Transformational Psychotherapeutics Trainings

"We are Shapeshifters and Storytellers:

The brave return to learning and re-imagining life."

Ready to deepen your therapeutic practice?

These trainings are designed for practitioners who wish to deepen their understanding and skill in working with trauma through somatic practices. Located in the heart of Calgary, our in-person sessions offer a space for growth, learning, and connection. Embark on this educational adventure and discover how to facilitate healing with a creative and experimental approach.

Module 1

Dates: April 25-29, 2025
40 hours, in-person in Calgary
Investment: $1395 - $1695 sliding scale

Module 2

Dates: October 24 - 28, 2025
40 hours, in-person in Calgary
Investment: $1395 - $1695 sliding scale

Entrance into these modules requires the following prerequisites:

You are currently practicing and/or actively training in therapeutic modalities that involve supporting clients in navigating and resolving mental-emotional health stresses. Ideally, you have already cultivated some capacity to navigate this territory with others in conscious, compassionate, curious conversation and are open to others supporting you in similar ways.

It could be said that everyone is fundamentally a shapeshifter

We are quite literally built to learn from and adapt to our experiences and gradually evolve an ever more elegant and sophisticated capacity to interact with and navigate our environment and relationships. Repetitive disruptions within our human development and acute experiences of trauma impair and interrupt these natural, fluid learning processes. They convince us, even at the level of our cellular body, that we need to be a particular way – to take on particular shapes - to be safe enough, to be cared for, to be loved, or to belong. We reactively hold to these particular ways of being and lose track of our innate capacity for change. Why would we want to learn something new when our past learning experiences were painful?

For many people, the threshold marking the return to learning and changing appears when their resistance to change becomes more distressing or uncomfortable within a changing environment than the return to learning and changing. Learning is a vibrant living process that eventually grows around and through the fragile rigidity of old, decaying, untenable forms. Learning is life challenging, breaking through and growing beyond domestication and colonization. Learning is a return to untamed potential. Learning, truly curious, vulnerable, brave learning is the return of the wild.

Module 1 Overview:

In our first module, we will explore what it is to adopt a curious, experimental mindset and approach with your clientele in order to re-engage creative and transformative learning. We will learn to constructively explore thought and belief, affect, behaviour, gesture, posture, sensation, relational interaction, boundaries and more to carefully work with and foster resolution in a broad array of client presentations. We will also look at numerous methods for effective integration of the transformation that occurs within our client sessions.

Module 2 Overview:

In the second module, we take a deeper look at one of the main impairments to learning; trauma. Trauma is a huge catchword in recent years and its rippling and pervasive personal, familial, and broader systemic effects are being increasingly recognized and studied. Everyone has been impacted by some degree and type of trauma. For some, it can be utterly devastating. We will turn toward a mindful style of facilitation that strategically utilizes a somatic, relational therapeutic approach to safely renegotiate our clients’ painful past learning experiences and bravely imagine and embody new possibilities. We will continue cultivating the capacity to support our clients in reimagining the stories of their lives as they learn and heal.

*Module 1 Required as a prerequisite or Level 4 from the Nūma Somatics training and/or extensive training in Hakomi.

Within this set of trainings, you will:

• learn an elegant therapeutic process model to expand your effectiveness and scope of practice

• learn how to incorporate an increasing variety of somatic psychotherapeutic theories, principles, and practices into your facilitation

• study more about the nervous system's role in shock trauma and more complex versions of PTSD

• increase your capacity to recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma, improving the trauma sensitivity of your facilitation

• develop the capacity to recognize the signs and symptoms of defensive mobilization and immobilization responses

• deepen your ability to track a client's nervous system and respond accordingly to support them in staying within their "window of tolerance"

• continue fostering respectful, learning-based therapeutic relationships with clientele as you enhance your capacity to listen, communicate, and experiment effectively for therapeutic purposes

• learn methods to safely, gently, and slowly bring awareness to attachment disruptions, embodied trauma, and shame and support its renegotiation

• expand your understanding of resourcing and the tools and techniques that can be shared with clients to support their self-regulation

• learn the difference between emergency methods to stabilize someone experiencing a trauma response versus supporting the processing of trauma while a client is within their "window of tolerance"

• cultivate the therapeutic usage of mindfulness and a wide variety of other tools and practices such as:

• contact statements and acknowledgements

• affirmations, inquiries, and probes

• simple movement practices, positional changes, and takeovers

• alternative breathing practices and vocal toning

• proximity and boundaries explorations

• enhance your capacity to mindfully navigate your clients' processing of trauma via sensitive, experimental conversation integrated with your existing practices

• explore the nuances of transformation and develop more ways to support the integration of new possibilities, insights, somatic shifts, and behaviours

• cultivate the capacity to be directive without compromising sensitive listening or the spirit of experimentation

• develop a wide variety of tools and practices

• personally receive these practices so that you can then utilize them from a place of experience with clients.

Storytelling of old wasn’t only for amusement or passing time…

it was a living communication that embodied the wisdom and mystery of the ages. The songs and myths echoing on from human to human carried the aches and pains, sorrows and heartbreaks, courage and curiosity, and pleasures and deep loves of this blood and bone human-spirited experience. Many of us have disconnected from being cocreators within these living stories but nonetheless, we are still storytellers. We tell ourselves stories every day. We live and die by these stories. The question is what stories are we telling ourselves, what consequences do they have on our lives, and how can we creatively re-imagine them when appropriate?

It takes a combination of cultivated safety and bravery to regenerate our capacity for shape-shifting and co-creative storytelling.

After we have expanded our capacities to tend to our client's needs and foster a deepening of safety within our therapeutic practice we can then learn how to be more evocative for particular types of experiences when it may serve the client's needs. By doing so with an experimental mindset, our investigations with clients can sensitively and safely be accelerated.