With the number of veterans entering higher education rising, universities are exploring ways to cater to the needs of this growing constituency. Accessible fitness equipment and intramural sports teams are important components, but Rebecca Smith, a fitness instructor at the Hawley Armory Fitness Center at the University of Connecticut (UConn) believes that programming for student-veterans should go beyond serving those with physical disabilities.

A student-veteran herself, Smith began teaching a free yoga class at the veterans’ house on the university’s Storrs, CT, campus after a Vietnam veteran in one of the regular yoga classes she teaches told her how practicing yoga had helped him.

“I thought that it had to be useful for the next generation of veterans, too,” Smith says. “So I started to do some research. It’s already widely known that yoga can help with anxiety disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a form of anxiety disorder.”

Although formal studies of yoga’s benefits for PTSD sufferers are limited, preliminary research is promising. One study, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and conducted through Harvard Medical School, found that veterans diagnosed with PTSD showed marked improvement in their symptoms after just 10 weeks of yoga classes.

Some of PTSD’s most common symptoms are re-experiencing traumas (when memories are so vivid they make the sufferer feel that he or she is actually living through the ordeal again and trigger physical responses), feeling distant from others and being on-edge.

“Yoga helps with living in the moment,” Smith says. “It really creates a connection between the mind and the body.”

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