Join the gsPN

Quarterly gsPN Virtual Gatherings (on Zoom, recordings available) are a space for peer support, resource sharing, practice, and learning from organizers and senior practitioners! The content topics are guided by your interests and needs.

gsPN Retreat: An In-Person Gathering

October 9-11, Bay Area, CA

More information TBA

Quarterly Virtual Gatherings:

Feb 21

May 22

Aug 28

Complete your gsPN Inquiry Form by:November 1, 2019

Monthly Somatic Supervision (on Zoom, recordings available) are led by senior practitioners, supervision is a place to bring your client questions, and continue your growth and development in somatic methodology. We do a deep dive on one client per session. 

Political Education sessions (in person, or via Zoom) are in tandem with gs Teacher Training; includes readings, videos, and other resources, as well as support to organize study groups.

Support on your path via

• • Assessments/Evaluations from a senior supervisor through the Support & Accountability Team (SAT)  
  • One-on-one support/coaching as needed from the gs Program Team

The opportunity to be listed as a somatic practitioner on  the gs website. This is for gsPN members who see clients, are in gs supervision, and who have been assessed by the Support and Accountability Team as a New Practitioner, Practitioner, or Senior Practitioner. 

Client matchmaking means gs will refer clients to you, including folks from our Strategic Priority areas, Movement Partnerships (MP), and other social and environmental justice movement leaders.

Other resources like Practice Client Curricula including 12-session trauma healing, 10-session for organizers/movement leaders, and healing groups, methodology handouts, and client agreement and evaluation templates.

Somatic Supervision It is an opportunity to deepen your skills in leading gs somatics methodology as well as learn from senior gs practitioners. 

Monthly Zoom Calls are for: 

• Members of the gs Practitioners Network (gsPN), including any practitioners/bodyworkers who see clients one-on-one or lead healing groups.
• gs teachers and teachers-in-training. 
• People who lead somatic practices inside of a gs Movement Partnerships. 

The gsPN is not a substitute for supervision. Any gs practitioner who is actively seeing clients or running healing groups, should be in supervision. Supervision deepens your effectiveness as a practitioner and supports you to be accountable to this role. This supervision requirement can be met by meeting one-on-one or in small groups with an experienced gs practitioner or by joining the gs monthly supervision group (via Zoom) led senior practitioners. 

Supervision is a place to:

• Continue developing competence in gs methodology
• Bring specific client questions
• Do your own reflection and work as a practitioner 
• Receive assessment, support, and guidance from experienced practitioners 

Becoming a competent somatic practitioner requires development and embodiment in a wide range of skills and competencies. What we mean by “competency” is that you know and embody gs somatics as a change theory, process, and practice. Rather than using stand alone practices or “body-based exercises”, you can assess the “shape” of an individual person or a collective “body” and use the wide variety of somatic principles and practices to help transform this to a “new shape,” aligned with their commitments and social justice principles. 

This embodiment comes through –

• deepening political analysis and movement strategy

• learning / training

• practicing with support and supervision

• your own transformational work and daily practices

• getting feedback from folks who embody the work

See more information about the path of development above.

One of the tensions we deal with at gs is that many of the somatic practices can be picked up and passed on before someone is embodied in them. When this happens, the practice can become shallow, or on the flip side, deep pieces might come up that the facilitator/ practitioner may not now know how to hold or work with somatically. We at gs have had to respond to the fall out of many of these experiences. Also, somatic practices outside of the context of “transforming shape” and embodiment, can feel weird and ungrounded for participants/clients. If somatics spreads as merely “body-based exercises,” participants/clients will miss the most sustaining and transformative power this path has to offer. We don’t want somatics to be a movement fad—rather we want it to contribute deep and transformative theory, practices and processes. 

At gs and with our movement partners, we talk a lot about these tensions…how do we grow and keep depth and quality? How do we make somatics as accessible as we can, while we know that repetition and practice is what creates embodiment of both principles and practices? How does somatics contribute to social and environmental justice movements in a meaningful way and not get rigid or bureaucratic along the way? We’d love to be in these real and live tensions with you, while we stay grounded in our commitment to offer somatics that will help build a more effective, powerful and compelling social and environmental justice movement. 

Below are several of the skill-sets that practitioners need to develop as they learn to embody and practice the gs methodology. 

• Deep personal healing and Social action & engagement towards change
• Regenerating safety while living within current conditions and Acknowledging material safety
• Somatic bodywork and opening and Consciously being able to contain/Containment skills
• Healing Shame, Internalized Oppression and Privilege and Centered Accountability, Self-Forgiveness & Dignity

Somatic Skills Building: supporting clients to develop most necessary new skills based on their declaration & social contexts, balancing: Healing and Leading and Taking Action

• Blending with a wide range of shapes and Leading with a wide range of shapes
• Somatic Awareness and Political Consciousness
• Assessing, blending with, and affirming What Is and Imagining, fighting for, and affirming what else is possible 
• Educating the client on the impacts of trauma, oppression and privilege and Learning from the client’s experiences of trauma, oppression and privilege
• Resilience: Identifying, affirming and cultivating client’s resilience and assessing where resilience may have become part of a client’s conditioned tendency
• Conflict as Generative
• Social Context: always acknowledging and being responsive to each of the Site of Shaping and always holding a client’s uniqueness, humanity and aliveness (i.e. Pat Parker poem, To the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend: “The first thing you do is to forget that I’m black. Second, you must never forget that I’m black.”)

