Ryann Summers

Ryann Summers is a San Francisco-based trauma-informed yoga teacher. She’s been teaching yoga since 2010, began her formal yoga training through Yoga Tree in 2014, and completed her E-RYT 500 in 2017. Ryann has studied trauma-informed teaching with Molly Boeder Harris, Zabie Yamasaki, Leigh Ferrara, Lisa Danylchuk, and David Emerson, in addition to prenatal yoga training from Jane Austin of Mama Tree. Ryann currently teaches private trauma-informed yoga out of Studio 20, and regularly holds workshops and teacher trainings at Thriveability Yoga. She also teaches the Yoga as Healing series for campus survivors of sexual assault at UCSF/USF.

I teach trauma-sensitive yoga classes and private sessions. I believe in the power of somatic approaches to healing trauma. When trauma memory is stored in the physical body, in the form of injury, tension, breath patterning, or loss of integration, movement and breath practices can help. I tend towards gentler styles of yoga, like restorative, yin, breath work, and functional movement. But my approach differs for each person, and is led by the student I’m working with. My trauma-informed approach is all about options.

I’ve been learning from and working with trauma survivors for over 10 years. My more formal introduction to trauma healing started in 2010, when I co-founded Boston College’s first support group for campus survivors of sexual assault with Dr. Elizabeth Rhodes. Alongside her, I also volunteered on Boston College’s on campus hotline resource for sexual assault survivors, SANet. From 2011-2013, I worked as a Spanish-language counselor and advocate at a community-based domestic violence center, providing one-on-one counseling, immigration clinic translation, hotline crisis intervention, prevention and education, as well as medical and legal advocacy. While our services at this community center didn’t address the physical body, it was in this environment that I began to notice the patterns of constricted breath, hypervigilance, tension, and other manifestations of trauma in the body.

I moved from Boston to San Francisco in 2014 for a yoga training immersion, in an effort to better understand functional and healing movement. From there, I slowly started integrating the worlds of trauma counseling and embodied movement. I worked one-on-one with clients, offered workshops focused on the emotional body, and eventually went on to pilot UCSF/USF’s first “Yoga as Healing” 8-week program for survivors of sexual violence. Everything I’ve learned along the way has been from my students, peers, and my own practice, as well as the mentorship and guidance of healers like Molly Boeder Harris and Zabie Yamasaki. In 2019, I held my first yoga teacher training to support other teachers in creating trauma-informed spaces for their students.