Your skeletal system provides a support structure and shapes your movements through space. Inviting your client into a dialogue with their bones can support a greater sense of grounding, certainty, clarity and deactivation as they shift experience from global activation to local awareness. Developing a relationship with our bones and joints helps us differentiate one bone from another and find pathways of connection within our skeletal system. These somatic skills can be applied to a cognitive recognition of connection and differentiation when working with over- or under-coupled traumatic patterning.

Fascia wraps around all structures as one continuous spiralling, multilayered, and multidimensional network of expansive sheaths, enclosing containers and specialised attachments, known as ligaments. Ligaments set boundaries of movement and support communication between the bones. They coordinate and guide muscular responses by directing a clear and specific pathway for efficient movement and alignment of the bones. We will explore how a dialogue with our ligaments and fascia can support greater ease and flow within our body, and in working with undercoupling, reinforce our client’s felt sense of connection and belonging to the web of life.

Organs are collections of tissues that each have their own function. They bring us vitality and carry on our every day internal functions of breathing, nourishment and elimination. Organs can also be local habitats for storing unresolved shock and trauma, often early developmental trauma. We will use touch and movement with attention to our organs, noticing what happens locally and how this affects our global well being. We will tell the story of how embryologically we grew our gut tube, heart, lungs and brain and explore how we can access our instinctual, emotional and mental centres of wisdom and social engagement via a felt sense of our organs.

Your nervous tissue grew in order to manage your body’s energy budget and maintain homeostasis. You developed a sophisticated communication system of sensory information being sent into your central nervous system and motor information being sent to your peripheral nervous system. You form memory and perceive the world in order to predict how you will need to respond to your environment, moving towards safety and away from danger. What is your relationship to movements that are voluntary vs. Involuntary? We will explore our perceptual response cycle in order to shift our pre-sensory motor focus towards recognising greater health and wellbeing. We will explore movement in the context of the Polyvagal theory and how we evolved to create a socially intelligent nervous system. The Nervous System and the Endocrine System (and the Immune System) work together (with all the other systems in the body), to maintain homeostasis by coordinating and communicating with all the cells, tissues and organs in the body. The endocrine and nervous systems both use signalling molecules (hormones, neurotransmitters, peptides, neurohormones, neuropeptides) to communicate with tissues and with each other. We will look at how nerve impulses affect the release of hormones, and how hormones can encourage or inhibit.

Part 1 covers the basics of sensing and perceiving, how you grow your nervous system and how it interacts with other systems in the body. In Part 2 we explore how we can use our knowledge of the nervous system to uncouple and recouple traumatic memories using sensory awareness and building a new perceptual response to stimulus. It is not necessary that you attend Part 1 in order to do
Part 2.

The Endocrine System commands a sort of mystical quality in its ability to respond to stress by creating coordinated global chemical reactions in our whole body. We will gently build our awareness of pockets of hormonal regulation and homeostasis in glandular systems such as your HPA and RAAS systems. As we bring our glands into relationship with one another and the whole body, we can discover their potency for regulation and resilience. We will explore our chemical self at a cellular level and how we relate with the many chemicals that support homeostasis in our body.

Starting with vibration, the basis of all movement, we will explore cellular to whole body movement, noticing how our movement is driven by our senses and perception. How did you learn to organise your head, limbs and torso to respond to physical or social nourishment or danger in your world? We will deepen our capacity to relate to gravity and yield into the support of the earth. For this place of yielding, we will find what happens to our capacity to push, reach and pull. In our relational response cycle. We will explore how this place of yielding affects our ability to push, how our push allows us to reach, and how reaching helps us pull what we need towards us.

Reflexes are the fundamental building blocks of human movement and give us a chance to experience whole body awareness. We will differentiate movement in relation to the vertical, horizontal and sagittal planes and explore the role of reflexes in the readiness for relating to earth an heaven, gathering and reaching, taking hold and letting go, weight bearing, rolling, vertical uprightness, locomotion and equilibrium. We will use specific case examples to discuss how primitive reflexes can show up in our adult clients as a result of certain behaviours that have not been completed or integrated

The three-dimensional grid of your muscles creates balanced support and movement with elastic forces that move your bones through space. Your muscles are the blood-filled and dynamic flesh that encompasses the skeletal system and which act in relationship with one another rather than existing in isolation. Your muscles enable you to express your power, follow your instincts, protect yourself and move towards safety and connection. We will explore different qualities of effort using our muscles that allow us to play or cuddle, fight or flee, digest or collapse and so much more. We will explore the difference between physiological and postural tone and tone in a baby’s early experience with gravity and support.