Renowned trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has spent over three decades working with survivors. And doing research on effective treatments. Join him in this transformational conference, and leave with a new understanding of traumatic stress. Learn how trauma can literally rearrange the brain’s wiring—specifically areas dedicated to pleasure, engagement, control, and trust.

This workshop will show how trauma affects how mind and brain develop, and how trauma affects self-awareness and self-regulation. We will focus on the fundamental difference between trauma de-sensitization vs. integration and growth, and look at the difference between disrupted attachment and traumatic stress.

We will do experiential exercises to explore the role of interpersonal rhythms and attunement in establishing a sense of self and community.  We will discuss and demonstrate affect regulation techniques, examine ways to deal with fragmented self-experience, and teach the benefits of yoga, EMDR, meditation, neurofeedback, psychedelics, music and theater. 

Trauma changes development of mind, brain and self. Its treatment requires a spectrum of interventions: finding words to describe and communicate what is going on, learning to regulate one’s emotions, learning to trust other human beings with shameful and horrific details of one’s life, befriending our physical sensations, processing traumatic memories, and learning to be fully alive in the present.

Body awareness is a major component of how we process bodily sensations and mental memories and, thus, how we deal with, and heal from, traumatic experiences. As therapists, our own body awareness is an important barometer to track the states of both patient and therapist. In this workshop we will demonstrate the cultivation of an embodied orientation: We cannot teach or guide someone else in attuned self-awareness if we are not able to get into that state ourselves.

Trauma and disruptions of secure attachment affect the development of mind, brain and self. We will examine a spectrum of interventions: finding words to describe and communicate what is going on, learning to regulate one’s emotions, learning to trust other human beings with shameful and horrific details of one’s life, processing traumatic memories, reorganizing the brain to focus and filter out irrelevant experiences, and learning to be fully alive in the present.

This workshop will discuss and demonstrate specific affect regulation techniques, examine ways to deal with fragmented self-experience, and teach the benefits of yoga, EMDR, meditation, neurofeedback, music and theater.

… is a clinician, researcher and teacher in the area of posttraumatic stress. His work integrates developmental, neurobiological, psychodynamic and interpersonal aspects of the impact of trauma and its treatment.

Bessel van der Kolk MD has spent his career studying how children and adults adapt to traumatic experiences, and has translated emerging findings from neuroscience and attachment research to develop and study a range of potentially effective treatments for traumatic stress in children and adults.

He is founder and Medical Director of the Trauma Center; past President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School. He regularly teaches at universities and hospitals around the world.

His most recent 2014 New York Times Science best seller (with over 3 million copies sold worldwide), The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Treatment of Trauma transforms our understanding of traumatic stress, revealing how it literally rearranges the brain’s wiring—specifically areas dedicated to pleasure, engagement, control, and trust. He shows how these areas can be reactivated through innovative treatments including neurofeedback, somatically based therapies, EMDR, psychodrama, play, yoga, and other therapies.

Licia Sky, BFA, is a Boston based somatic educator, writer, artist, singer-songwriter, and bodyworker who works with traumatized individuals and trains mental health professionals to use mindful meditation in movement, theater exercises, writing and voice as tools for attunement, healing and connection. She is a regular instructor in trauma healing workshops at Kripalu, and Esalen.

In the course of over 25 years of bodywork practice, she developed her methods of vocalizing for embodiment in physical and emotional healing when she began using her voice with her bodywork clients by vocalizing and toning – to help them release the constriction from repressed vocal expression. She found that breathing, toning and vocalizing led to profound beneficial changes of physical and emotional state. She has been teaching workshops on these subjects around the US, UK, Italy, Netherlands, Egypt, Israel, China, and New Zealand.