emotional breakdown” describes a deeply troubling incident in which a participant on a yoga teacher training was led into an emotional breakdown after an exercise that ventured far beyond the scope of yoga teaching. The case is disturbing not only because of the harm this woman endured, but because it reflects a wider pattern emerging in yoga spaces: teachers introducing psychological processes they are not trained to handle, and then failing to support the emotional fallout they provoke.
As someone who has taught Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Teacher Trainings for many years and written a book on the subject, I found the details of the story unsurprising, though still deeply concerning. Sadly, it mirrors situations I have witnessed or heard about repeatedly in the past years, where yoga teachers overstep their professional boundaries, misuse practices, and venture into territory that belongs firmly to trained mental-health professionals.
What has been equally unsettling is the mixed reaction within parts of the yoga community. Some discussion threads have even veered into victim-blaming, revealing a profound misunderstanding of both what yoga is and what it is not. To place responsibility on a student whose emotional boundaries were crossed in a setting where safety and professionalism should be assured is entirely inappropriate. The consequences in this case were heartbreaking, and my hope is that the person affected receives the support she needs to heal.
The Importance of Congruence and Expectation
One of the most troubling aspects of the situation described in the article is the profound incongruence between what people expect in a certain setting and what they actually receive. When students sign up for a 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training, they anticipate learning yoga philosophy, sequencing, teaching methodology and practices beyond asana. They do not expect to be guided into revisiting childhood trauma, confronting painful memories or exposing their emotional histories in a group circle. This mismatch between expectation and reality can be profoundly destabilising. Research in psychotherapy consistently shows that when a person’s expectations about a process do not align with what actually unfolds, they are more likely to feel confused, unsafe or dissatisfied, and that is within a therapeutic context where emotionally charged material is anticipated and held by trained professionals.
Our psychological defences are shaped by context to help us stay regulated and safe. For instance, most people sit very close to strangers on public transport without distress, because the situation calls for it. If someone stood that close to us in an empty park, our defensive system would activate. Nothing about the distance changes; only the context does. We willingly let a doctor press into our abdomen or examine a sensitive area because the context is medical, and we are prepared for it. Yet if a stranger calling themselves a doctor attempted the same examination while we were standing in a supermarket queue, our whole system would react with alarm. The physical action is the same; the meaning changes entirely because the context does. This is what I mean by incongruent. The behaviour is identical, but the context makes it either appropriate, threatening or confusing.
The Vulnerability of Teacher Training Environments
Teacher trainings in particular create conditions in which students are far more susceptible than usual. Intensive programmes are physically demanding, mentally draining and often take place away from home, which can be ungrounding in itself. When people are tired, their capacity for self-regulation diminishes. Boundaries soften, resilience drops, and the ability to access helpful coping mechanisms is reduced. In these states, even relatively small emotional triggers can have an outsized impact. Introducing psychologically provocative practices into such a vulnerable environment is, therefore, not only inappropriate but negligent. A yoga teacher training is designed to teach yoga, not to facilitate therapeutic processing or emotional excavation.
Over the years, many students and clients have shared that interventions of this nature left them distressed, yet they remained silent because they felt embarrassed, confused or ashamed, or feared they would be dismissed as “too sensitive” or “not ready” for the work. This silence is common and deeply human. When someone is harmed in a space where they expected safety and support, it is very typical for them to doubt their own experience and turn the blame inward. This is a well-documented psychological pattern across many forms of boundary violation: people minimise what happened, question their reactions or assume the fault lies with them. Although the circumstances differ, the internal response is similar to what many survivors of emotional abuse or assault report. When trust has been breached, the nervous system often clings to self-blame because it feels less threatening than acknowledging that a person or system you relied on failed you.
The Lack of Appropriate Qualifications
Another central issue is qualification. Supporting someone through trauma or deep emotional distress requires extensive clinical training. It involves understanding nervous system responses, stabilisation, containment and knowing how to intervene safely if someone becomes overwhelmed. Yoga teachers are not trained in these skills unless they also hold separate therapeutic credentials. Without this training, they cannot responsibly lead students into emotionally charged territory or manage the aftermath. This is crucial because teacher trainings naturally place teachers in positions of authority, and students often comply with whatever is presented, even when it makes them uncomfortable.
