Embodied resilience for change

Grow your embodied capacity for personal and collective healing and transformation, with Roses

Embodied Resilience for Change teaches somatic skills to meet challenges with the minimum amount of stress that’s useful – freeing up energy to transform the conditions for stress into conditions for flourishing.

“We’re always practising something,
and we are/become what we practise,
so we may as well practise on purpose!”

– Staci Haines, author of The Politics of Trauma

This is for you if you want to create change on purpose

towards what you care about.

You may be…

  • Preparing for trauma therapy or healing
  • Organising for social and climate justice
  • Providing care, leadership or service to others
  • Transitioning identities, relationships, roles, life stages or locations
  • Trying to cause less harm
  • Cultivating other purposeful change.

“We don’t need more knowledge. We need to be changed by what we know.”

Prentis Hemphill,

author of What it Takes to Heal

The body remembers…

We react to pressures based on embodied memories of what helped us survive past challenges. This intelligence can be life-preserving, but not always discerning. Current and past pressures may differ, yet we react now as then.

Inappropriate and/or excessive stress responses can cost us personally (with illness and burnout), relationally (conflict and disconnection), and collectively (making us less able to create the change we care about).

 

…but biology isn’t destiny

We can learn to respond more discerningly: checking if our automatic reactions are a good match for the moment, and tweaking them on purpose to align with what we care about and our real-time conditions.

As we become more resilient we become more able to change the conditions causing stress and harm, into conditions for thriving.

Not just by thinking and talking, but through embodied practice.

 

“All that you touch, you change.
All that you change changes you.
The only lasting truth is change.
God is change.” –
Octavia Butler

What’s involved?

Through 4-6 x 90-minute sessions 1:1 – or 3-4 x 2-hour group-sessions – you will:

  • Deepen your understanding of how your body reacts to stressful situations, combining self-reflection with research and theory
  • Cultivate your capacity to feel safe in safe situations, and to access choice in your embodied responses
  • Learn simple, effective, embodied practices for responding to stress and triggers in the moment
  • Grow your capacity to resist and transform harmful systems and situations
  • Build skills for resilience that honour your body, past and culture.
“It felt very expansive and experimental which I’ve never had before. It felt like a creative process.”
Roses held the space incredibly well. I felt very actively listened to, everything was explained clearly and concisely (and with the right level of nerdery for me!) and even when I felt I couldn’t answer a question properly Roses made space to explain things.
“The information has hugely changed my perspective on something I used to feel quite a lot of embarrassment around. I’m currently exploring changing my medication and have been fearful about the return of this. Now I am less so!”
“Roses did a stunning job reflecting what I had shared back to me and weaving it into how the toolkit could support me with my current and enduring stressors. Roses is amazing at communication and delivering complex information in an accessible way.”
“I think you really hold space well, you really held the situation together when I was triggered. I know I played a responsibility in that too but the way you held space made it easier. You really took a good amount of control of the situation and I felt safe. Thank you”
“Roses felt warm, calm and kind throughout the session, which made me feel safe and open to learning new coping ways.”

Long-term benefits of regular practice:

  • More confidence in our own resilience
  • More competence to hold complexity and contradictions – to go beyond all-or-nothing thinking and embrace more possibilities
  • More capacity to take action to transform the conditions creating stress into conditions in which we can thrive
  • Ability to meet and respond more creatively and strategically to challenges, in alignment with deep longings and values
  • More sustained, relaxed energy
  • Access to sensations of safety in the body when present-time conditions support safety – and to mobilise appropriately to threats
  • More embodied aliveness and mental clarity
  • More skilfull, compassionate relationships that uphold the dignity of all and deepen the connections between us.

Embodied Resilience for Change-Makers isn’t:

  • Therapy. Contact Katherine for online therapy, or Roses for details of  practitioners local to Machynlleth
  • Exploring past trauma/stress. We’ll focus not on what’s happened, but on how what happened is affecting you now.
  • Something done to you, or absorbed passively. I’ll guide you through practical skills that you can apply yourself, in sessions and outside them, now and indefinitely.
  • Just about somatic awareness. Awareness of our current shapings is important, but not the whole gig. Change happens through what we choose to practise on purpose.
  • Telling you to go and meditate. Not that you can’t do that too. You do you.
  • ‘Manifestation’. Imagination is necessary and powerful for inspiring us towards where liveable futures, but it doesn’t just take us there on its own. Change happens through what we actually practice.

hidden
Booking enquiries
Contact hello@rosesherbal.com
Pricing

Prices are offered are on a sliding scale depending on your access to wealth, aiming to be sustainable for me and available to you. See our pricing page for details.

