An Online Course for Tapping into Your Innate Ability to Heal
Evolution has provided us with a way to deal with trauma the moment it happens—yet our cultural training overrides our body's natural instinct about what to do. The result is that we often store the energy of trauma in the body leading to unexplained physical problems, emotional issues, and psychological blockages.
Course objectives:
- Assess when trauma may be the cause of anxiety, insomnia, depression, and unexplained pain.
- Apply nature's lessons on returning to equilibrium and balance.
- Describe the concepts of Somatic Experiencing.
- Demonstrate techniques for preventing trauma.
- Utilize exercises to release past trauma from the body.
- Discuss exercises that build resilience for future challenges.
Dr. Peter A. Levine's breakthrough techniques have helped thousands of trauma survivors tap into their innate ability to heal—from combat veterans and auto accident victims, to people suffering from chronic pain, and even infants after a traumatic birth.
With Healing Trauma, this renowned biophysicist, therapist, and teacher shares an empowering online training course for restoring a harmonious balance to your body and mind. Including more than seven hours of expert guidance, plus Dr. Levine's answers to questions submitted by past participants, this comprehensive course will help you understand how you can release unresolved traumas and live more fully.
A Proven Body-Based Approach for Restoring Wholeness
Drawing on his 40 years of research, Dr. Levine gently guides you through each of the essential principles of the four-phase process he calls Somatic Experiencing®. From identifying how and where you are storing unresolved distress, to becoming more aware of your body's physiological responses to danger and practicing specific methods to free yourself from trauma, you'll learn how to address unexplained symptoms at their source—your body—and return to the natural state in which you were meant to live.
"I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening," teaches Levine. With all new video and materials that you can download and keep, Healing Trauma offers a step-by-step program to help you restore the wisdom of your body, feel stronger, and reconnect to your inherent aliveness.
Highlights
- Anxiety, insomnia, depression, and unexplained pain—when trauma may be the cause
- Nature's lessons on returning to equilibrium and balance
- How our bodies hold the key to freedom from past trauma
- Why you don't have to "relive" or even consciously remember an event to heal from it
- Why moving the energy of seemingly minor events can yield big results
- More than a dozen practices and exercises to resolve past traumas and build your resilience for future challenges
Note: Contains materials from Healing Trauma book and CD and Healing Trauma audio learning course.
Session One: Trauma and Its Effects on the Body
Trauma is about loss of connection—to ourselves, our bodies, our families, to others, and to the world around us. As Dr. Levine teaches, this disconnection is often hard to recognize because it doesn't happen all at once but rather over time. In this session, we'll begin by defining trauma, distinguishing it from stress, and then identifying some of the most common causes and symptoms.
Session Highlights:
- Fight, flight, or freeze—common reactions to trauma
- The immobility response and the effects of undischarged energy
- Why do we do that? The phenomenon of reenactment
- Step-by-step instruction for rebuilding your relationship to your body
Session Two: Transforming Trauma
It is not necessary to relive a trauma in order to process it, teaches Dr. Levine. The key lies in renegotiating our old trauma. Renegotiation allows us to create new channels for the stuck energy to complete its movement and course of action. In this session, we'll discuss this process in depth and explore how transforming trauma involves our instincts, emotions, and intellect all working together.
Session Highlights:
- The truth about symptoms and the messages that they hold for our healing process
- The inspirational story of Marius for helping us understand how we all can reestablish harmony in our lives
- How to break free of fixed perceptions through the practice of renegotiation
Session Three: The Concepts of Somatic Experiencing
In this session, Dr. Levine breaks down the key concepts of Somatic Experiencing® in clear and easy-to-follow language. From heightening our state of body awareness to completing the energy discharge cycle, this session will help us understand how each element helps contribute to a successful healing.
Session Highlights:
- The tracking exercise to help you reconnect with your instinctive resources
- How we can allow for a natural ebb and flow in our energy to create a new experience
- The value of natural aggression
- A grounding and centering exercise to help rediscover your strength and resiliency
Session Four: The 12-Phase Healing Trauma Program (Phases One through Six)
Drawing on the foundational knowledge we created in the previous sessions, we'll delve into Dr. Levine's 12-phase Healing Trauma program. The first three phases of our work will help us learn how we can contain sensations and feelings, return to center, and begin to restore our body's boundaries. In the next three phases, we'll explore the language of the inner body by learning how to identify where we are tense or constricted, and how we can normalize that sensation through feeling and movement.
Session Highlights:
- Fluttery, wobbly, dense, or fluid? A list of practical terms to describe your bodily sensations
- A guided practice for finding the "islands" of relative safety, comfort, and ease within your body
- How to identify the sensations, images, thoughts, and emotions that cause your fear or anxiety
- A "pendulation" exercise for learning how to stay with a sensation until it begins to change
Session Five: The 12-Phase Healing Trauma Program (Phases Seven through Twelve)
Memories of traumatic events are stored on an instinctual level in our bodies. When we access those memories through our felt sense or language of inner bodily experiences— as we learned how to do in the first six phases—we can begin to discharge the instinctive survival energy we did not have a chance to use at the time of the traumatic event. In this session, we'll practice finishing that part of the cycle, learn how to continue cultivating this new state of equilibrium, and explore the spiritual aspects of our Healing Trauma. We'll also discuss the sacred nature of sexual trauma.
Session Highlights:
- Strength and resiliency versus collapse and defeat—an exercise for allowing our bodies to be empowered
- An easy-to-follow exercise for helping your nervous system re-adapt to this new state of harmony
- Settling and integrating—a guided practice for sustaining this new sense of presence and calm
- How honesty, compassion, and using the felt sense can help regulate our sexual energies and break the cycle of sexual abuse
- The unexpected opportunity for spiritual awakening through Healing Trauma
Session Six: Helpful Tips and Techniques for Preventing Trauma
It's almost inevitable that we, or someone we love, will suffer an accident or other traumatic experience, teaches Levine. There are many ways to help that person prevent long-term trauma from developing. In this session we'll gain tips and insights for working with someone who has had a traumatic experience, including specific guidance for working with children. We'll close with a discussion on societal trauma and how our individual healing can have global implications.
Session Highlights:
- The three phases of "emotional first aid"
- What a two-year-old toddler named Sammy can teach us about trauma
- How reclaiming our instincts can lead us out of suffering and recapture the simple wonders of life
- The transformative power of Healing Trauma in ourselves, our families, and our world
