Somatics Foundations for Q/T & BIPOC Practitioners
Somatics Foundations for Q/T & BIPOC Practitioners (Earth - Regenerating Safety):
This course is for practitioners who are queer and/or trans and/or BIPOC, and will develop practitioners’ abilities to introduce somatic practices to support clients to regenerate a felt sense of safety. The course is skills-based, grounded in Generative Somatics’ methodology. In this course, participants will explore somatic theory, witness and participate in demonstrations of somatic skills, practice with one another, and deepen their embodied capacity to offer somatic work.
In Somatics Foundations (Earth - Regenerating Safety) we explore:
Generative Somatics’ theory of how healing happens through the body.
Developing somatic declarations with clients.
Practices for returning to a felt sense of center under conditions of pressure.
Embodied allyship.
Embodied consent to bring more choicefulness into decision-making.
Somatic ‘seeing’ - learning to see how the body physically holds trauma.
Where: In-person, at a location near Cambie & Broadway in Vancouver
When: Tuesdays, 9am - 12pm, from April 28 - June 30th
Who: Small Group. Maximum 8 participants, BIPOC-majority cohort.
Access info: KN95 masks required. Teaching space is up a flight of stairs (15 steps).
Investment: $2100 (limited sliding scale spaces available at $1650 for QT/BIPOC Practitioners, and $1250 for Indigenous &/or Black Practitioners).
Coming back into our own bodies, as practitioners, is a political choice. Knowing how to support clients to come back into their own bodies is also a political offer. There is a reason that a tactic of colonialism has been to separate people from their own bodies (and also the land, water, one another, and plant and animal life) - it is where our power, our courage, our connection to a larger sense of aliveness, is felt.
In this training, I bring 15 years of Generative Somatics training to teaching somatic skills to practitioners in community. So many of us are holding so much in our roles as political repression increases. Somatic work is one of the ways in which we can effectively support healing.
There are infinite paths to embodiment; all of our lineages have ways to move trauma through the body, and in many cases these knowledge bases were purposefully disrupted by colonialism, including in my lineage. Generative Somatics is one methodology amongst many to return to our bodies. We will look together at the tributaries of practice that fed into GS, named and unnamed, known and unknown, while also developing and practicing skills that cellularly, in our lineages and in our DNA, we have always known.
Course Outline
(subject to change and adjustment according to the needs of the group):
Week 1: Opening: Orientation to Generative Somatics’ Lineage & Theory of Change.
Week 2: Somatic Declarations: Centering Clients’ Longings
Week 3: Centering Under Pressure: Returning to a Felt Sense of Self.
Week 4: Blending with Safety Shape: Accompanying and Supporting the Ways We’ve Survived.
Week 5: Open Space / Integration.
Week 6: Embodied Consent: A Felt sense of Consent - Yes / No & Maybe.
Week 7: Somatic Allyship: Being with One Another.
Week 8: Somatic Seeing: How our Bodies Hold Trauma.
Week 9: Open Space / Integration.
Week 10: Embodied Completion.
This Round of Somatics Foundations (Earth) is in progress. To be notified of the next cohort, sign up for newsletter below.
Fayza Bundalli
Fayza is a queer, femme, somatic practitioner and bodyworker. She feels in her bones the importance of the role of politicized healers in moving towards a new world. She was strongly mentored by generous, profoundly skilled, and predominantly QT/BIPOC teachers during her decade with Generative Somatics, and now feels deep commitment to and joy in mentoring fellow QT/BIPOC practitioners in somatic skills.