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winter healing circle

An intimate container for growth & healing through Somatic Experiencing and nervous system capacity building.

Five months together through the dark season and into spring 🕯

Let's Go!

This is a season for softening, for shedding old layers,

and for returning home to yourself.

winter is a sacred season and a time to look deep within

There is a quiet kind of magic that happens when we slow down and

listen to the wisdom of our bodies.

 

For those craving more spaciousness in their life, nervous system literacy, and an ability to listen to and trust the deep wisdom of their body.

Let’s spend some time together this winter. 

If you’re curious about this work, get comfortable, grab your favorite beverage, and cozy up as you read on. ☕️

This page is here to help you feel into if this is what you've been waiting for. 

something really cool happens when we come together to explore our nervous systems 

We realize that we aren’t alone in our experiences. Maybe we’re not as weird as we thought we were – or that our weirdness can be welcome here. 

Our body’s experiences start to make sense. 

We find ourselves more able to trust ourselves to ride our activation waves. 

And lean on each other when we need coregulation support. 

The Winter Healing Circle is a sweet and nurturing place for deep exploration of our patterns, our longings, and our possibilities. 

We can’t do it alone. And we were never meant to. 

We need to grow a coregulation community of trusted beloveds with nervous system skills that can walk with us through our activated moments. As we move toward secure attachment, our nervous systems experience more safety in being seen by others in our messiness and our expansiveness. 

We unshame our nervous system responses as we learn to make sense of them and see how others navigate them too. And we learn what kind of support our system needs to feel safe enough to try something different. 

Managing an overactive nervous system – and trying to do it alone – is exhausting. 

This is the self-awareness and nervous system tending that we need to show up fully in our lives, live out our values, and still have energy for a hike after work or a spontaneous snow angel in the yard – and this is the work we will begin together in the Winter Healing Circle.

step into the circle

 

 

 

 

Clarisa

I'm not alone. I'm capable.

Some things about myself that I've viewed in a negative light are really just a perfectly understandable animal-body reaction to my life experiences. And, I have the ability to manage, shift, and support those reactions. 

I might not be able to list off each "tool" we learned, but through our practices they are ingrained enough to support me in my day to day life. 

The transparency and honesty that our group had from the very first call is something I will always appreciate and value. I think it allowed us to all feel seen and heard, and for me at least, it made me realize that even people who appear to "have it all together" - they're just people, too! 

My life has not changed outwardly in some giant, dramatic way, but I feel a peace and love toward myself that I wouldn't have allowed myself to even desire before. 

Nicole 

What transformations await through this sacred nervous system work?

 

There are a lot of different versions of success that could come from this work. Many of them can be summed up in two words: capacity building. 

  • having the capacity to make the kind of changes that you really want to make in your life. 
  • having the ability to feel fully present for your goals while also holding space for those around you without feeling like you're sacrificing one for the other
  • deep trust in yourself to make/take bigger risks without it feeling too threatening for your nervous system
  • emotional responses that feel proportional to the stressor and within your capacity to ride out
  • an ability to show up for yourself in stressful situations that will help reduce the risk of trauma or PTSD – a great example of this is my encounter with anaphylaxis in the backcountry last summer, but it would translate well for any high-stress situation, from being an emergency responder arriving at the scene of an accident or a parent supporting their child's emotional development

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Winter Healing Circle is a supportive space

for those who are:

  • working on building an unconditionally loving relationship with their body so their self-worth is no longer tied to looks or abilities
  • aware of childhood / nervous system patterns that are holding them back but haven’t yet been able to shift them
  • going through a transition time and wanting to move through it with less angst and more ease
  • experiencing an identity shift and struggling with letting go and accepting this season of life
  • Interested in bringing a somatic / nervous system / inner child lens to their healing path

Qualities that would indicate you are a good candidate for this container:

🕯️ You want to learn how to listen to & trust your body and its signals instead of overriding and ignoring them. 

🕯️ You’ve been disappointed by your reactions to stress and easily shift into overwhelm when stressful instances arise. 

🕯️ Your coping strategies aren’t working as well as they used to —or they aren’t working at all. You’d like to lighten the load on your nervous system so you don’t have to constantly rely on exercise, food, drink, stay busy, or scroll to ‘take the edge off.’

🕯️ You’ve noticed that your nervous system has a high ‘set point’ and you’re interested in learning how to lower that point to help enable more tolerance for experiencing life and its challenges with less overwhelm and fewer triggers. 

🕯️ You wonder if you might be in a bit of a functional freeze… sometimes you feel like you are on autopilot, not fully present to live and enjoy your one wild and precious life. 

