The Leading Edge:
Frontiers in Prenatal and Perinatal Healing Online
​Next Class Starts Spring 2022

This is an online class that meets once a week for 8 weeks on Mondays 11:00 am - 1:00 pm Eastern time. The fee is sliding scale $275-$325, payment plans available. This course is part of a new frontier in helping you understand your nervous system and the impact of earliest trauma.
  • Do you want a learning community where you can interact with others, learn about safety and engage in personal growth?
  • We are offering a chance for you to engage in your nervous system's responses, understand your own personal map of your body's response, and resonate with others in positive states.
  • You will also learn skills to help others navigate their stressful lives
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What is a 'Leading Edge'?

Class One Introductions and What is "Health"? Stabilization
Class Two: What is a "Leading Edge"?
Class Three: Working with States and Facilitation Skills
Class Four: Working with the Polyvagal Theory and Your Personal Profile
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Creating Safety and Working with States

Class Five: Understanding Blueprint/Imprint and The Body is a Portal
Class Six:  Microexpressions, Working with the Face, and Attunement
Class Seven:  Recognizing the Baby's Experience through Body Mapping
Class Eight: Understanding Memory, Working with Early Imprints, Mapping Your Early Experience​

​ https://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/

Descriptions and Learning Objectives

Class One: Introductions and What is Health? This class will start us off with introductions and identification of health, resilience and resources. Health is a concept in somatic trauma resolution often described as resilience in trauma-informed practices. A practitioner's first step is to stabilize the nervous system if it has been overwhelmed. We start with resourcing and building coherence.
Learning objectives. Participants will:
  • Identify their intention for taking the class
  • Identify states of health
  • Identify resources: Internal, External, Missing
Class Two: What is a Leading Edge?This hour will introduce a series of autonomic nervous system maps, ways to recognize the times to pause the process in order to create space for someone to make a different choice, or to respond rather than react. Each moment is either speeding up too much or slowing down too much (dropping out of the window). It is an art form to help someone in their nervous system. This class will introduce states again, plus how to call a pause to help regulate the pace. Participants will identify states when they are in different parts of the nervous system responses and share as a group.
Learning objectives. Participants will:
  • Learn more about autonomic states
  • Be able to identify pause and warble zones
  • Be able to identify the Leading Edge dependent on state
  • Learn to use the Pause to regulate the pace
Class Three: Working with States and Facilitation Skills Your first skills are connected to feeling present and helping others feel present. If you can help yourself and another feel the bodily felt sense of the moment, then you have a tool to help answer the questions:
  • What let's you know you are here just now?
  • What helps you feel okay just now?
Breakout sessions will include helping others and yourself to feel a sense of grounding, settling and centering. Often the more detailed, or granulated, you can get with sensation and emotion, the better the foundation for healing. Handouts include lists of feeling states plus favorite questions for inquiry.
Class Four: Working with the Polyvagal Theory and Your Personal Profile: The Four Posters Explained This lecture offers a detailed description of the Polyvagal Theory as offered by Stephen Porges and Deb Dana. In other words, becoming aware of the way our own neuroanatomy and its scanning for danger is a Leading Edge. The language of the polyvagal theory is explained and the four posters on the baby's experience are included. Participants will be able to use the posters to help others understand the neuroanatomy and its function
Learning objectives. Participants will be able to:
  • Describe the anatomy of the polyvagal theory
  • Discern between social engagement and threat responses
  • Identify specific anatomy connected to dorsal and ventral vagus nerves, according to John Chitty
  • Introduce specific theory to help lay a deeper foundation for understanding states.
Class Five: Understanding Blueprint/Imprint and The Body is a Portal We all have in us a natural capacity for health that is called the Blueprint among Biodynamic Craniosacral and Polarity therapists. Straight from the work of Randolph Stone, Anna and John Chitty, Ray Castellino, Biodynamic craniosacral therapy and quantum physicists around the world, this lecture will:
  • Introduce the concepts of Blueprint and Imprint
  • Explain the sequence of coming into form
  • Gain a practice of perception through The Chitty Protocol
  • Lay the groundwork for understanding how we shaped by earliest experiences.
Extra information will include:
  • Adverse Childhood and Early Experiences and their Resilience Scores
  • Benevolent and Positive Childhood Experiences
  • Differentiation between Trauma Informed Practice and Healing Centered Practice
Class Six: Microexpressions, Working with the Face and Attunement This lecture will introduce the work of Paul Ekman who research on facial expressions helps professionals detect lying. The face is very expressive and while we may try to hide our expressions, the face will portray feelings. Autonomic nervous system expressions are immediate and universal across age, gender, education and many cultures.The conscious mind cannot fully control face and bodily expressions; The body speaks in its unspoken voice.The face is particularly susceptible to micro and macro expressions of emotion and is connected to bodily felt experience.Learning to read the face and gesture can help us with relationships, and can help us with our states. In addition, Porges says, "We wear our heart on our face and in our voice." We will examine emotional granulation as a health practice.
Learning Objectives. Participants will be able to:
  • Identify primal emotions and their microexpressions
  • Understand the importance of detecting emotional expression and the way it can show up in experiences
  • Practice identifying microexpressions and themes of triggers
  • Identify repair strategies for attunement and misattunement in relationship
  • Practice emotional granulation with primary emotions
Class Seven: Recognizing the Baby's Experience through Body Mapping How do we know our story? For healing earliest trauma, the story is a somatic pattern language. It is a collage of sensation, posture, and gesture. You can learn to see the baby’s experience in the person you are with by looking for the physical features of imprints of the baby’s experience in the mother. There are four maternal pelvis shapes. You can learn to see the baby’s experience of working with intrauterine constraint, lie side and birth. Learning objectives. Participants will:
  • Remember the layers of a baby's experience, and their somatic correlates
  • Specifically learn the markers of intrauterine and birth experiences
  • Be able to assess compression and vectors in faces and bodies
Class Eight: Understanding Memory, Working with Early Imprints, Mapping Your Early Experience Peter Levine, Founder of Somatic Experiencing has said that implicit memory often arises as a collage of sensations. Sometimes it arises quickly, without warning. He describes them a "hot". In a flash, you don't feel safe. Our earliest memories may stay profoundly alive in our bodies.
Learning Objectives: Participants will be able to:
  • Review implicit and explicit memory
  • Identify the layers of memory that stay alive from preconception through the first 1000 days. These layers come from the teachings of prenatal and perinatal psychology. They include preconception, conception, prenatal experience, birth and after birth experiences.
  • Gain clarity regarding the importance of early trauma healing through unpacking a case study
  • Practice clinical applications will also be presented as time allows.
  • Harvest information from their own early history to begin to craft their own early narrative