Description
This hands-on framework will give you tools to work powerfully with others through the body, so they can heal deep wounds, transform fear and return to a place of trust and freedom.
In this program, you’ll develop a clear foundation of bodywork to guide clients beyond long-held hurts and fears, toward a re-newed sense of worth, hope, vitality and freedom.
It’s a framework into which you can pour all of who you are – your skills, life-experience, intuition, heart, curiosity, and desire – to touch people’s lives.
In this 5 1/2 day in-person training you’ll learn:
- A way to perceive where a client struggles in their life, and how the body holds both the struggle and the way beyond it.
- Tools of touch – through your hands, words and presence.
- How to recognize and work with fear and pain in the body.
- Ways to create a container for transformation; in your working space, your own body, and the client’s body.
- How to develop a partnership with your clients that will allow them to reach new states of freedom and power.
So much of the individual and collective pain we see in this world
comes from a profound lack of trust.
Trust in each other, ourselves, and the world around us. To compensate for this lack of trust, we put up guard rails. They protect us. Yet, those same guard rails which we’ve used to keep us safe, also keep us from living our most fulfilling life.
We feel this gap in our bodies. The yearning to live a life full of joy, love, confidence, ease, and connection, and the way we hold ourselves back. Part of the pain we experience as humans is that our bodies relentlessly long to be free. When we return to the rich experience of sensation, breath, movement, ease, and intimate awareness, we find our way toward this freedom. This is what the body offers.
The Touching People’s Lives framework intends to create a space, community, and world where we learn to trust ourselves again. A trust that is deeply rooted in the body.
This program is designed for:
- Anyone with a deep heart, and a curiosity for how to work with people through touch.
- Anyone practicing a hands-on healing modality (massage therapists, bodyworkers, reiki healers) who is seeking a well-structured framework for transformation and growth
- Coaches (Somatic, health, life, etc.)
- Yoga teachers, trainers, and pilates instructors
- Therapists who yearn to touch
You mayalready work, or have a deep wish to work, with people, and you:
- Desire more depth
- Want to reach through the screen and touch your client’s shoulder, guide their breath, place a hand on their heart so they feel themselves again.
- Trust your intuition but are unsure how to use it powerfully for change, support and transformation of your clients.
- Perceive what’s possible but your current skill set lacks a well-defined structure that you can trust.
- Know the body holds all of who we are and are ready to develop the skills that allow you to break through the noise and touch what’s essential.
WHAT WE’LL EXPLORE, TOGETHER:
Tools of touch
You’ll learn to touch the body using various forms of hands-on techniques, communication and presence. Touch is a powerful skill that guides your client’s attention. As you develop your confidence with this skill set, you’ll learn to recognize that when you touch another body, you’re giving clients the space to feel themselves.
Through working with patterns of effort, you’ll learn that you’re not just touching a contracted muscle, numb area, or stuck movement, but you’re touching a pattern of life: a place where your clients long for freedom and ease.
The power of attention
You’ll learn the ability to pay attention to your clients from your body, which is a vast, limitless ability we have as humans. It is the simplest tool to create a space for healing.
As you develop your ability to pay attention, you’re training your clients to do the same. Paying attention to areas of the body, sensation, flow of energy, and shifts of being. You’ll encourage their ability to shift their attention from a contracted state to an expansive one.
Through this enhanced attentiveness clients learn not only to pay attention in a session, but to take this attentiveness into their lives.
The ability to pay attention to another person is one of the more powerful things we can do. Opening up the depth of sensations for an expansive experience of one’s self and the world around us.
Body awareness
Once a client is paying attention, they naturally become more aware of their body and themselves. This awareness gives them the chance to feel their patterns of effort and the ability to let go, allowing for a flow of sensation, a connection to parts they left behind long ago, and a shift in body presence.
You’ll learn to tangibly connect to the qualities that emerge in clients’ bodies as they let go, and how this deep experience of themselves moves them in their lives.
What does confidence feel like? How spacious is their breath? Do they trust themselves more when warm energy washes through their legs? Do they feel their depth, as they reconnect to their belly? Every human experience can be described and connected to, through the body and ever-deepening body awareness.
It’s the key to lasting change, as it holds both the pattern of effort and the deep connection to a person’s potential. It is how a client knows whether they are free or not.
Transformation of energy
One of the most fundamental aspects of this work is the movement from a contracted or limited state to one that is expansive and free. Both are physical experiences and how we hold the energy of who we are.
