RETURN

Come back to the wisdom of your body, deepen your intuition, and learn to read the language of your unique bodily experience.

We all have a connection with our bodies and the wisdom they hold. We’re born with it! But this connection sometimes gets severed along the way from trauma, the stress of living under oppressive systems, or a break in the chain of inherited knowledge around the benefits of somatic (body-based) practices.

This small group virtual course is designed for people looking to reclaim their connection with their bodies in a way that’s unique to them through somatic awareness.

This course is for you if you:

• Want to begin to reclaim your relationship with your body

• Would like to learn about the nervous system and nervous system responses

• Like the idea of grounding but standard meditation just isn’t cutting it

• Like to learn in a variety of ways

• Are curious about learning to expand your awareness- both internally and externally.

• Are tired of ppl yelling “love your body!” or “yoga is the answer!” or whatever the thing is at you. These suggestions aren’t accessible to everyone.

• Are tired of the spiritual bypassing in embodiment and wellness spaces

• Would like to learn how to hold more than one emotion at a time 

• Are interested in exploration vs a goal 

• Feel like “somatics” as it’s largely presented in online spaces only skims the surface of what’s possible when it comes to relationship with the body

After having run this class for the last three years with four different cohorts, it feels the time has come to run it again in a more robust and intimate way. Teaching Circles are 2 hours long and are psychoeducational and experiential with room for embodied writing and reflecting. In this space, choice and self-consent is encouraged and being able to pace your learning to a rhythm that suits you supports this. Our Course Portal (through Podia) will contain access to resources and class recordings. A 1:1 session with me is also included.

Teaching Circles are held every Friday from 10-12pm pacific. We begin July 12th and end August 30th.

Currently being Re-Worked

For context, embodiment is an intentional practice of rooting into the body to better understand it’s cues. Emotional awareness, another phrase for mindfulness, is a practice of slowing down to tap into your inner world and your emotional and somatic experiences. A practice of embodiment and emotional awareness is, in large part, what we are engaging in when we practice somatic awareness.

A definition I like for “somatics” is “the living body in it’s wholeness”. When we practice somatics, we are paying attention to the cues of our body in relation to the environment it’s in and the context it lives in. This includes our physical body, our emotional body, spiritual body, ancestral body and so on. Which inevitability means we each come at this work from different socio-economic intersections. This work and practice is political and cultural and gives us tools to navigate this web we’re all a part of.

When we practice somatics, we are creating conditions in order to pay deeper attention to this web we’re all connected to and through. We work towards expanding our capacity for the “hard to be with” emotions as well as practicing the cultivation of joy. We do this so we can show up for ourselves in a deeper way. And when we do that, we can show up in our interpersonal relationships more fully. That, in turn, radiates out to the communities we’re a part of. We start to learn what it looks like to hold more nuance, complexity, and compassion.

It’s my belief that this is part of how we slowly start to shift our culture. We start with ourselves and it ripples outward and touches the people we’re in relationship with. This is the web!

Throughout our eight weeks together, I aim to meet you where you are as a facilitator. Everything we cover is an exploration with the understanding that YOU know your body best. Because different things work for different people, each week provides practice exercises with modifications if you need them. You get to decide what works and what doesn’t.

”I really committed to this course and practiced at least one practice every day. I am different now at the end of this. My body has opened up. My spirit sings. My life feels different after this kind of study. Thank you, Stevie, for the thorough introduction to this work.” -C.H. RETURN 2020 Cohort

Course Outline

Week One: Opening + Landing

We’ll begin with a general introduction to “somatics” and it’s history and I’ll share the lineages I practice within and have learned from. We’ll learn a fundamental centering practice and have some time for embodied writing and sharing.

In the class portal, you will find a daily meditation and the writing prompt we’ll have explored in class together.

Week Two: The Body as an Ecosystem

Our bodies come from the land and from the people who came before us. Understanding our place on the land we’re on and where we come from gives us a stable foundation to grow from and to keep coming back to. Here we’ll be looking at how our connection with land shapes our sense of belonging, and we’ll begin to practice a form of deep embodied listening.

Week Three: Finding your Ground + Resourcing

In our second week together, we’ll begin to explore the many ways there are to ground down and find our root. Understanding our resourcing and intentionally using them as an anchor is another fundamental piece of this work.

Our class portal will have a couple of short videos and meditations on Grounding practices for those of you who want to supplement your learning.

Week Four: Nervous System Awareness

During Week Three, we will move into some basic nervous system education. We’ll be exploring nervous system responses (including flight, fight, freeze, and fawn) alongside practicing using our resources. This will be the “headiest” of the weeks. Remember, we don’t have to discard the mind or the intellect- we bridge it with the rest of our experience.

