Dear friend,
I want to let you know that registration is now open for my new online course, which begins with our first live session on Thursday, March 4th.
>>Learn more about Resting Your Nervous System: Embodying a Trauma-Sensitive Spirituality and Discovering a Felt Sense of Safety
The course will take place over four months and include 12 live sessions, on the first, second, and fourth Thursdays of each month, at 11am PT/ 7pm in London. It is not required that you attend live and you'll receive a video replay, audio MP3s, and a written transcript shortly after each session.
As part of the course, I'll be sharing the teachings, practices, and perspectives that I offer in my writing and in my clinical work, which explore the role of the body and the nervous system in transformation and healing, and the nature of an embodied, contemporary, trauma-sensitive approach to spirituality.
Some of the topics we're likely to cover include:
- The importance of resting the nervous system, especially in uncertain and transitional times
- How any integral approach to our spiritual lives must include awareness of and sensitivity to trauma and relational wounding
- How the felt sense of safety is the foundation for psychological growth, emotional healing, and spiritual transformation
- The essential role of the body in healing, especially in times of overwhelm and stress
- A not-too-technical, experiential understanding of the nervous system and its role in healing
- A fresh look at what trauma is and how it is more common than we might think
- The relationship between trauma and feeling unsafe, and how “safety” is the ultimate medicine for trauma
- Trauma, the nervous system, and the workings of implicit, bodily memory
- How and why we cannot “think” our way out of trauma and other types of relational wounding
- The meaning of integration and how trauma is a dis-integrating experience and the need for experiential process in healing the emotional brain
- Neuroplasticity, new experience, and the encoding of new neural circuitry
- The role of the “other” in healing - self-regulation and regulating with another
- Neural integration and the importance of linking together the layers of our experience
- The unconscious investment we may have in not healing and honoring the realities and implications of what true healing will always ask of us
- Establishing a list of specific, individualized practices and exercises you can engage in the moment when you notice yourself falling out of your window of tolerance
- The role of contemplative practices such as mindfulness, breathing, and yoga - and discerning when they are being used in healthy vs. less-than-healthy ways
- How meditation and practices oriented in “open awareness” are not always the most wise, skillful, or kind approach to working with trauma and other relational wounding
- The importance of having even one “safe other” in our lives, including the accessing of this “other” by way of imagination
- How spiritual beliefs and practices can overwhelm our nervous systems and can also serve as unconscious pathways of self-abandonment and avoidance
I hope to see you online starting in March and look forward to making this journey with you into the spring, into a time of rejuvenation and renewal.
Warmly,
Matt
