Healing ourselves Helping others
By participating in this course, you will:
Build resilience and strength in your nervous system and whole mindbody
Become more grounded, resourced, and present in the safety of this moment
Know the basics of how trauma shows up in your clients, recognize when they are in a trauma response of fight/flight/freeze/fawn, and become skilled at emotionally co-regulating with them
Learn and be comfortable teaching practical somatic healing tools for your clients to work with troubling thoughts and energies
This is for you if:
You are a life coach, facilitator, or counselor who helps people align with their values and supports them in making practical changes
You are a therapist wanting to integrate more trauma informed somatic therapy into your cognitive based work with clients
You are a yoga teacher, school teacher, nurse, chiropractor, doctor, massage therapist, general holistic practitioner, or peer supporter to whom people turn for help
You are a student or newly certified in any of these professions
The Stillpoint Method is a somatic mindfulness based inquiry practice that can be used in conjunction with your own methods of coaching and counseling.
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In a general sense, this course is meant to provide people who are in helping professions like teaching, coaching, therapy etc, with a solid understanding of trauma and how to work with it in their clients or students.
The first principle is healing ourselves, helping others, and that we can only teach and share what we practice ourselves. Similar to teaching yoga nidra, it will fall flat if we're trying to guide something we aren't familiar with and experiencing ourselves.
One focus is to be able to recognize trauma responses in ourselves, AND to recognize them in our students. This is similar to the course Teaching Trauma Informed Yoga. We need to know if we personally are in eg a freeze response and how to self-regulate, and we also need to be able to recognize that in students and be able to help them during class.
In the coaching and facilitating intensive, we are generally working 1:1 with people and more directly with their personal experiences, stories and beliefs. Many people have a hard time accessing and healing stored trauma in the body because it doesn't feel safe to be in their body.
In my experience, somatic mindfulness inquiry is the most effective way to heal. Talk therapy works on the cognitive level. Our nervous system communicates through energy, feelings and sensations in our body and as we listen somatically, reveals associated memories that are stored with the energy.
Traumatic memory pulls us back into the past. We need to know and practice grounding and orienting tools to stay in the safety of the present moment with our adult self. Clients practice these and they co-regulate with us.
For the last two thirds of the course, we will also practice these principles with each other.
Why Do We Need Trauma Informed Coaching and Counseling?
Trauma-informed is a buzz word the last few years for good reason. Many people felt stressed, scared, disconnected, and like we could barely keep our head above water before Covid, then it intensified.
Trauma is not just something that happened to us in the past. We are moving through a collective experience of trauma now. We feel the impact on our nervous systems, and are aware of how hypervigilance plays out in our personal lives, politics and in the media. We need help.
Trauma informed coaching is not therapy, although it can have therapeutic benefits. As we regulate our nervous system, we experience authentic safe connection. As we learn and practice the tools we offer our clients, we become more stable and trustworthy for ourselves and each other.
We can only help others to the extent that we have and are healing. This work is not a quick fix. It takes time, persistence, and courage AND we don't have to be fully healed ourselves to help others.
"If you are one step ahead of someone, reach back your hand." Swami Veda Bharati
Elements of Trauma Informed Coaching and Counseling
Somatic Mindfulness: We recognize what is happening in our nervous system and those around us. Clients co-regulate with our more settled nervous system, and from this experience of feeling safer, are able to open to healing.
Friends With Our Mind: Anxiety about the future or ruminating about the past creates a storm of catastrophic and shaming thoughts. We help clients intervene on the spot with proven somatic tools that change their relationship with their mind.
Core Deficiency Beliefs: We develop beliefs based on our experiences. Seeing through our own core deficiency beliefs, we develop a warm authentic relationship with who we are now, and with our younger self. We model that for our clients.
Adult Agency and Resources: whatever our situation was as a child, with awareness and consistent practice we can build the capacity to be with our younger self with attuned empathy, to recognize and stop inner critic attacks, and to change habits and conditioning.
Understanding Trauma Responses
We turn against ourselves with a mean inner critic. We anxiously try to control other people and the external world so we can feel safer. Our mind is caught in a trance of ruminating and catastrophic thinking. We shut down and think about emotions instead of feeling them.
