In our new online course for therapists Staci Haines offers Embodied Transformation Training as a foundational tool to heal trauma in ourselves, support that healing for clients, and provide healing of systemic trauma as a service to the greater community.
Here, we offer a short excerpt from the first module of this online somatics course for therapists which lays the foundation for somatic therapy training, starting with understanding the “soma” of somatic therapy modalities. Learn more about and read on for her definition of “soma”.
Staci shares from generative somatics techniques for trauma healing – Embodied Transformation Training:
I want to invite you into a different interpretation of the body for the length of this program. I’m going to interchange calling it body and soma at the same time. So let me talk about somatics. Soma, somatics, has a Greek root. Soma means the living organism in its wholeness. It is really the best word we have in English to describe mind, body, spirit.
Understanding the Soma in Somatic Therapy Training
I want to break it down a little bit more. So soma is our embodied thinking or our thought processes. It includes that. it includes our emotions and our emotional range. It includes how we relate to or make contact with or separate from others because we are social animals.
Somatic trauma therapy: not a body add-on to therapy
Our soma also includes our actions and our non-actions. So you can think about somatics, really as looking at our embodied life. It isn´t a body add-on to psychotherapy. Rather, it’s really a different paradigm. It is understanding how we transform and how we transform in a sustainable way.
So, when I say soma, I mean the whole shebang. One way I’d like to invite you to think about the body or the soma for the duration of the course is that this is 3 billion years of evolutionary wisdom. That’s what’s living in us. That’s what we are.
Generative Somatics Training: Self and Soma Are One
Our spiritual experiences, our healing experiences, our struggles and our traumas, all of that is happening through the body. Any of us trained in in the West have learned a pretty deep separation between mind and body. Like the body is the object that we feed, or try to keep healthy, or dress in a certain way or look a certain way, and that carries the more important mind around. We can really thank Descartes for that in Western philosophy.
I’m inviting us to know the self and the soma are one, are one. That’s how we’ll be orienting to the soma or the body during the online program.
FREE Live Webinar with Staci Haines
Understanding Individual and Collective Transformation
In this training, We will explore:
Automatic reactions for safety, belonging, and dignity become embodied behaviors.
Holistic trauma healing integrates social influences and embodied experiences.
Access longings, prioritize what matters, and center these in healing.
Somatic practices heal individual and collective traumas through body awareness.
Personal and social transformation are interconnected, mutually reinforcing change.
