Foundations in Feminist Somatics

Training Description

This full-day training aims to build foundational skills and knowledge for counsellors, support workers and psychotherapists interested in embodiment and somatics. It provides an introduction, as well as practical tools and resources to support counsellors to increase their capacity and confidence in integrating somatic frameworks within 1-on-1 sessions. At its core, this workshop provides a framework for authentic, co-created therapeutic change with the aim of cultivating, restoring and expanding the agency of individuals. 

Drawing from Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Politicised Somatics, this workshop contextualises somatics within an explicitly intersectional feminist framework. 

Through experiential learning and interactive activities, it integrally supports practitioners to bring awareness to and inhabit their own nervous systems as a way of resourcing the healing of others. 

Partipants will:

  • Practice a range of somatic practices relevant to Stage-1 trauma recovery (safety and stabilisation) including tools for: grounding, centring, orienting, resourcing and tracking 

  • Learn somatic techniques for navigating use-of-self, boundary-work and the relational field

  • Gain specialised knowledge regarding politicised somatics 

  • Engage with vicarious trauma from a somatic framework, as well as embodiment practices for self-car

How we Facilitate Foundations in Feminist Somatics:

We adopt an experiential, somatic and interactive learning approach. 

We are most often encouraged to learn through an academic framework that prioritises our minds and ignores our bodies. This limits the potential for full, authentic change. 

This training invites participants onto their learning edges - to practice, play and begin to embody the ideas and concepts through ourselves first. 

This learning approach is grounded in the principle of embodied consent. Attendees are encouraged to engage with the training by bringing full awareness to their own capacity and desire to participate. The skills that allow full, authentic choice is cultivated throughout the day. 

Assumed Knowledge

This training is designed for counsellors, support workers and psychotherapists with an interest and desire to work with bodies (including our own). It assumes participants bring a basic knowledge of trauma, its embodied impacts, polyvagal theory and 3-stage trauma recovery.

This training is ideal for folks who may have some experience with embodiment (such as prior familiarity with yoga, breathwork or movement) but are looking to expand their skills in noticing and intentionally regulating activation and deactivation cycles in your own nervous system and well as tracking, staying with and sequencing sensations in your body.

Foundations is a primer for people new to and curious about somatics and looking to integrate embodiment concepts and practices within an explicitly political framework.