Traumas, or wounds, are initiations that demand of you to cross the threshold between light and dark, order and chaos, oneness and separation, ordinary and extraordinary worlds. Myths are maps meant to help you navigate the crossing from the descent into your personal underworld, your subconscious, to the ascent up to your Mount Olympus, home to the gods and your conscious mind.
Deep-seated wisdom is encoded in the ancient Greek language of these myths and preserved like a time capsule over thousands of years. We have combined this ancestral wisdom with cutting-edge, healing modalities that include but are not limited to Internal Family Systems, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, and Mindfulness.
You will experience five myths over five sessions, each a call to adventure:
Week 1: Medusa and Perseus
Week 2: Sisyphus
Week 3: Minotaur and Theseus
Week 4: Chiron
Week 5: Odysseus
Despina Plousiou is a marriage and family therapist specializing in Trauma Therapy as well as Individual, Family, and Couple Therapy. She is a Certified Systemic Family Constellation Facilitator, an EMDR therapist, IFS Level 3 trained therapist, and she has completed her second level training in Sensorimotor psychotherapy. She is completing her training as a grief counselor and is also obtaining certification as a Kalffian Sand play Therapist. Furthermore, she has completed the 6 month Polyvagal Training through Deb Dana’s institute. She is currently supervising the translation of Dick Schwartz’s book “No Bad Parts” in Greek and she is translating Frank Anderson’s book “Transcending Trauma” in Greek. She has authored her own book, currently available only in Greek, “The Serpent. A story on the art and wisdom of creativity.” She has worked in public and private institutions and has participated as a speaker in conferences and workshops in Greece and the United States. Learn more at despinaploussiou.com
Sofia Vasi (Vasilakos) is a Greek-American psychotherapist in private practice based in Athens, Greece who works remotely with individual clients from all over the world. She believes trauma survivors can become the hero of their own story and views trauma as a call to adventure to discover your most empowered, authentic, joyful Self. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from New York University and Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology and Psychotherapy from the American College of Greece. She is an Internal Family Systems (IFS) Level 2 trained therapist, a Certified Yoga Teacher, and has received extensive training in mindfulness. She has dedicated the last 10 years to discovering integrative, evidence-based trauma therapies and helping passionate professionals, big-hearted entrepreneurs, and creative women release their self-limiting blocks to create abundance in all areas of their lives. Sofia splits her time between Athens and her small village near Sparta with her husband and two sons, loves to cook, and enjoys running different biohacking experiments. Learn more at sofiavasi.com
Website: https://traumatotherapy.com/
Practically speaking, the way we experience the impact of trauma, attachment injuries, and stress in our lives is through triggers. Whether that be how we feel when we visit our parents, receive an urgent email from our boss, or pass by the site of a traumatizing incident – it’s in the midst of these moments that our past disrupts our present.
If we want to have an impact on these triggers instead of them having an impact on us, it’s essential that we learn practices that allow us to approach triggers in a safe way where they do not overwhelm us and we have the capacity, space, and time to transform them.
The purpose of this series is to introduce you to a self-directed framework on how to cultivate agency over triggers that previously were beyond your control using a combination of cognitive (top down) and somatic (bottom up) approaches.
We will cover:
Session 1: Somatic Awareness & Cultivating True Self
June 6: Resourcing Positive States
June 13: State Shifting with Pendulation
June 20: Future Selfing
June 27: Anchoring
Karden Rabin is a Nervous System Medicine Practitioner, an expert in the field of psychophysiologic disorders, and co-founder of Chronic Fatigue School. Over the last 15 years, he has combined principles of bodywork, brain retraining, and somatic trauma therapies to help thousands of clients all over the world heal from chronic pain and illness. He is a regular contributor to the Trauma Research Foundation Blog and has led programming for The Wounded Warrior Project, Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, and Starbucks.
Social Media @kardenrabin
Afro Flow Yoga® is an embodied practice integrating dance movements of the African diaspora with meditative yoga and live healing music, promoting individual and collective healing in a compassionate, non-judgmental, inclusive, and safe environment.
Afro Flow Yoga® grew out of Leslie and her husband’s explorations of healing and their African American and Caribbean heritage in West Africa, Haiti, and Jamaica.
The couple developed a new integrated practice, Afro Flow Yoga®, that integrates Leslie’s deep knowledge of yoga and African and Afro-Caribbean dance, Jeff’s extraordinary fluency in drums, melodic, and other traditional African instruments, and their passion for the empowerment, education, healing, spirituality, and wellness of all they serve. As a result, Afro Flow Yoga® is a unique approach to physical, emotional, and mental wellness.
