Understanding the somatics (of the body, in relation with the body) of both trauma and resilience has the potential to transform a sexual trauma survivors’ healing journey. Reframing our body’s acute and ongoing responses to trauma as rooted within instinctual survival patterning can create an empowering influence in how survivors relate to themselves and embody their life. Importantly, expanding access to physio-education about how the body handles and heals overwhelming experiences can create a societal shift in how we view and respond to individual, systemic, and historical forms of trauma that continuously shape our lives.

Drawing from her ongoing healing journey, medical and legal advocacy work, trauma-informed yoga teaching, and her Somatic Experiencing studies, Molly will share how trauma responses understood as resilience responses remind us that healing is an ongoing, organic process of emergence – a practice of yielding to and embracing the language of our individual and collective bodies as a foundation for restoring our individual and collective humanity. Some of the primary concepts of Somatic Experiencing, including orientation, titration, pendulation, and co-regulation will be explored as we consider their applications across a variety of healing systems and within our daily lives.

This two part workshop combines lecture, discussion, and invitational experiential practices to honor and valorize the intelligence informing our bodies’ impulses, expressions, boundaries and capacities. While Molly will be holding the periphery of the workshop experience with guided lecture and practices, this series aims to be collaborative in nature as we come together, as well as attentive to highlighting both the nuanced and collective wisdom each participant may explicitly or implicitly share within the space.