This workshop, held in collaboration with The Breathe Network, explores how trauma lands in the body and how we can use somatic experiencing to support survivors’ healing. Molly Boeder Harris and Maira Holzmann introduce the concepts of somatic experiencing (SE) and co-regulating touch, offering somatic practices for down regulation that we can incorporate into our healing.
Focusing on the unique somatic imprints of shame that many survivors experience as a result of how trauma physiology and social norms interact, this workshop considers practices that support survivors in cultivating appreciation for their body’s innate responses to overwhelm, building capacity to hold the intensity of how our body remembers, and bolstering our resources for safer explorations of our own embodiment.
Somatic Experiencing and Sexual Trauma Recovery was originally held as a two-part online workshop in July 2021. The second part was recorded and is offered here as an open-access resource.
Maira Holzmann, Molly Boeder Harris
When it feels like the world is suspended in a state of permacrisis, community is the root that grounds us, giving us stability and hope. Not only does politicised somatics offer us an alternative pathway to reimagine our liberatory futures, but it also demands that we do it together. Like the seeds of a pomegranate, we nestle tightly against one another, connected by the white membrane that threads us together as one.
An introduction to healing trauma through somatic practices
“I’m learning how it also starts from the self and how it is at the cellular level in which we create ripples and changes at a more macro scale. Innerstanding that being in the body, as a site of transformation, simultaneous effects broader structures. So much of the time we are understanding oppression by intellectualising it.”
A discussion about the need and potential of somatics in our social justice movements.