🕯️ You might have noticed your nervous system capacity has shrunk lately. Maybe you aren’t able to enjoy your outdoor activities in the same way, or you’re feeling close to burnout & overwhelm at work or home. 

🕯️ You’ve tried all the things (therapy, cold plunges, yoga, nutrition changes, etc.) and something still feels off. It’s common for people to run a gauntlet of treatment modalities before coming to understand nervous system dysregulation as the root of much of our discomfort

To sum it up, if you are tired of the constant work of managing an overly-activated nervous system and ready to have a more settled and capable experience of life, the Winter Healing Circle might be a great fit for you. 

Winter is the season for looking inside, doing the deep work, releasing old patterns, and getting free so we can thrive in this season of life.

If you’re at this threshold and feeling the pull toward looking at all of this through the lens of the nervous system, parts work, and somatics, you’re in the right place. 

This kind of transformation is easier when it’s well-supported, and that’s what this container is designed to do.

If the Mindset Modules in Ski Babes & Summer Strong, promo materials for Soft Strength, or the email mini-course From Crisis To Calm have been useful to you and you want to take it to the next level, the Winter Healing Circle is for you!

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this container, we’ll have 5 months together to deepen into healing.

What follows is our planned monthly curriculum. I also want you to know that this work moves at the pace of the body and the nervous system. We will prioritize following the group’s organic development over following a rigid syllabus – exactly how this ends up looking will be specific to the group’s evolution.

  •  Getting to know each other and ourselves from a nervous system lens. 

  • Identifying goals and intentions for our time together

  • Exploring nervous system capacity for giving and receiving support

  • Getting to know the feelings of enoughness and completion

  • Getting to know our parts (Internal Family Systems) and our nervous system (Somatic Experiencing)
  • Building somatic skills in the body: orientation, pendulation, titration, tracking, integration
  • Resourcing ourselves so we can experience change safely without reactivating patterns
  • We’ll share a winter solstice ceremony in our December group session
  • Tending the inner ecosystem so we can handle the hard times with more ease, live with more coherence, and free up more energy & lifeforce.
    • Getting to know our internal parts & inner child + learning how to support them
    • Work with internal conflicts, shame, grief of losses and previous seasons of life
    • Identifying our patterns & why they exist
  • Working skillfully with the nervous system
    • Learning the intricacies of your fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses
    • Practice riding the waves of our stress cycles all the way through so we can actually rest, digest, & heal
    • Building our community web & social nervous system
  • Exploring joy, pleasure, play, and rest as integral parts of the healing journey – this helps us engage sustainably and allow it to take as long as it takes. 
  • Building capacity for activation and intensity without override
  • Discharging stress that is stored in the body — as we discharge stored stress, our nervous system's 'set point’ changes

 

We're also deepening into inner child healing and Internal Family Systems work (also known as parts work) in this month

  • We step into the expanded version of ourselves (and help our parts and our nervous system feel safe enough to do this)  
  • We move into coherence with our inner parts and embrace our full humanity – including the messy bits.
  • We take our newly expanded capacity out into our families & communities so we can be the change we want to see in the world
  • The work of connecting with our parts and growing our nervous system capacity is ongoing… AND we celebrate the completion of this container and our growth within it

how might your life shift through this deep inner work?

let's see

essential logistics

  • Space is extremely limited– this group won’t exceed 12 people
  • We will have one group this year meeting on Thursdays. 
    • Thursday Group Call dates: all at 11 am - 1 pm AK: Nov 13 & 24, Dec 4 &18, Jan 8 & 22, Feb 5 & 19, Mar 5 & 19 (please note the 11/24 call is on a Monday to avoid meeting on Thanksgiving) 
    • I plan to lead all of the group calls and also have the support of two dear friends and fellow practitioners/students to help hold the space and who will be able to step in on the off chance I need to miss a session.
  • Group calls will be recorded and available for replay, but live attendance is recommended.

Cost: 

  • Tier 1: $3500 total (includes one 1:1 call each month) 
    • can be broken into payment plans
  • Tier 2: $4500 total (includes two 1:1 calls each month)
    • can be broken into payment plans  

 

Sarah Holding a Workout pose

What does the monthly structure look like?