Unresolved trauma hijacks our system and keeps us in perpetual hypervigilance and survival responses of fight/ flight/ freeze/ fawn. We don’t have to live that way.
People conditioned into learned helplessness can’t afford to take a chance or make a mistake because the stakes are too high. This strategy served a purpose as a child and is no longer as necessary.
As we lessen and dissolve the obstacles to knowing, respecting and loving ourselves, we aren’t as reactive to other people shaming us. We’re not as vulnerable to manipulation. We form better boundaries. It occurs to us to be on our own side and to prioritize our own precious life.
Compassion and Kindness: the Shortcut to Healing
Compassion is the daily practice of recognizing and accepting our shared humanity, so that we treat others and ourselves with loving-kindness. Action in the face of suffering is fueled by understanding and accepting that no one is immune to pain or suffering.
Empathy is the most powerful tool of compassion. It is an emotional skill set that allows us to understand what someone is experiencing, and to reflect back that understanding.
Through attuned empathy, we experience kindness and compassion for ourselves and others. We become a steady presence for our clients as they welcome feelings and associated thoughts, memories and beliefs. We help them become free from self limiting beliefs and patterns.
We Become Skilled At Healing and Helping
As our intuition sharpens, we tune in to what is happening moment to moment with our clients. They feel our unconditional acceptance, attention, and care.
We have all known joy, hurt, heartbreak, shame, grief, and love. To the extent we allow ourselves to feel these emotions, we can afford to connect with what someone is feeling about their experience.
We see clearly. We live in a world of systemic oppression around race, class, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, education, and neurodiversity. We understand how oppression plays out in personal life and relationships, and how it creates an affinity with or barrier between us.
What You Can Expect During the Course
We have 2 hours each week to deeply explore facets of healing trauma and helping others through somatic mindfulness inquiry, trauma education, small breakout groups to share and practice, and talking with Lynn and asking questions in the larger group.
Some classes will be an opportunity for 1 or 2 participants to be facilitated by Lynn to illustrate the principles we are working with.
This is an intensive with a focus on practice to become skilled with grounding, orienting and emotional regulation that help us become a stable presence for our clients.
In this course, we won’t work directly with traumatic events and memories during class as you might in private sessions with your clients. We learn and practice tools to work with traumatic memories of our own. From our own emotional regulation, we help clients work at a comfortable healing pace.
Between classes, participants are encouraged to practice tools for self-regulating and awareness, and reflect on the somatic inquiry and focus of the week.
After week 4, participants will practice somatic listening and counseling with each other.
We Get Better At Life
We deeply know our authentic self on all levels of mindbody. We regularly access higher levels of awareness and stillness. We no longer fear the trauma that is stored as sensations and energy in our body. We cultivate welcoming all that is here.
We practice yoga, meditation and nervous system regulation not to get better at the practice, but to have more ease and joy in life.
With mindfulness of our thoughts and energy, we continue to redirect our attention away from movement to stillness and our own basic goodness.
Is This a Yes for You?
Relax your body and close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths. As you contemplate being in this course, what does it feel like in your body?
Would this intensive help deepen your healing work with others?
Feel the sensations and notice associated thoughts and memories. Is there anything that would have to change for you to join? There is no right or wrong answer when we inquire. We are looking to know what is here.
What Does the Heart Know? Click here for a 5 minute guided somatic inquiry.
Cost and Resources
The regular price for this ten week intensive is $499 US. Registration is through Yoga Farm Ithaca, and they have 3 price options and a payment plan.
A PDF of the slides plus video recordings of everything except the small groups are available the following day.
Certification and CEU
Everyone is welcome to attend the classes live or through replays, and to participate in whatever way works best for you.
Participants who also complete the following will receive a certificate that they have successfully completed the Stillpoint Method Intensive, and 20 Continuing Education Credits for Yoga Alliance.
Participate live in 8 of the 10 classes
Pass a open book written exam based on course content and personal reflections
Submit a 10 minute video of coaching another class participant using principles from the course
Please email me with questions. lynnfraserstillpoint@gmail.com