In this particular case, the training team defended themselves by saying that after the exercise, the student thanked the teacher who led it. This argument was used in court, as well as by many people who are now blaming the victim. However, what they fail to understand is that gratitude in such moments is not evidence of safety; it is often a sign of the fawn response, one of the primary trauma responses. When someone feels overwhelmed or exposed within a power-imbalanced setting, their nervous system may default to appeasing the authority figure as a way to avoid further threat. In yoga, wellness and spiritual environments, where there can be strong social pressure to appear open or receptive, this response is especially common. A dysregulated student may smile, thank the teacher or appear ‘moved’, not because they genuinely feel grateful, but because their nervous system is trying to keep them safe. Group dynamics amplify this, as people sense what the ‘correct’ response is meant to look like. Once the person leaves the environment and their nervous system no longer has to perform or appease, the real impact surfaces: panic, shaking, crying, emotional flooding, intrusive memories or dissociation. This delayed reaction is not unusual. It is precisely why trained trauma therapists never provoke deep emotional material without providing grounding, containment and aftercare.
Why Dismissing Distress Is Never Acceptable
What I found most disturbing in this scenario is that the only person with any relevant training, and the one who could have intervened, dismissed the student when she said she felt overwhelmed and emotionally dysregulated. When someone discloses emotional distress in a learning environment, especially after a guided experiential exercise that forms part of the curriculum, there is an immediate duty of care. Even outside psychotherapy, any educator or facilitator has a responsibility to take such disclosures seriously, to check in, to ensure the person is safe and to offer appropriate support. Brushing a student aside is not simply unkind, but a failure of basic safeguarding. In our Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Trainings, we discuss this extensively. TSY is designed precisely to minimise the risk of triggering someone, but if it does happen despite best efforts, the response must still be one of acknowledgement and support. Being met with presence in that moment can make an enormous difference.
When a teacher has intentionally led a group into psychologically charged territory, the ethical responsibility becomes even greater. You cannot provoke emotional material and then withdraw simply because you were unprepared for the reaction or unwilling to deal with it. Leaving a student alone with a heightened nervous system without stabilisation, grounding, or informed guidance is not only unsafe but potentially traumatising, which is unfortunately what happened here. In therapeutic contexts, containment and aftercare are essential; in educational contexts, at the very least, teachers must ensure that students are emotionally regulated before the session ends. Ignoring distress reveals a profound misunderstanding of power dynamics, of the vulnerability created by immersive trainings and of the facilitator’s responsibility to safeguard the people in their care. Creating emotional intensity without the skills to manage it is already dangerous; inducing overwhelm and then dismissing the person experiencing it is indefensible.
The Myth of Catharsis and the Legacy of Harmful Methods
What is perhaps most striking about the approach described in the article is that almost no contemporary, evidence-based psychotherapeutic modality would ever do this anymore. The practices described are outdated and widely recognised as risky, destabilising and clinically irresponsible. These techniques belonged to a very specific era of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the 1960s and 70s, when various confrontational methods were used. Most of these practices have since been debunked, abandoned or heavily criticised because they often produced more harm than good.
Modern trauma therapy looks nothing like this. Contemporary approaches, such as CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy), EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), etc., emphasise safety, stabilisation, resourcing and consent. They focus on helping people stay within their window of tolerance, not blowing it wide open. They prepare clients carefully, monitor their responses, and move slowly. So when a yoga teacher, with no qualifications and no accountability structure, begins to imitate the outdated and unsafe techniques from the fringes of psychotherapy’s past, it's dangerous and reminiscent of the kind of quasi-therapeutic experimentation that was fashionable many decades ago, before we understood the neurobiology of trauma and the risks of emotional overwhelm.