Through touch, attention, and awareness you’ll learn to teach clients how to create space inside of themselves to feel and incorporate the parts they’ve left behind, cut themselves off from, or buried long ago. This can come as sweat, tears, tingles, shaking, gurgling, a warm flow, a cold rush, emotional expression, and so much more.
As a client learns to trust this transformation of energy, their inherent qualities effortlessly emerge. Creativity, playfulness, spontaneity, intelligence, easy human interactions, sensuality, warmth, clarity, self-assurance, simplicity, directness, and more.
You’ll guide clients in their process of growth as you practice the key components of energy transformation: learning to let go of effort, responding to energy that moves, and supporting that flow toward change.
Movement
Movement is where the magic of transformation happens. As a body learns to let go, there is always new movement. Movement of our hearts, intelligence, spirit, wishes, and desires.
All of our struggles show where movement got stuck, held back, or unexpressed and hint at the potential underneath. As you implement the tools of touch with attention, you’ll gain awareness of the subtle and potent movements a body holds, the direction it wants to flow, its pace and vibrancy, and the outer movements a body wants to make to feel whole.
The space you create and hold for your clients is full of movement – Movement of muscle, breath, sensation, thought, will, and energy. Your presence offers them the freedom to explore and allow this movement without a need for explanation, permission, or holding anything back. It’s a space of complete freedom. You’ll learn to encourage your clients to follow their movements full of curiosity to feel just how free they can be.
This framework guides you to connect your clients to their unexplored capacity for movement and possibility in their lives. The movement of their potential.
A personal note:
As I sat down to create this program, I knew in my heart I wanted to offer something fundamentally different. I wanted to offer a space inside of which your value could flourish. Yes, you need tools and guidance, which you will abundantly get in Touching People’s Lives. But after 30 years of doing this work, I’ve learned that who you are, when you show up next to a person yearning to be free, is the most essential ingredient of all.
This framework offers you the space into which you can pour your heart, growing and thriving, and teach others to do the same.
Venue + Logistics
TBD
What’s included
- 5 1/2 days of training, including topic discussion, demonstrations and hands-on practice, as well as daily embodiment training. We’ll leave time for feedback, reflections, and how to work with the personal challenges you meet as a practitioner.
- 5 Follow-up Zoom calls (2 hours) to deepen the learning of all topics covered, allow for questions, doubts, and support of your own personal practice.
- Lodging and meals to be details to come
What’s not included
- Flights and transportation to the venue
Daily Schedule:
Monday – Friday: 9:30-6pm
(includes a 2-hour lunch break and 2 scheduled breaks + more as needed.)
Saturday: 9:30am-1pm
Faq
How many people will participate in this program?
The maximum participants in this immersion is 10. I would like to keep the group smaller, to allow for a more powerful, in-depth experience.
Is this program open to both men and women?
Yes.
What is the learning format?
The general schedule M-F will be from 9:30am – 6pm. A few of those days we will meet earlier for an embodiment and movement pracitce.
On Saturday, we meet from 9:30am -1pm
What should I bring to the program?
Be sure to bring plenty of comfortable clothes in which you can train and move.
Water bottle.
Journal.
Hiking/walking shoes (if you’d like to go for a cool walk in the mountains near the venue)
What is the cancellation policy?
The $500 deposit is non-refundable.
Cancellations less then 2 months and up to 1 month prior to the program will receive a 50% refund less the deposit and any credit card or processing fees.
Cancellations less than 1 month prior to the workshop date are non-refundable.
Will there be future trainings?
Yes. My intention is to offer a total of 4 weeks of training. The subjects for the subsequent weeks will include:
- Working with reactions (in session and life), including long-held beliefs, emotional reactions, and movement patterns.
- The power of personal history and emotional flow. Deepening the connection to potential.
- Workshops – learning to build workshops and ongoing series through body awareness, practices, and movement training.
Will I get any certification?
As I offered in my personal note, my intention is to give you a framework that holds power and potential. There are so many trainings out there, and chances are, you’ve already done one or more of them. I want to give you a structure that will allow you to go even deeper with your clients, incorporating what you already know.
If you’re doing this for the first time and feel you need and want some type of certification, I can offer suggestions of where to learn to support what you will gain in the Touching People’s Lives program.
On what level can I work with people after this week?
You’ll be able to work with anyone who wants change in their lives. While in this first week we won’t go deeplpy into beliefs, emotional patterns, or history, whenever you touch a pattern of effort in the body, you touch the whole.
You will learn to create a strong container, so the client trusts themselves and the differences they experience when they walk out of a session with you. You’ll be empowering clients to hold their lives in their hands.