A 7-WEEK SEASONALLY PACED ECO-SOMATIC MENTORSHIP AND IMMERSION
THE NATURE OF HEALING & ROOTS OF SAFETY
This Autumn we begin at the R O O T and learn the foundations of eco-somatic healing. Exploring the nature of healing itself as a theme, we will honor the season, with our plant kin as guides, and return our energy into the soil of our bodies. Placing our attention and awareness on our own root system, otherwise know as our nervous system, we will begin to cultivate a felt sense of safety in the body. Deep nervous system repair starts here, in the roots, as we learn the biology of attunement, co-regulation, and how to ground ourselves back into relationship with our inner landscape as well as with the larger ecosystem we are apart of. Throughout these 7 weeks together we will explore the ways in which trauma and conditioning have us pull our roots up and out of the soil of connection and go into protection. This protective wisdom, while life saving at times, engenders a felt sense and belief system of separation. Held by the Autumnal season, we have the opportunity to re-member, to turn towards, to plant ourselves back into the regenerative healing cycle of compost and harvest, expansion and contraction, give and receive. Join me as we nourish our roots, and awaken within our nervous system a trust in our intuitive knowing that is rooted in safety and belonging.
Eco-somatics in essence is a homecoming.
As we slow down, reconnect with our body, place our roots back in the soil and remember our Earthen ways, we give ourselves the permission to heal into wider circles of connection.
- 7 x Weekly live 2 hour calls
Each week I will share teachings on the foundations of eco-somatic healing, the nervous system, co-regulation, seasonal alignment, and more. This wisdom, collected over my years of deep study and devotion to the healing arts is woven from the fields of somatic therapy, herbalism, eco psychology, inner family systems, poly vagal theory, and deep ecology. Along side these teachings will be time for practice. Crafted specifically to build on one another throughout our time together, these embodiment practices will be a time to connect deeply to your body, to welcome in the teachings at the level of the soma, and to take with you in the medicine chest of tools and resources we are building for a lifetime of use.
* all classes are recorded and shared in the E A R T H E N portal. Live attendance is encourage as we will have time for Q&A and 1:1 support during each call.
- THE HEDGE : our seasonal news paper / resource guide
Held within the pages of THE HEDGE you will find a collection of seasonal writings, recipes, practices, interviews and more. Think of this as your resource guide for seasonal inspiration, embodied cyclical living, and connecting more deeply to the teachings we are welcoming into our lives.
- BONUS CLASS: Herbal Medicine for the Nervous System - This will be taught the first week of November and you will all have access to the live class and the recording.
Herbalism and medicine making is one of my most cherished eco-somatic embodiment practices. Connecting with the power and allyship of our plant kin through medicine making is an ancient way to weave ourselves into the rhythms and cycles of nature. In this bonus class we will learn to attune to our bodies needs, becoming the healer of our home, and craft herbal medicines that build capacity and resource for the healing journey ahead. You will leave this class knowing how to align your bodies needs with the allyship of the pants, how to receive your bodies symptoms as wise messengers, and how to begin to build a home apothecary that you can turn to in any occasion.
DATES TO NOTE:
- Registration opens - Monday, September 23rd
- Opening Ceremony: Friday, October 11th from 10am-12pm PST
- Week 2: Friday, October 18th from 10am-12pm PST
- Week 3: Friday, October 25th from 10am-12pm PST
- Week 4: Friday, November 1st from 10am-12pm PST
- Week 5: Friday, November 8th from 10am-12pm PST
- Week 6: Friday, November 15th from 10am-12pm PST
- Week 7: Friday, November 22nd 10am-12pm PST
- BONUS Week - Integration: Friday, December 6th 10am-12pm PST
Registration is open September 23rd. We begin October 11th.
words shared lovingly by those who have worked with Kristen
“Finding Kristen was an answer to a prayer. After becoming a mother and loosing both my parents, I was emerging from an underworld journey that held so much wisdom but I knew I could not fully access it on my own. I was disoriented and far away from myself. Working through it with Kristen, I have felt a safety in opening up about my inner life that I haven’t experienced before whether it’s exploring a dark neglected part of myself or ecstatic mystical experiences. It is hard to describe the fullness of our work together. I feel my feet more firmly rooted on the ground. I feel connected to this planet, to myself, to my loved ones, to my ancestors, to my intuition and my purpose. My capacity for joy is expanding. Kristen herself is like a psychic woodland creature who is not afraid to go to the shadows and climb back out into the sunlight. Through our work, my path is taking me closer to who I have always been.”