Session 1: Afro Flow Yoga®: Restoring Our Roots to Restore Our Inner Strength Series
Session 2: Afro Flow Yoga®: Restoring Our Roots to Restore Our Inner Strength Series
Leslie Salmon Jones & Jeff W. Jones: Leslie Salmon Jones and her husband Jeff W. Jones are co-founders of Afro Flow Yoga®. Leslie is an Alvin Ailey trained dancer, yoga practitioner, teacher, and wellness coach. She speaks, coaches, and teaches internationally and in addition, is a co-creator and faculty member for the annual Omega Women’s Leadership Intensive.
Jeff W. Jones and his wife are co-founders of Afro Flow Yoga®. Jeff is a professional engineer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, composer, and musical director who has traveled the world with musical greats including Little Richard and Al Green, and Zap Mama, to name just a few. He has also performed for the inaugurations of President Barack Obama and Governor Deval Patrick. Through music, Jeff creates an intuitive flow with proficiency and his inspired use of an eclectic array of tonal instruments ground and center the yoga practice.
Together they have developed an integrated embodied practice, combining dances from the African Diaspora, yoga, and live healing music, promoting individual and collective healing in a compassionate, non-judgmental, inclusive, and safe environment.
Social Media handles: Instagram @afroflowyoga
Learning about trauma can be empowering and transformative….and we also know that the traumatized brain may have limited capacity to learn, integrate and apply new information.
Too much information can be dysregulating.
Over this next month, Linda Thai will take us through how trauma impacts the body and the nervous system, and can drive the formation of personality in marvelously adaptive ways.
These bite-sized presentations will use visuals to help to illustrate concepts and will be interwoven with somatic practices to enhance learning, to create a bridge between theoretical knowledge and practical, life-affirming skills.
Session 1: Neuroception of Life Threat & Danger: The Common Trauma Responses of Attachment Cry, Flight, Fight, Freeze, and Flop
Session 2: Fawning & Appeasement: Reactive, Proactive, Acute and Chronic Relational Survival Responses
Session 3: Finding: An adaptive evolutionary strategy turned haywire with the threat of traumatic stress
Session 4: Triggers, Window of Capacity & Upregulation / Downregulation Skills
Linda Thai LMSW (she, her) is a trauma therapist who specializes in cutting edge brain- and body-based modalities for the healing of complex developmental trauma. As an educator and consultant, she is gifted with the capacity to contextualize, synthesize and communicate complex and nuanced issues pertaining to the impact of oppressive systems upon identity, mental health and wellbeing, and the invisibilized wounds of racial trauma. Linda is passionate about breaking the cycle of historical and intergenerational trauma at the individual and community levels, and deeply believes in the healing power of coming together in community to grieve.
Born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, and now living in Alaska, Linda is a former child refugee who is not only redefining what it means to be Vietnamese, to be Australian, and to be American United States-ian….she is redefining what it means to be wounded and whole and a healer.
Michael will guide four distinct theme focused meditation experiences over four weeks Each session will build upon the previous one but feel free to drop into one or more. If you are new to meditation this is a great opportunity to make an easy to follow guided start. If you are experienced, you will be able to use the facilitated focus to become more aware and experience valuable life enhancing insight. Michael will guide you in easy to follow body and breath meditation practices that will bring you home to now. You will engage both body and breath as anchors to support a shift in your “lens of self-reference”. From a place of greater equanimity, stress, anxiety, fear, and tension can be transformed.
Michael Lee, M.A., Dip.Soc.Sci. came to the United States from Australia with a background in education and psychology. An accomplished master teacher and yogi, Lee is the founder/director of Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy. A program that has been featured in Yoga Journal and elsewhere. Lee gives training programs and workshops and appears at conferences throughout North America, Australia, and Europe.
March 7, 2023 – Befriending Your Body
Our bodies have a wisdom of their own and here you will use your body as your friend and guide to access that inner wisdom.
March 14, 2023 – Acceptance
Accepting things as they are is one of the keys to happiness. But acceptance is not about giving up. In this guided mediation you will experience the difference and learn to use acceptance as a way of seeing clearly.
March 21, 2023 – Discernment and Wise Choice
There is no single recipe for happiness but there are valuable tools, one of which is discernment. In this guided experience you will be invited to practice discernment and allow it to inform wise choices in life.
March 28 – Embodying Truth
We are all different and unique human beings. We each have our own path to walk and happiness awaits when it resonates with our truth. In this guided meditation you will be invited to discern and embrace what is true for you.
