2 to 8 of June 2025Module Two:
From Trauma to Personal Power
Key Focus Points:
Discover who you in your wholeness.
Learn healing ways of relating.
Befriend, trust and come alive with your instincts.
Integrate the different parts of you.
Rebuild a secure sense of self.
Uncover and transform old unconscious drives and patterns that have been running your life and affecting your present day relationships, emotions and behavior.
Learn how to regulate your triggered nervous system.
Awaken your capacity to love beyond fear and shame.
Experience relating free from fear, lies and conflict.
Experience an integrated and grounded sense of wholeness.
Learn that your shadows and personal problems do not need to be fixed, but are the food for genuine connection.
Feel powerful when you are seen as you actually are.
Experience more self-love and self-acceptance.
Come to terms with apparent contradictions in yourself: the destroyer and the creator, the victim and perpetrator.
A Holistic Picture
In Module One, we built a strong container of safety and community. We learned to speak up, to listen, to trust, and to bond. In the second Module, we use those shared skills and safe space to heal our deeper sexual, social and cultural and religious traumas – and to restore our personal power accompanied by others.
In order to create the love we truly desire, we must first undo the grip of unconscious fear. What comes up when we feel triggered, threatened, exposed beyond our comfort zone, or vulnerable beyond our ability to hold ourselves?
We slam on the brakes, and the love play can end in the middle of a kiss.
Our nervous systems ignite, activate and propel us involuntarily – often frighteningly – into instinctual, animal, primal responses, designed to defend us and keep us safe from possible threat. Perhaps, under the surface, we have the impulse to fight, flee, freeze, cry out or collapse, or some combination of these. All of these defences have something in common. While they may keep us alive, our sense of self intact, and protect our position, they also take us out of connection with others. When ruled by these instinctual responses in our daily lives, we find ourselves alone, isolated, disconnected and afraid.
These automatic reactions cannot be unlocked alone. They were formed in relation with other people: parents, siblings, playmates, girlfriends, boyfriends, partners, lovers, trusted adults, authority figures, perhaps even enemies or abusers.
And to unlock these traumas, large and small, we must reveal them to other human beings, and heal them in new patterns of relating.
Trauma is stored, and healed, in the body. It’s not enough to talk about it, or do emotional processes around it. To really get to the core of it, we must become vulnerable again, in a place beyond words, and move into pure embodied experience. This can only happen in a safe container we can trust. Sometimes that safe container is with a lover or a trusted therapist. But the greatest transformation, the deepest healing, seems to happen mirrored in a group when more often than not our personal trauma is our collective trauma.
In Module Two, everyone has the opportunity to work with their developmental/ attachment/ sexual traumas. These are invited to be brought into the community to be witnessed and met in love, transparent vulnerability, and rugged challenge to the illusions they maintain. We learn to connect, safely embody, and relate with these defensive instincts. We develop our capacity to possess and harness the power of these instincts, our primordial reactive power. Fear is turned to power: the power to love as we desire, to create the sacred life we wish to live.
In this process each individual is invited to claim their power back. With the group committed to each person’s healing and liberation, now there is the opportunity to learn to stand on the foundation of one’s own inner strength. The bonds of the group remain but move into the background as each individual develops their capacity to stand alone, connected to one’s own sense of safety, clear boundaries, authentic yes and no, and the strength of our essence. From here, a whole new experience of community can emerge from the woven tapestry of each individual’s offered wholeness, power and passion.
We are held within community, and we stand strong on our own two feet. This is the interdependent balance that real loves requires: I am my own solid person, and I can also merge into joyful oneness with you.
Additional Practices:
Trauma Healing Practices (Drawing from our experience of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Embodied Intimacy, David Cates, TRE, Body Work, Yin based approach to De-armoring, Contact Improvisation
Affect Regulation Practices (Drawing from our experience of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy)
Part work (Drawing from our experience of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Theatre Improvisation, Humaniversity Therapy)
Erotic and Sexual Healing Practices (Drawing from our experience of David Cates, Body Work, Yin based approach to Dearmoring, Rebirthing, Tantra,)
Community Building Practices (Drawing from our experience of Sharing Circle, Zegg Forum, Humaniversity Social Meditation, Authentic Relating, Cuddle and Play Structures)
Theoretical Context:
Drawing from our experience of Interpersonal Neurobiology, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Trauma Theory, Affect Regulation, Structural Dissociation Theory, Tamera Healing Biotope Philosophy, Sacred Sexuality