 

Our monthly cycle works like this:

  • Week 1: The Monthly Learning Module is released. Group Coaching Circle (live) to introduce & explore this month’s theme & practices. Monthly guided practice(s) to follow the group call.
  • Week 2: 1:1 support calls to personalize the work for your process
  • Week 3: Group Coaching Circle to deepen our practices and strengthen our community’s social nervous system
  • Week 4: Integration week(s) or 1:1 support calls for those with upgraded support

Our group container also includes: 

  • Monthly Learning Module for building Somatic Experiencing and Internal Family Systems skills. Our live call sessions will focus on practice and the embodiment of the work, so these modules will provide the foundation and theory behind what we’re doing.
  • Monthly guided practice(s) for integration and embodiment of the work between our sessions. You can expect a variety of guided embodiment and movement practices – I’ll be recording these as we go, so let me know what kind of support you want here!  
  • Weekly journal & reflection prompts to support your processing after sessions and keep this work top of mind during our off-weeks. 
  • Spaciousness + support through the holiday season – we’ll have two weeks of Integration time through the Christmas & New Year holidays.
I'm ready for the next steps

I'm a why person.

I am also a relationship person. Sarah's approach is a beautiful blend of creating trauma-informed shared relationship space, providing education, facts and knowledge about nervous system function and then following it up with practical tools and exercises that put the ideas into practice. For me, her style is a great balance of speaking the language of my body and nervous system while keeping my critical/knowledge seeking/ problem solver parts satisfied. 

Jodie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the personal journey I've been on that led to this container

 

I’ve been an athlete my whole life. My being (and business!) revolved around being strong, working hard, and getting outside. 

But when my husband and I started our fertility journey 5 years ago, things changed big time…For the first time in my life, I wasn’t able to ‘train’ my body to do what I wanted it to do. Fertility isn’t something that you can make happen, no matter how hard you work at it. 

Cue my identity crisis. 

I had to slow down athletically, and slowing down exposed a bunch of other vulnerabilities that my previous go-go-go athlete mode had kept hidden. 

My self-worth plummeted… because I had coupled my ‘enoughness’ with my ability to do cool stuff in the mountains

My anxiety and depression returned… because I had been depending on exercise to take the edge off the anxiety and keep the depression at bay.

And my body changed. My current body is in a softer, slower season. (Though, as my nervous system capacity builds it’s been cool to feel how my body’s interest and availability for athletics is returning as well — hooray!) 

The identity crisis has been humbling and hard, but also a catalyst for deep healing.

This process hasn’t been easy. It’s been messy, uncomfortable, and also gorgeous. A slow untangling of nervous system patterns. A melting of body tensions and holding patterns. A slow dance of feeling the uncomfortable feelings, and learning to be with myself through the waves.

This journey and the deep healing it has catalyzed have been absolutely transformative. That’s why I’m so passionate about this offering; I needed a whole different set of tools for this transition, and I can’t wait for you to see what these skills & healing open up for you.

No matter what your transitional season looks like, you don’t have to be alone as you walk through it. Yours might not be a fertility journey, but so many of us are experiencing unexpected transitions, body and ability changes, or other challenges adapting to the next season that life has brought our way.

The magic we’ll explore together will reverberate through the current stage of life and into your future in all the ways. 

As well as going through it personally, I’ve also been training in the skills of teaching and space holding for this deeper work.  A couple of years ago I completed the Somatic Experiencing three-year training — not to be dramatic, but I think I’ve found my calling. 

It’s now time to share this body of work, in an intimate container. 

If you want to read more about me, my official bio, and the lineage of my work, you can do that here. 

you'll also have a chance to work with...

Echo Cunningham

they/them 

Echo has been assisting with the Circle for the last two years and will be back again this year.

More info on Echo is coming soon, you can meet them now in this podcast episode. 

Merreley Donohue 

she/her

Merreley will also be available to assist our group this year! 

I have had a lifelong love for the human body and our connection with spirit and nature. I believe that having a loving and attuned relationship with our bodies and our nervous systems can be deeply healing, and a powerful transformative path of self-discovery. It certainly has been for me!  

My 30+ years in the somatic fields have given me a deep appreciation for how incredibly helpful it is for people to learn how to beneficially affect their nervous systems and attune to their bodies. I weave a unique approach from my background in Somatic ExperiencingŽ, RolfingŽ Structural Integration, Co-regulating Touch, Co-active coaching, developmental trauma (including pre and postnatal trauma), and somatic movement. I am also a birth doula, with a passion for working with pregnant and postpartum women.   

People often work with me because they sense there is something more that they are missing, but that this “more” is not the kind of thing our culture tells us to chase after: status, attention, money, etc. Instead, it’s about deepening into one’s true nature, so that they can live this gorgeous life they have been given in a way that feels honest and fulfilling.  My sessions are co-regulation focused, meaning we work together to create a sense of safety and regulation, we go slow and at your body’s own unique rhythm and discover together what wants to come through.  I work both in person and online. 

frequently asked questions

I live, work, and play on the unceded land of the Dena'ina people. I'm committed to using my life and work to create a world where colonization and oppression are no longer normal or possible. #decolonize #indigenize #unlearning