How We Heal

Trauma can affect many layers of human experience at once. Biologically, it can alter responses to safety, threat, sensation, and stress. Psychologically, it can influence memory, identity, emotion, and our sense of continuity. Relationally, it can shape trust, intimacy, boundaries, and belonging. For some, it can also affect meaning, hope, purpose, faith, and connection.

Arielle and Scott will explore how these dimensions interact, including how patterns can be carried through families and relationships and how trauma in one area can influence another. Through teaching and experiential practice, participants will begin exploring how these dimensions show up in their own lives, bodies, relationships, and work with others.

Trauma rarely belongs to a single moment or a single layer of our lives.

Peter Levine will explore how nervous system responses, relational experiences, generational patterns, and other dimensions of human experience can become intertwined over time.

He will then work directly with an audience participant, offering a rare opportunity to witness his approach to trauma healing as it unfolds.

Participants will observe how Peter follows the person's experience, what he notices in the body, how he responds to protective patterns, and how the process allows new possibilities to emerge.

Following the demonstration, Peter will discuss what happened, what informed his choices, and the principles guiding his work.

The session will close with discussion and Q&A.

Recovery can begin through many different doors.

This experiential session brings together somatic work, parts work, somatic EMDR, movement, breath, imagery, mindfulness, creativity, relationship, ritual, and meaning-making.

Faculty will explore how resourcing and relationship create the conditions for deeper work, how we can approach difficult experiences without overwhelming the system, and how patterns held in one area of experience can begin to shift through work in another.

Participants will experience practices that support greater awareness, flexibility, and connection while exploring the relationship between biology, psychology, embodiment, and meaning.

How do we rebuild meaning after experiences that have changed us?

This conversation explores dimensions of healing that do not always fit neatly inside a clinical framework: creativity, ritual, consciousness, spirituality, culture, community, and belonging.

Across cultures, these have long been part of how human beings have lived through suffering and change.

This gathering brings those traditions into dialogue with what we now understand about trauma, the body, psychology, and recovery.

Together, Peter, Arielle, and Scott will explore the many ways human beings have sought healing—not as a replacement for trauma recovery, but as part of the larger human experience of becoming whole.

Resilience is more than how much stress we can withstand. It grows through our ability to find support, recover after activation, stay connected to ourselves and other people during difficulty, and move through challenging experiences without losing access to choice.

Arielle and Scott will explore the embodied foundations that make this possible, including resourcing, co-regulation, grounding, boundaries, breath, the window of tolerance, and the ability to move between difficulty and what helps us feel supported and present. Through experiential practice, we'll explore resilience as something we can strengthen across the body, our relationships, and the way we meet our lives.

Peter will explore one of the central ideas of his life's work: that resilience is an innate biological capacity that can remain available to us even after overwhelming experiences.

Through teaching and a trauma healing demonstration with an audience participant, you'll witness how protective responses can shift, how the nervous system can regain flexibility, and how someone can begin to recover a sense of choice, connection, and aliveness. The session will close with discussion and Q&A.

Recovery can eventually open questions that survival left little room to ask: What matters to me now? What do I want my life to stand for? What parts of myself are ready to come back? In this extended final session, Arielle and Scott will explore how healing can move into repatterning, meaning-making, creativity, values, relationships, purpose, and contribution.

Through teaching, demonstrations, and experiential practice, we'll work with the possibility of loosening patterns and identities organized around what happened, reconnecting with strengths and desires that may have gone quiet, and discovering what we want to carry forward into our relationships, communities, and lives.