Trauma and Reconciliation Coming Home to the Body with Breema

Abstract
How do we each relate to that which we experience? What does it mean to reconcile, heal, digest, or integrate, and what is the role of the body in this process? Each of us is the expression of our individual experiences and histories, but also of our cultural and intergenerational legacies. We did not create many of the conditions with which we struggle, but our challenges can bring possibilities for listening in new ways, responding in new ways. This is where somatic psychotherapy can enter. As clinicians, how we engage ourselves as we engage our clients’ traumas, can directly support our client’s ability to transform their relationship with traumatic experiences or conversely, can reinforce the identification which keeps them bound. In this 2 hour workshop, we enter experientially into various dimensions of embodied relationship and explore how they inform this process we call therapy. We will begin with individual and partner Breema exercises that support harmonizing body, mind, and feelings, nonjudgmentally, moving us from fragmentation and concept into experience and presence. Resonating with the holistic approaches of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (2012, 2018), Daniel Siegel (2010), Alan Fogel (2009), Judith Blackstone (2018) and others, Breema acknowledges the implicit wholeness of the body as a microcosmic expression of universal principles of wholeness and unity that exists in the present.

Bio
Angela Porter MFT, CATC, CMT is an addiction treatment specialist, and Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in group practice and work with other therapists. Trained in Gestalt, body-centered and Somatic Therapy at Esalen Institute, body-mind connection is primary in her work. Angela serves as adjunct faculty at both CIIS and JFK at National University’s Graduate Psychology programs, as well as The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley. She teaches and supervises clinical interns in practicum at the Center for Somatic Psychology, and Associate MFTS with Eugene Porter at their non-profit Blackbird Institute, in Oakland. She maintains a private practice as a partner clinician at Greeting Health an Integrative Wellness Clinic also in Oakland. Formerly a program director at the New Bridge Foundation’s residential substance abuse treatment program in Berkeley CA, and a group facilitator at Bayside Marin, Angela incorporated the principles and practice of Breema into her treatment curriculum with great success, working primarily with veterans, formerly incarcerated men and women, and clients with co-occurring mental health issues. A certified Breema Instructor since 1998, Angela travels internationally teaching workshops for therapists, MDs, nurses, midwives, teachers, and other healing professionals.

Carrie Gray, MA, MFT is a somatically-oriented, relational psychotherapist in private practice in North Oakland. As a Breema instructor since 2001, Carrie combines Breema’s “art of being present” with training in Relational Somatic Healing, Hakomi, and EMDR. A former clinician at New Bridge Foundation in Berkeley, Crisis Support Services of Alameda County and the Women’s Therapy Center in Berkeley, she specializes in working with couples as well as individuals, and she teaches self-care workshops to therapists and those in the helping professions. Carrie has degrees from Wesleyan University, California Institute of Integral Studies, and the Wright Institute, and is formerly an adjunct professor at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). She is currently in a PhD program at CIIS in Somatic Psychology.