This training will help you to understand the nature of trauma and how it is embedded in the body’s memory and nervous system reactions, how it affects behaviours, emotions, overall health, relationships and lives, and begin to transform them. It will help you to identify trauma related symptoms, ways to heal them somatically, while finding ways to reconnect with resilience and vitality and bring it into the foreground. It will also help practitioners of various modalities to trauma~inform their practice, which is essential for any practitioner, as Trauma Expert Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk says, “One third of all disease has it’s origins in trauma.”
The training primarily draws on the work of Dr. Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing founder & Trauma Expert), Dr. Gabor Mate (MD & Trauma Expert), Dr. Stephen Porges (Psychologist & Neuroscientist), and Betsy Polatin (MFA, Somatic, Breath & Movement Specialist). It will also include an in-depth workbook that you can download to be used throughout the course. Recordings of each class will be made available to all participants the day following the class.
Both health practitioners and lay people are invited to join in exploring and transforming ill~adapted trauma related patterns via the following topics:
- What is trauma, it’s symptoms and causes and how it affects the function of the Central Nervous System (CNS), the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), which includes Sympathetic & Parasympathetic (Fight, Flight, Freeze & Rest & Digest), the Somatic Nervous System, the Vagus Nerve
- Working with memory and track thwarted fight, flight and freeze (FFF) responses through related body sensations, etc. to help to discharge them and heal the stress physiology through somatic practices, while exploring the principles of Somatic Experiencing
- Engaging in somatic exercises that can ground and bring the Nervous System back to safety, enhance capacity for self-regulation and bring us into greater connection with our bodies to move out of survival mode into greater healing and creativity
- Connecting with the breath to move stuck trauma using various breathing exercises (contained practices)
- Working with emotions, like fear, rage and shame, interoception (enhancing gut connection), and learning the benefits firsthand of practicing healthy aggression and boundary-setting
- Exploring the relationship between authenticity and attachment, the ACE Score, pain and addiction, and the personality traits of those with chronic pain
- Identifying intergenerational trauma and cultivating ancestral resources to overcome trauma
- Trauma healing as a portal to deepen spirituality by waking up through the body, and enhancing somatic awareness; practicing meditations that include the body; also identifying spiritually disorganizing practices and spiritual bypassing (dissociation) to help to avoid them/harm
- Jaya will offer somatic healing session demos to individuals who volunteer within the group to further illuminate the information shared