Michael is the founder of Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy, and a world-traveled conference presenter, author, and teacher. His work is based on the essence of yoga and mindfulness practices that have relevance in today’s world for supporting greater emotional and mental well-being and personal transformation. Michael is the author of Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy—Bridge from Body to Soul, and Turn Stress Into Bliss. He is also a contributing author to the American Psychological Association-published book Beyond Talk therapy. Michael was a keynote speaker for the International Association of Yoga Therapists and the opening keynote speaker at Yoga Australia Conference, a presenter at the International Congress on Integrative Medicine and Health, the Toronto Yoga Conference, the Japan Yoga Therapy Conference, and the first Global Consortium on Yoga Therapy in Sendai, Japan in 2018. Michael and his wife Lori parent five adult children live in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts
https://kripalu.org/presenters-programs/deepening-your-relationship-workshop-couples#
Overview of the Program:
When we become more present and embodied, we feel more. We sense more of ourselves, the environment, and the world. This can allow us to discover more deeply what we are made for, what we long for, and what questions we are in. When we become more embodied, we may also feel more of the pain and struggle of the world. In transformational work, we say this is “good news.” Not the pain, but the opportunity to feel, to empathize, and to tend to what needs tending.
In these 4 embodied practice sessions, we’ll explore embodied hope. We’ll discover how to open to a wider range of sensing and feeling, how to notice and cultivate hope, and how to cultivate practices that allow for complexity.
Staci Haines is the author of “The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice.” She has been experimenting at the intersections of personal and social transformation for the last 30 years, through the work of somatics, trauma healing, embodied leadership, and transformative justice. She is the founder of generationFIVE and the co-founder of generative somatics.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2020/09/30/nourish-resilience-trauma-somatics/
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/politics-trauma/
Step by step, we rebuild verbal behavior by reinforcing new habits. Each week we are invited to discover how the entire body contributes to the way you communicate.
Steps to prepare you for our work together:
1st – procure a speech, a poem, or song lyrics. We will use that to practice the MBS exercises.
2nd – Record the text below in your phone’s recording app. For the remainder of our time together, record this once a day.
3rd – Questions to consider: Answer these in a note app on your phone. The answers to these questions are personal and do not need to be shared.
Join us for a calming, regulating, experiential exercise with our co-founder and the world-renowned author of The Body Keeps the Score.
We’ll learn how breath works to calm our nervous system to bring us out of the past and into the present.
Overview of the Program:
Sexual Grief is a response to sexually traumatic events which can occur over the span of one’s life. Sexual Grief can include abuse of any kind, ridicule after an initial sexual experience, being unwanted at birth, and menopause or erectile dysfunction. A kinship is formed between the traumatic event and the grief which imprisons the mind, the body, and the psyche. The bond causes a sense of imprisonment when unwanted pop-up memories occur at the worst times, and leave you feeling as if your mind and body are out of sync. Bring your mind and body back into sync. Now is the time to learn six interactive, experiential hostage negotiation techniques to help you learn to listen and to shift how your mind, your body, and your emotions live within you. You will challenge their presence with core exercises using guided imagery, breath work, body engagement, and eye movement. Take each exercise with you wherever you go, and you will feel empowered and in sync.
Session 1 – The Curious Listener, The Rainstorm and The Cave
Session 2 – The Question to the Hostage Taker- Empathy in the Body
Session 3 – Breaking the Bond: Create a new bond of trust
Session 4 – Engage with the Cognitive Interrupters: The S.T.O.P. Method
Session 5 – Mind and Body Dancing in Sync: Identify and name your warning label
Our Facilitator
Edy Nathan is a thought leader and Certified Sex Therapist Specializing in Trauma and Grief. She works with businesses, universities, and long-term care homes to help people understand how these areas filter through their lives and affect everything from creativity to productivity. Working together, she offers creative ways to deal with grief, trauma, and sexuality.
“The cave awaits and it’s dark, it hurts, it’s a place no one chooses. I have a love – hate relationship with the cave. That dark place is a place that moves you from stuck to metamorphosis. Knowing it is one thing, believing it will change, and open up new worlds is hard to imagine. This is what the work of sexual grief, loss and trauma is all about. I offer a new way to think about tangling with what feels like a potent adversary. Yes, New York University for a masters, and Fordham University for another master’s and University of Michigan for a sex therapist certification, make the conversations around what we’d rather not talk about, grounded, and powerfully life changing. It’s time. To Dare to Live.”
To learn more about Edy, click the links below:
https://twitter.com/edynathan1 https://www.linkedin.com/in/edy-nathan/ https://www.instagram.com/edynathan/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXZqna_h82vXcfkVsK07owA https://www.facebook.com/EdyNathanPsychotherapy
Week 1
Our Facilitator Stephanie Kimble has been practicing yoga for nearly 20 years. In 2013 she completed her first 200-hour teacher training and, throughout the last decade, has completed 12 supplemental yoga and healing-based trainings, including her 500-hour teacher training. Stephanie has taught more than 5,000 hours of yoga, breath, and meditation techniques to individuals across all developmental stages. She believes in the healing power of yoga and teaches from a person-centered perspective.