This 3.5-hour workshop explores what ‘Somatics’ is, with a focus on what it might mean to you as a counsellor (or other listening helper) and to your understanding of yourself, and your clients, as embodied beings.
As well as some practical skills designed to help you feel more at ease in your own body (e.g. when sat for long hours with clients), you’ll get an outline of what Clinical Somatic Education is, and its key insights and practical uses. The workshop stresses the importance of not seeing Somatics as an ‘add-on’ involving ‘the body’, but as an important way of understanding the whole person as embodied.
Exploring the significance of physiological stress responses in humans, and the importance of self-sensing to create change, you’ll learn how sensing and movement combine in Somatics to move individuals away from stress, pain, and trauma, and towards greater suppleness, freedom, and ease.
We’ll consider the relationship of Somatic Education concepts to experiences (& labels) such as ‘anxiety’, ‘depression’, ‘stress’, ‘chronic pain’ and ‘MUS’ (medically unexplained symptoms).
You’ll also discover what Hanna’s concept of the ‘soma’ shares with Carl Rogers’ ideas and Gendlin’s Focusing practice, and the relevance of Peter Levine’s development of Somatic Experiencing®.
Somatics can shed light on why chronic tightness, tension, and pain (including e.g. ongoing back pain, tight shoulders, hip pain and more), MUS, and other ‘conditions’ or ‘syndromes’ confound not only medical and healthcare professionals but also many mental health professionals and therapists. It also helps explain why so many of us still feel ‘stuck’—in emotions, in discomfort, in pain, in trauma—even when we’ve talked through issues, and even when we’ve made significant ‘breakthroughs’ in counselling or psychotherapy.
In practical terms, you’ll:
be invited to experience specific stress response patterns in your own body (or ‘soma’); learn the technique Hanna Somatics uses to ease out of tightness and pain, into more ease;
consider how this can improve your own comfort in your practice and in your life,
and also discuss how Somatics—and a somatic awareness—might inform your work with clients and your understanding of them as embodied, neuromuscular beings.
The workshop will be especially beneficial to anyone who wants to feel more at ease in their own body; for those who work with trauma, stress, anxiety, depression, and MUS; and for anyone wanting to explore more about the embodied, somatic nature of the whole person.
Samantha Holland, PhD (Cultural Studies, 2001) is a Certified Clinical Somatic Educator, Certified Essential Somatics® Movement Teacher, RSME (ISMETA-registered Somatic Movement Educator), BFRP (Bach remedies), with MAs in Philosophy (1994), Communication Studies (1996), & Nature (Philosophy & Anthrozoology) (2013). A university lecturer in the UK & US for many years, she also practised as a barrister, volunteered overseas for several years, then obtained a Foundation course & Certificate in Counselling from Academy SPACE in Sheffield. She continued her training and volunteering at Share Psychotherapy and Cruse, with the goal of practising as an existential psychotherapist. Then her life changed: she resolved almost all her long-term chronic pain in a matter of weeks after discovering Hanna Somatics, and soon thereafter shifted her path to train in Somatic Education, to share this remarkable work with others. Her interest in counselling & psychotherapy endures: her Somatics practice is Polyvagal Theory informed (including regular group supervisions with Deb Dana) and Somatic Experiencing® Informed. As at December 2024, she's just completing the three-year Somatic Experiencing® professional training. In addition to the various requirements to qualify as an SEP, Samantha studied chronic pain and long Covid in-person with Peter Levine for five days in 2024. She works as a Clinical Somatic Educator in the Scottish Highlands (where she also runs a bookshop), online, and sometimes in Sheffield. An active member of the US-based Association for Hanna Somatic Education, she runs an innovative online programme for counsellors, coaches and therapists interested in how Somatic approaches can help them and their clients.
Information Source: The Academy Space | eventbrite

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