Accessibility

We’re all different, so please email Roses to discuss your needs.

As standard:

  • Sessions will take place online, via Zoom.
  • Live captioning can be turned on/off as needed.
  • You’ll need to call in from a location that doesn’t restrict your natural range of movement (so e.g. a car wouldn’t be suitable, but most rooms would be).
  • I can adapt any and all movement and sensory practices as needed for your body and processing style.
Lineage

Embodied Resilience for Change is a permitted adaptation and application of The Resilience Toolkit, a framework created and developed by Nkem Ndefo of Lumos Transforms, which I am certified to facilitate.

The skills offered through the Resilience Toolkit don’t originate with any one person. They descend from the wisdom of all indigenous cultures, and run deep in all our beings. The institutionalisation of this knowledge as something called ‘somatics’ has come to exist only because racial capitalism, ableism, patriarchy and other systems of oppression have disconnected people in western cultures, and many in western-colonised cultures, from our own bodies. This knowledge is also the subject of increasing scientific study, and the Resilience Toolkit is informed by the cross-disciplinary evidence of these undertakings too.

My practice has also been shaped indelibly by training in related branches of politicised somatics through Staci Haines, Erika Lyla, Brandon Sturdivant, Donna Hirschfeld-White and others. I don’t try to reproduce their teachings in Embodied Resilience for Change, but their work has influenced my understanding of and personal path in change work profoundly, which has shaped me as a person, which in turn shapes me as a facilitator.

What can I expect to happen in a session?
I’ll introduce some ideas and we’ll get curious together. Based on your responses I’ll invite you into some short practices, which may involve mindfulness, breathing, self-touch and/or movement. Everything is optional.

If you choose to take part in the practices, I will invite you throughout to continue anything you are finding helpful, and to stop anything you are finding unhelpful.

You may experience some settling, and you may experience some stress activation, as you explore and learn how your own unique nervous system responds to different cues. By the end of the session hopefully you will feel more empowered to respond to your own nervous system and signs of stress, if, when and how it feels useful to you to do so.

How might I feel after a session?

Depending on how you were feeling when you arrived for the session, you may feel more embodied aliveness and/or more settling afterwards. You may even feel a little activation.

It’s a good idea to schedule in a little time for yourself after each session, if you can, to integrate your experience and continue to attend to your needs.

I will also offer some aftercare after the first session, so that if discomfort arises you can be supported. Through the course of the second, third and fourth sessions, you will become more and more skilled to be able to attend to your own needs as they arise. My goal is for my role in our work together to become less and less important, as the skills become your own embodied competences.

At the same time, we’re all connective creatures, and there may be times in the future when you’d benefit from additional support and guidance from some who’s been on the path a little longer. After our sessions have ended, you’re welcome to get back in touch for occasional maintenance sessions.

How might it be similar or different to other stress- and resilience-related offerings out there?

Embodied Resilience for Change…

  • is trauma-informed in its purpose, design and delivery
  • honours the protective functions of our stress responses – it doesn’t pathologise stress
  • embraces and validates the full range of human emotion, including anger. It’s not about trying to be calm all of the time!
  • aims to free up capacity to change harmful conditions rather than just put up with them. Instead of seeking to pacify our energy for engaging in social movement, it aims to increase it
  • accounts for our physical, social, political and ecological conditions, including systems of oppression – it doesn’t try to flatten power differences or universalise people’s experiences
  • teaches skills for self-responsiveness, rather than telling you what to do. You will be invited to defer to your own authority in your embodied experience, not the facilitator’s or anyone else’s.

Get in touch

Please sign up for our occasional newsletter if you’d like to receive seasonal herb profiles, recipes, support with navigating change and systemic challenges, invitations to connect with the seasons, and info on our upcoming events.

Katherine (therapist):

kvcoxtherapy@gmail.com

I mostly work Tuesdays-Thursdays and some weekends

Roses (herbalist & embodiment facilitator):

hello@rosesherbal.com

I mostly work Mondays-Thursdays

Training enquiries:

hello@fireweedcollective.org.uk