Because contemporary helping professionals face the complexities of multiple, intertwined traumas, we need to train differently. It’s no longer enough to just learn skills; we need to become a different kind of therapist: one that’s unafraid to sit with suffering in a deep and compassionate way. We need to become trauma change catalysts who can see beyond the stigma of trauma and support growth in our clients and the sacredness of their life journeys. 

We can’t fix past traumas for our clients, but we can learn how to respond to their longing for wholeness with wisdom, skill and heart. We can support their nervous systems to regulate and help them to trust that their trauma story has deep purpose. We can learn how to ground ourselves in kindheartedness and work with our clients’ traumatic experiences as our own triggering arises. This new way of helping transcends the old paradigm of healing and delivers precise and effective tools for self-healing and transformation. ISITTA® provides a clear pathway to becoming this kind of healer.

Guiding clients through trauma processes also requires a fluid and resilient nervous system. The adaptive practitioner commits to healing their own nervous system, and uses their nervous system’s resilience to support clients towards health and new ways of being. In this training, you’ll focus on learning “from the soma up” to deepen both your cognitive and somatic understanding. In other words, you won’t just learn techniques and practices for healing trauma—you’ll learn to embody them.

Being a somatically intelligent practitioner also means understanding the current sociopolitical and societal challenges that we’re collectively facing. 

We need to understand not just the client’s personal trauma, but how it intersects with intergenerational and collective trauma in a society that’s rapidly changing and evolving. We will explore who we need to become to facilitate health and wellbeing in this climate of dramatic change; this requires a new mindset that can help heal deep fractures in communities, societies and in the relational realms.

In ISITTA®, you’ll learn how to work with a variety of different traumas, including relational and developmental trauma, physical trauma, and collective and systemic trauma. To honor and support the neurodiversity of the learners in this training, we will learn through a variety of activities, including experiential guided group practice, somatic practices, movement, small practice groups, short lectures and discussions. Because of the somatic and experiential nature of this training, participants will need to be comfortable learning through movement, breath, safe, boundaried touch and mindful interpersonal exploration.

ISITTA® acknowledges a number of influences, including Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, Continuum Movement, expressive arts, Buddhism and Taoism, body-centered meditation, mindfulness and compassion practices and systems thinking. It’s designed for therapists, healers, social workers, trauma coaches and medical professionals who are willing to be changed in order to become more effective healers. This unique training requires a commitment to learning outside of your comfort zone and beyond your intellectual knowledge, and a willingness to delve into the mysteries of the body’s healing powers.