Why a retreat format?

Therapists, counselor, and teachers - those who serve others - often lose a felt sense of their own bodies while being present to clients. When we do check in with ourselves, we can become a bit overwhelmed with sensations and feelings.

This is totally understandable. I'm learning from my students, however, that if these states of dissociation and/or overwhelm become constant over time, there is a price to pay.

Losing interest in your work, increasingly dissociative thoughts and behaviors, anxiety, lack of movement and exercise, and physical pain are just a few of the costs.

Isolation is another.

And its not your fault. Often the systems within which we work push us past what is healthy for us. They ask too much of us. Our slowly evolved, biologically complex bodies need time to reset, recover, and then reconnect with others - often more time than we can give them.

The retreat format offers ample time for experiential practice, mini-breaks to digest learning, and dialogue among participants as an anti-dote.

You will not be required to learn massive amounts of information faster than your body can process. Your body will have time to catch up with your brain. Through investigating and caring for your own feelings, body sensations and cues, you will build trust in your relational instincts as well.

My work is exploratory and educational, not diagnostic or treatment oriented. It is intended to feed your own curiosity and build your personal capacity to stay with yourself.

That said, quiet learning and somatic exploration, while not a treatment for trauma, can sooth a traumatized or stressed nervous system.

Attending to yourself and including another person in your awareness is actually a natural thing, but it can get trained out of us or overcomplicated. The retreat aims to restore this natural ability.

Benefits of the process, according to my students, are:

• Feeling good in, and about, your body
• Grounded presence
• Emotional, physical, and cognitive resilience
• A resonant, calming voice
• A more expansive awareness of environment and others
• A flowing connection between sensation, emotion, and thoughts

What is cranial nerve sequencing?

It provides somatic adjuncts for therapists and educators who are highly skilled at verbal communication - but have difficulty accessing sensate, embodied support for their own nervous systems while working.

In the retreat, I'll guide you step by step through an embodied experience of all 12 cranial nerves. We learn concrete practices for each one, exploring its sensory or motor function and linking it to mobility within your environment.

You will also learn the basic anatomy and function of each nerve, and recordings with visual support materials will be provided afterwards to help you remember what you've learned so you can share it with clients if appropriate.

You can return to your senses, one sense organ at a time. Discover neglected areas of perception and re-integrate them into your sense of wholeness and peace.

It's actually very difficult for our bodies to think and feel at the same time. Thinking "hard" sometimes results in unconscious motor activity that can be felt as tension.

When your motor system is always active, it drowns out the nuance of sensory experience. When your sensory system feels unsupported by your structure, you can feel easily overwhelmed.

Through exploring each cranial nerve, how it connects to and animates your physical structure, you experience a more springy and resilient relationship between inner and outer worlds.

We don't have to think so hard that we forget our bodies. We don't need to force feelings to come - smell with our neck muscles, hear with our jaw muscles, or see with our frown muscles. We can instead let each nerve do it's own job and learn to let our nervous system orchestrate itself with ease.

Retreats and workshops provide the time your body needs and skilled guidance your brain wants to have this experience!