* I blend both the Window of Tolerance theory alongside Polyvagal Theory when I teach this class.

Week Five: Unlocking the Senses

In Week Four, we play with our senses and explore various sense-based exercises (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch). We expand our definition of what connection and pleasure can look like.

We also make room for the knowledge that not all of the senses are available to all of us and that we experience them differently.

The Class Portal will also contain practices on finding our sense of “yes”, “no”, and “maybe”.

Week Six: Emotions + The Body

In Week Five, we dive into emotions. We’ll cover blocks and barriers to our emotions, explore how to name our feelings and our feelings about our feelings.

We explore the sensations of your emotions and learn how to locate them inside of the body.

Included in this week is a Bodymapping Art Practice where you can create your own unique BodyMap on canvas, woodblock, butcher paper- whatever feels resonate for you.

Week Seven: Embodied Boundaries

Boundaries are intrinsic to our physiology and the natural world. Yet we often have a hard time knowing how or when to set boundaries- or we use our sense of “logic” to decide what our boundaries “should” look like. Here we’ll explore how boundaries show up everywhere in life and how we can practice setting and holding boundaries in an embodied way.

Week Eight: Integration

In our last week together we integrate everything we’ve learned. We discuss various integration techniques and explore what aspects of a somatic practice you would like to grow.

Our Group Practice is an Integrative Closing Circle, allowing us to recognize all that we’ve done in this space together.

“RETURN feels like the program we all should have taken as children but were never introduced to. A lot of what we did was stuff we should already know but don’t. This is a foundational course on how to be a human imo.” - R.B. RETURN 2021 Cohort

“Stevie is a lovely teacher and a skilled facilitator! She mixes information, practice, storytelling, and time for reflection in a way that keeps students engaged! I loved my time in RETURN and plan on taking it again one day.” - M.S. RETURN 2022 Cohort

After taking this course, participants will begin to:

• understand their nervous system through a somatic lens

• listen to their body in a way that is nonjudgmental and more compassionate

• be able to hold more than one feeling at a time

• reclaim their connection with their bodies

• integrate their minds and thoughts with their bodies and emotions

• understand how to move through and with big emotions, nervous system responses, stress, and old beliefs about themselves and their bodies

• use a somatic framework that is in service to collective liberation

Pricing + Registration Details

The fee for this course is $800. Participants can choose to pay in full or through a payment plan (you will be automatically charged). This price point includes:

• eight Teaching Circles (2 hours each)

• intimate cohort skill building

• supplemental practices in video and audio form through Course Portal

• a one-on-one session with Stevie

• first access and discounts to my other courses

An early-bird discount will be offered to those on the waitlist before the launch of the summer edition of RETURN 2024.

Registration Process

• First, you’ll send in your application (applications open in June).

• From there you’ll be contacted about a 20 minute feeler call with me for us to feel out if this program is the right fit at this time.

• If accepted into the program, you’ll be sent an acceptance email along with a link to pay your $300 deposit.

• From there, you’re officially in and will be given access to the welcome packet, protocols of practice, and course portal.

* Due to the intimate group nature of this course, all purchases are non-refundable. If you’d like help discerning whether or not this course is for you, be sure to set up your feeler call! I won’t try and sell you- I want participants to feel like this is the right fit for them.

Email me with any questions!

FAQs

Are there pre-requisites to this course? I ask that participants have experience in traditional therapy or other healing modalities before joining. Somatic work goes quite deep so participants will need a baseline of previous depth work as well as an outside support system.

What qualifies you to offer this work? I am a Hakomi trained somatic practitioner and have been in private practice for 5 years. I was a birthworker and sex ed coach prior to that. I have run RETURN a number of times over the years, co-teach a practitioner training for body-based professionals, and am supported by my teachers and mentors. It’s always important to know who you’re learning from! And I offer more details on my About Page if you’d like to read in depth about my lineages of practice.

I’m already a practitioner, can I still take this course? Yes! This program is open to practitioners, therapists, mystics, and bodyworkers as well as newbies to somatic practice. *A caveat: This course is for personal inquiry and practice and does not qualify anyone to teach or offer somatic practice to people.

Can I join if I’m a one-on-one client of yours? My in depth programs are not open to 1:1 clients while we are actively working together. If you’re a previous client, email me and we can set up a time to discuss what transitioning our relationship could look like.

I’m interested in taking this and reKINdle, should I join one before the other? RETURN and reKINdle are my two small group, intimate courses and they absolutely hold hands. RETURN honors how our ancestors inevitably are part of our bodily experience and reKINdle honors the body as a crucial part of ancestral remembrance and lineage healing. My advice is to join whichever calls to you and go from there.