The Misuse of Therapeutic Language in Yoga Spaces
I had not encountered either of the teachers from this school before, so I did some research before writing this. I came across an interview in which one of them spoke openly about wanting to “evoke and encourage [yoga] students to face their most emergent shadow aspects.” This alone should raise an alarm. It reflects a belief that yoga teachers have the right to initiate psychological transformation, suggesting an agenda of emotional excavation and identity disruption framed as spiritual growth. He goes on to describe yoga as a platform for trauma resolution and psycho-emotional integration, which made me wonder which lineage he is referring to. If yoga is the platform, then surely only yoga tools should be used. Trauma resolution, however, is a clinical process, not a yoga workshop exercise.
This leads to a broader and crucial point: yoga is not psychotherapy, and the two should not be casually blended. Yoga can absolutely support healing, but it does so through its own tools and within its own boundaries. Asana helps people reconnect to their bodies, build strength and agency, and develop interoceptive awareness. Pranayama, when offered skilfully, can support nervous system regulation. Mindfulness and meditation have been shown to improve emotional regulation and reduce stress reactivity. These practices can create conditions that support healing, but they do not involve leading people into traumatic memories or processing deeply held pain. No yoga lineage trains teachers to guide students to relive traumatic events, unearth childhood wounds, or forgive their parents in a group circle. Such practices do not belong to yoga, or to yoga therapy, and, as already noted, not even to contemporary psychotherapy.
With all of my credentials, when someone with complex trauma reaches out, I refer them to professionals who specialise in trauma work. I am consistently shocked by how lightly people with no relevant education or experience step into territory that requires such precision, care and clinical understanding. It is astonishing how confidently some will make claims about “healing” and “transformation” without recognising the depth of responsibility that comes with this kind of work.
Vulnerability Should Never Be Exploited
Many people join yoga workshops, trainings and retreats during periods of transition, uncertainty or emotional sensitivity. They may already be navigating grief, identity shifts or major life changes, and they often arrive with a level of psychological openness that they would not bring into other environments. As I often say to teachers, students leave their protective shields outside the studio door because they believe they are entering a safe space. This vulnerability should be honoured and protected, not manipulated or mined for the sake of dramatic breakthroughs.
When yoga teachers begin using therapeutic language, promising transformation or presenting themselves as facilitators of emotional catharsis, they create expectations they are not qualified to meet. In such circumstances, students can easily be led into panic, dissociation, or emotional overwhelm without anyone present who knows how to recognise, navigate or contain the experience. These moments can be frightening, lonely and deeply destabilising, and they are completely avoidable.
What saddens me most is that much of this behaviour is driven not by a genuine desire to help, but by the pressures of a crowded and competitive yoga market. Standing out, offering something different and tapping into whatever is currently “trending”, at the moment, trauma work, can become more important than practising responsibly. Yet if someone truly wishes to support others in their healing and is trained to do so, there are established, ethical, and accountable ways to offer that work. None of them involves blurring professional boundaries or experimenting on students’ emotional lives in the name of growth.
A Call for Ethical Clarity
Yoga has immense potential to support healing, empowerment and self-connection, but that potential is compromised the moment teachers inflate their role or confuse yoga with psychotherapy. When psychotherapeutic language is borrowed without understanding, when emotional processes are used without training, and when vulnerability is treated as a gateway to transformation rather than something to be held with care, people get hurt. If we want teacher trainings, workshops and retreats to be genuinely safe and supportive, we need clearer boundaries, more humility about what yoga can and cannot offer, and far greater respect for the disciplines we are drawing from. There is no shame in referring out, staying within one’s scope, or acknowledging that another profession is better equipped for certain kinds of work. That is what integrity looks like.
To the best of my knowledge, those involved in this case have not taken responsibility for what happened, nor have they shown any indication of adjusting their approach. This is deeply concerning because, without reflection and accountability, the same patterns will inevitably continue.
Yoga teachers are not therapists, and they should not attempt to be. When they do, the people who trust them bear the cost. My hope is that this case encourages the broader yoga community to pause, reflect and recommit to ethical practice out of professional duty and care for the students who place their wellbeing in our hands.
