Somatic Wholeness:
​Recognizing, Understanding and Healing Earliest Trauma

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
          Hath had elsewhere its setting
               And cometh from afar;
          Not in entire forgetfulness,
          And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
~ Excerpt from Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
William Wordsworth, 1770 - 1850
A study group for touch professionals wanting to recognize, understand and heal earliest trauma in adult populations
One full day quarterly in September, 2018
Learning objectives:
  • Understand autonomic nervous system threat responses, and gain skills to shift them into healthy functional states.
  • Recognize and promote health and wholeness.
  • Be able to hold space with deep listening, touch skills, and principles related to prenatal and perinatal somatic health. 
  • Recognize and normalize difficult birth patterns for mothers and their partners.
  • Recognize and normalize difficult conception, in utero, birth and after birth patterns from the baby's experience.
  • Gain facilitation skills for birth story process for mother, partner, and baby.
  • Learn bodywork approaches to healing early developmental trauma, and appropriate verbal skills

Morning: Didactic Teaching and Dyadic/Triad exercises
Afternoon: Table Exchanges
Time: 9 am - 5:30 pm with 1.5 hours for lunch
Fee: $120 per class 4 Classes (Fridays in Sept-Dec-March-May in Charlottesville)
Fee:  $150 per class, October 28 in Silver Spring, MD, at the Potomac Massage Training Institute
  • Transforming the trauma tree: 9 positive imprints
  • Blueprint/Imprint: Working with the Tree of Life
    • Baby self and Good Mother Self
    • Recognizing wholeness and the health in the system
    • Resiliency as a health network, trauma recovery as art
    • Right Relationship as Blueprint
  • Preconception as a resource: We come from Wholeness
  • Birth Sequence
  • Two Layers of Support
  • Ying, yang, neutral
  • Autonomic Nervous System and Polyvagal Theory
    • ANS Maps
  • Conception: Coming into form
  • First, Second, Third Trimester
  • Attachment styles
  • Recognizing in utero constraint
  • Birth Patterns
  • Bonding
  • Shame and Grief
  • Noble and Fierce Listening
Practitioner Skills
  • Prenatal and Perinatal Principles
  • 5 Practitioner Skills
    • Presence
    • Relationship
    • Listening
    • Recognition
    • Conversation
  • Recognizing wholeness (working with the torus, and ying, yang, neutral)
  • Touching wholeness, Resources
  • Verbal Skills
  • Working somatically with small difficult pieces
  • Recognizing the Tide, Tidal Touch
  • Holding the Whole
  • Recognizing Holes as developmental sequencing delays or absence of stages/Adults with Earliest Trauma
  • Conjunct and Vectors from Inutero Constraint and Birth
  • Boundaries and Sweet Spot negotiation
  • Holds on the body to promote Wholeness
  • Talking with the Baby Within: Polarity Two Chair Work