Jen G.
“Kristen's somatic therapy sessions have been such a guiding light for me. In each session, I have felt fully held, supported, seen and loved. Being held in this way has taught me how to do it for myself, and has changed how I relate to myself and my life. Each session Kristen has guided me into different parts of me that needed healing. It has been so profound moving through these parts, and towards awakening with more and more awareness and love. Kristen is so incredibly knowledgeable and is a profound healer. Every single session I got something profound from it. I couldn't recommend working with her enough. It has been life changing for me, and if you allow Kristen's guidance and just open up your heart, I have no doubt it will do the same for you too.”
Katie G
“After only three mentorship sessions with Kristen, I feel that I have a handful of wonderful tools to support me as a healing artist, and therefore my clients in our sessions. It’s amazing to be feeling into the differences in sessions when my focus shifts from “being a healer” to “deep presence and attunement”…wow. I feel grateful for her knowledge and wisdom that she shares, for her sharing her personal experiences, and for her guidance in this capacity. ”
Gaby A.
As we gather together in our virtual group container, each 120-minute session will be an exploration on the themes of eco-somatic healing, the medicine of the season, and creating a felt sense of safety in the body.
WEEK ONE - OPENING CEREMONY
In the opening ceremony of our 7 - week journey together we will discuss the very foundations of eco-somatic healing and attune with the theme of healing itself as a force of nature. I will share teachings on aligning our body and healing journey with the regenerative cycles of nature as we dive deeper into the medicine of the Autumnal season. We will touch on the nervous system, the biology of trauma, the wisdom of your body, attunement, co-regulation, and what it means to build capacity and safety. On top of this grand overview of our time together there will also be time to begin our somatic practice. Guided by the season we will slowly begin to bring our energy into our root system and practice somatic grounding. This simple yet foundational practice is the bedrock from which all other practices will grow and be supported by.
WEEK TWO - THE ROOTS OF SAFETY
This week, we will explore the science, anatomy, and lived experience of how our bodies are hardwired for connection. We will acquaint ourselves with the nervous system, through discussion and through practice, as the principal, primal gateway into healing relationships and connecting with our ecology. We will learn how our bodies, adaptively wise, respond to trauma and cultural conditioning. Our practice time together will be centered around the theme of safety and exploring our felt sense. We will also begin to welcome our witness self, the aspect of self that can hold a wider frame of our embodied experience, and begin to attune with our inner landscape.
WEEK THREE - WIDER CIRCLES OF ATTUNEMENT & CO-REGULATION
On an intellectual level we understand that we are all connected, that we live in a world of deep interdependency. This week we explore the medicine of attunemnt, co-regulation and allyship. Nature works through cooperation not domination and its with this in mind we begin to widen our circles of connection to include the land, the plants and the fungi. Welcoming in supportive plant for our nervous systems as we deepen our roots, we will introduce the practice of embodied herbalism into our medicine chest and how to build resource for our healing journey ahead.
WEEK FOUR - OUR ALCHEMICAL NATURE
This week we begin to weave together a web of all that we have gleaned during our time together. Connecting ever more with our bodies we will begin the practice of turning towards, of unconditionally welcoming, of bringing the sunlight of our awareness to the soil of our bodies and noticing what happens if we go with? Our self trust muscle is made stronger by the embodied experience of realizing that we have the tools now to compost, to metabolize and alchemize that which was once undigestible! Here we learn the somatic practice of composting and how to work with charge in the body. I will also be bringing into the conversation the themes of defense mechanism and limiting beliefs as we descend deeper into our subconscious patterning.
WEEK FIVE - GROUNDING INTO GUIDANCE
As we have been learning to turn towards our feelings, to welcome each sensation, composting what no longer serves us - its now time to welcome in the new way, the new stories, and connect to our inner navigational system - aka our intuitive knowing. This week our somatic practice takes us into the idea of what is guiding us? It's my belief that we are always in a living and breathing state of co-creation. That our essential nature is in concert with our larger ecosystems. And as we build capacity to be with our contraction, our sadness or grief, we also want to welcome in the expansion, the joy, our pleasure, and let that be our north star, guiding us into service of the greater medicine we have to share with the Earth.
