Embodied resilience for change
Grow your (and/or your team’s) 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, politicised somatics educator & writer
This is for you if you want to create purposeful change 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,
embodiment facilitator & 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 our present-time conditions and what we care about.
As our responses become more choiceful, we become more able to change the conditions causing distress into conditions for thriving.
Not just by thinking and talking, though. Change happens 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 1:1 sessions, or 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.
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.
What this isn’t:
- Therapy. Contact Katherine for online therapy, or Roses for details of therapists in 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, absorbed passively. I’ll teach you practices and skills that you can apply yourself, in sessions and in your daily life.
- Restricted to embodied awareness. Awareness of our current shapings is important, but not the whole gig. Change happens through what we practise, and we can learn to choose what we practise on purpose.
- Telling you to go and meditate. Not that you can’t meditate alongside if you like.
- ‘Manifestation’. Imagination is necessary and powerful for inspiring us towards where liveable futures, but it doesn’t work alone. Change happens through what we actually practise.
hidden
Booking enquiries
Pricing
Prices to individuals 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.
Prices to organisations depend on your annual turnover and requirements. Please contact hello@rosesherbal.com to discuss your needs.
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 of The Resilience Toolkit – an evidence-based framework created and developed by Nkem Ndefo of Lumos Transforms, which I am certified to facilitate.
The somatic practices themselves don’t originate with any one person or institution. Versions of them can be found in cultures all over the world and the knowledge of how to practise them runs deep in all our beings. This knowledge has only come to be institutionalised as ‘somatics’ in the global North (and in places colonised by the global North) because we have been disconnected from our bodies by racial capitalism, patriarchy and intersecting systems of oppression.
Knowledge about embodiment is also increasingly the subject of scientific study, and the Resilience Toolkit is informed by the cross-disciplinary evidence of these undertakings.
My practice has also been shaped indelibly by training in the ‘generative somatics’ branch of politicised somatics through Staci Haines, Erika Lyla, Brandon Sturdivant, Donna Hirschfeld-White and others. I don’t attempt to pass on 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 evidence-based ideas about stress and resilience, and we’ll get curious together about your own embodied experience.
I’ll invite you into some short practices, which may involve mindfulness, breathing, self-touch and/or movement.
And I’ll support you to develop, integrate and sustain your own, independent practice.
Everything is optional. As you practise, you may experience some settling, and you may experience some stress activation. You’ll learn how to discern for yourself what’s helping and what’s not, and to respond to your unique body’s feedback, in alignment with what you care about.
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 or shame stress, but contextualises and works with it
- 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, we aim to increase it
- takes into account 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.
Katherine (therapist):
I mostly work Tuesdays-Thursdays and some weekends
Roses (herbalist & embodiment facilitator):
I mostly work Mondays-Fridays
Training enquiries:
hello@fireweedcollective.org.uk