WEEK SIX - YOUR ESSENTIAL NATURE & THE LINEAGE OF PERMISSION
We all come into this world with a core essence. It's this essence that our defense mechanisms and limiting beliefs build up around in order to protect. This week we honor our essential nature and give our essence the attunement it desires. Through curious and compassionate exploration we connect with the way our essence feels, how it moves us, and how it has been guiding us along our path. This week is one of may favorite weeks as we get to share from our core what our TRUTH is and widen our circles of permission around who we truly are.
WEEK SEVEN - THE INITIATORY PATH OF THE INNER HEALER
Our final week of the autumn session we will discuss the initiatory path we all walk to birth our medicine, our art, our creativity safely through our body and into the world. The medicine the Earth needs now is YOU, awake, in your body, co-creating with the land, weaving your aliveness into every part of you life. Our truest nature is to live the way of reciprocity and in our final session we welcome into the space our inner healer, we honor the part in ourselves who will hold the flame of these teachings, supporting us upon our continued journey of self discovery and healing.
*BONUS WEEK - INTEGRATION
After giving ourselves a pause I will open our healing container for one more bonus session as a time for shares, questions, 1:1 processes and integration. This session there will be no agenda other than to hear from you and support you in anyway I can. We will also discuss the Winter Session and our descent into the fertile darkness.
What does it mean to enroll in a eco-somatic mentorship & immersion
"I am rooted, but I flow." - Virginia Woolf
I wanted to take some time to speak directly to those of you who have found your way to this page. To let you know there is a human being behind this sale page for whom these teachings and this program is a full realization and example of the extraordinary power of this work. I’ve always been someone who wanted to know the “how” of healing. As a child I can recall pondering the very idea of healing and being so curious to know how it happens? As I look back over my timeline, I can see how my journey to this work was laid before me from generations past and the lineage of resilience they passed down, body to body.
This work is an alignment with our deepest remembrance as human beings. These teachings, call them somatic, call them therapeutic, call them herbalism, call them eco-psychology, are all ancient ways of healing woven into the fabric of our being, placed there from our larger body, the Earth. When I say your true nature is regenerative I mean it! We are cyclical, we are seasonal, we are meant to expand, contract, compost and harvest. We were never meant to do this alone, each season is holding us, teaching us, and if we surrender to its wisdom, delivering us into greater connection. In this program we learn the how: how our bodies have evolved to be in an intimate relationship with this Earth, how to go with each season of our lives, how to allow the contraction to deliver us into the expansion, and how to trust our bodies wisdom.
Years ago in a woman’s circle in Toas I shared my deepest truth. Shaking, crying, and raw with honesty I spoke the one sentence I had spent a lifetime (maybe more) hiding from myself.
I can hear the trees. I speak the language of the plants. I can hear the land speaking through my being. And I think we all can.
The shame that lived inside my body from years of denial, from cultural conditioning telling me that who I was at my core was wrong, slowly let up its grip and I was set free, on a journey of remembrance. This is our truest nature. We are channels for earthen ways, earthen wisdom, earthen expression and the way we access that wisdom is in and through the body. If you've felt this calling to awaken your organs of perception, to compost the cultural conditioning and belief systems that have written stories of limitation in your tissue, join me as we remember together our most ancient of ways and reclaim what is our truest nature. Shame can only live in the dark, in what we keep hidden. It's a radical act in todays culture to choose attunement and not look away, to turn towards and nourish. My greatest prayer is to hold your hand as you come home to the wisdom of your body.
If you’ve ever felt a yearning to belong, a suspicion that the way most of us live in modern culture is missing something essential to wellbeing, felt your body was a mystery to you or even something to be feared, have felt that you just know things sometimes, really know things in your bones, but haven’t felt validated in that feeling, or have heard the plants talking to you… literally or metaphorically… this course is for you. If you want to feel more at home in your body and want to heal into healthier relationship with yourself, this course is for you. If you’re curious about somatic healing and want to have a repertoire of practices in your toolkit that you can turn to, to support the spiral path of healing, this course is for you. And if the idea of working with the plants as medicine speaks to an ancestral yearning to be tapped into the healing capacity of the Earth, this course is also for you. If you’re still wondering, or have questions, reach out to me via email. [email protected]
We’ll gather virtually, on Zoom, for weekly live group work sessions, lasting 120 minutes. Roughly we will spend about 1 hour of lecture/discussion and ½ hour of eco-somatic practices. I will also make time for questions, processes, and integration.
Herbalism offers us direct connection to the Earth. We are living in a world that is both covertly and actively keeping us disconnected from our own bodies and the body of the Earth. We’ve lost our instinctive nature to know the language of our bodies and to hear the plants telling us their medicine. Working with plants as medicine can mend the wounds of separation that keep us locked out and remind us of our innate healing capacity. We’ve evolved together, humans and plants. There is a reason that they can heal us. Our bodies know them. And they know us, holding within them the ability to heal us on more than just the physiological level. They can mend our hearts, and nourish our spirits, reminding us that we truly belong here. We are always supported. And that the Earth wants us, now more than ever, to heal so that we may offer our own medicine to the plants in return.
Embodiment is such a big part of the healing journey. Somatic healing allows us to learn the language of our bodies. As we learn turn towards the sensations and "charges" held in the body, and bring the unconscious to light, a world opens to us, our inner landscape becomes the fertile soil where change can be made.
This program was created to be a deep immersion into the embodied experience of the season and the teachings. The best way to learn something is through direct experience and so that is why each class will hold both teachings and practice. I also created this program to be a touchstone for those who are interested in becoming or are already established as a healing art practitioner. The beauty of this program is that these practices are innate, our bodies already know how to do this work, making them great compliments to any healing practitioner's tool box. Something I am deeply passionate about is supporting healing artists. This program is also supportive for those who may be held back by limiting beliefs around what healing is and their ability to awaken the healer within.
Once you register a welcome email that includes a list of recommended herbs will arrive in your inbox. For this Autumn session we will not be providing herbs but that may change for suture seasons.
That’s ok! We will be recording our sessions, and sharing the recordings within 24 hours of the initial class time. All lessons and practices will be included in the recording. There is a potential that individual shares may be offered by students in the cohort, and we may choose to omit those from the recording, depending on content. We aim to create a container that is safe and trauma-informed, and that may cause the recordings to differ slightly from the live class. Know that you will miss nothing in the way of educational content if you cannot join us live.
You will have access to the recordings for 6 months after the course has concluded. But all recordings and content are downloadable.
That is perfectly fine. You need no experience for the work we intend to do together. And even if you have taken part in individual or group somatic practices, this will be an opportunity to greet that work through our own, Earth-centered approach.
No matter where you live, you are a nature being. You still reside in an animal body that is inextricably linked to the ebbs and flows of the ever-cycling Earth. All practices and lessons can be done from the safety of your home, wherever that home may be. Some students may choose to spend time outdoors during our lessons, and that is great too! Wherever you feel comfortable is the perfect place to join us from.
Definitely. We understand that Fall can be a really busy time for folks. Though the days are growing shorter and the temperatures are cooling, the pressures of modern life tend not to take notice. That said, we hope this course will invite you to relate to that busyness with a little more awareness. So even if it is a busy time, if you’ve found yourself here and this work is feeling resonant, we hope you’ll join us. Also, the recordings will be available to you for 6 months after they have taken place. So you can catch up when life is a bit more spacious.
Not explicitly. But we will invite you to explore intentional perspective shifts, eco-somatic practices, and herbal medicine preparations during our time apart, in between sessions, to deepen your learning. Our aim is that this allows you to strengthen the embodiment of the teachings and put the tools we are learning into daily practice, so that they may support you more habitually after the program has concluded.
No. This is a self-healing program. If you are a practitioner, this program will undoubtedly support you in expanding your toolkit for supporting your clients in whatever type of healing work you offer. But you will not receive a certificate. In the future I hope to offer a training program so stayed tuned.
You can! And would love you to.
Absolutely. This is not a healer-training program, though it may be helpful for those currently living in that role. It is a program aimed at supporting your individual healing journey. So regardless of how you spend your days, if you are interested in embodying a deeper felt sense of belonging and want to feel supported by the Earth as you heal into your purpose, join us.