Trauma & Healing Analysis

Practitioners must also pay attention to maintain a dynamic balance across skill-sets. For example, a practitioner needs to develop a deep knowledge of personal healing in order to support a client in navigating the terrain of healing the impact of intimate violence, and at the same time, if a practitioner focuses only on developing personal healing skills, they will not develop the competence they need in order to help the client understand their experience of intimate violence in the context of patriarchy, adultism, white supremacy and disability justice.

Ignoring these aspects of shaping and context will leave both practitioner and client at risk of individualizing the client’s healing arc, and likely to miss critical opportunities for each to engage in action for social change, which can re-establish connection and dignity in deeper and more significant ways than are possible solely through individual work. It is important for practitioners to be in ongoing self-reflection, as well as to receive ongoing assessment, in order to balance and counterbalance, or cross-train appropriately to facilitate healing for the sake of liberatory social and environmental change movements. 

Individual and Social Trauma:  politicized healers need to understand the ongoing cycle between trauma and oppression, i.e. that trauma creates and perpetuates oppression and oppression creates and perpetuates trauma. We hold this as distinct from an individualized view of trauma. 

• Resilience: politicized healers need to understand the central role of resilience in working with the impacts of trauma and oppression, as well as how resilience can inform and be leveraged for organizing, campaigns and movements. 
• Grounded in Transformative Justice approach and principles: politicized healers need to be grounded in transformative justice approaches for addressing harm and violence. This means options for safety, transformation, healing and accountability that do not depend on state violence and punishment. Restorative Justice partners with the state, and can still be a better option, at times. Since the capacity for transformative justice (TJ) is low within movement and communities, responses to harm and violence may need to be multifaceted depending on the level of risk of further harm.
  • Practitioners need to be able to deal with the experiences of trauma, violence or harm experienced by clients, their families and communities, and/or the client doing harm/ being violent. These are often situations where others need to be called in for organizing support and accountability. Practitioners should know when to call for this.
  • Politicized healers need to be in ongoing learning and practice with TJ politics and principles: liberation, shifting power, safety, accountability, collective action, cultural relevance/cultural humility, and sustainability. Or refer to someone who is when needed.
  • TJ includes healing and interventions, collective accountability and organizing to change social conditions. 
  • To find out more about Transformative Justice read generationsFIVE’s Transformative Justice document.

In order to be relevant to movement, politicized healers need certain political competencies, and to structure their work in order to serve in relevant ways. These competencies and conversations include: 

1. • Ongoing political education and development on: intersectional analyses of oppression & privilege, political economy, identity politics, etc.
   • How to establish and maintain a healing practice with political values
   • Ways of being meaningfully engaged in movement, as a healer and as an individual
   • Knowing who to strategically serve in your region, and whom to partner with to assess this
   • Understanding movement roles
   • Understanding movement landscape & trends
   • Holding and grappling with the complexity of resources and income as a politicized healer within capitalism

Political Analysis & Movement Engagement

In order to be relevant to movement, politicized healers need certain political competencies, and to structure their work in order to serve in relevant ways. These competencies and conversations include: 

1. • Ongoing political education and development on: intersectional analyses of oppression & privilege, political economy, identity politics, etc.
   • How to establish and maintain a healing practice with political values
   • Ways of being meaningfully engaged in movement, as a healer and as an individual
   • Knowing who to strategically serve in your region, and whom to partner with to assess this
   • Understanding movement roles
   • Understanding movement landscape & trends
   • Holding and grappling with the complexity of resources and income as a politicized healer within capitalism

Group Facilitation (only for healing group leaders)

The purpose of healing groups is to offer participants a space to move through the arc of transformation within a group setting. The aim is embodied healing. A group is a very powerful setting in which to heal because it offers both social and relational reflection, and the possibility to regenerate safety, connection and belonging. For politicized healers to run groups, they need to have training in: 

• Distinctions between holding a group versus one-on-one work
• Group dynamics & agreements
• Offering collective assessments (and individual assessments in a collective)
• Leading demos & doing pieces of work live with an individual or a few individuals within a collective body

Our priority is to serve social and environmental justice movements as transformative “booster power.”  We do this through courses, Movement Partnerships and gs practitioners serving folks one-on-one and through healing groups. 

After many conversations within generative somatics and with other practitioner-training organizations, we have determined that we do not want the gsPN to become an accreditation or licensing body. We assessed that this decision is most aligned with gs commitments, strategy, and priorities.  We want to keep our time and capacity on our primary focus serving movement. Also, we aim to support a wide variety of healers and practitioners to serve movement. Making this a credentialed process, tends to limit who has access and asks us to engage legal processes, that are not values-aligned. While depth and competence are our commitments, being a credentialing body is not.

The gs practitioners will reflect a high quality of standards, depth, and responsibility to movement, which includes processes for supporting and assessing practitioner competence. gs practitioners will embody ethical standards and be in ongoing development.  We are committed to ensuring that gs practitioners are best serving movements and communities. 

Each gs practitioner enters this learning with many, many skills you have already developed. We assume these interact with and add to what you learn with gs. The learning process below is a general guide to what it takes to become competent as a politicized somatic practitioner, doing one-on-one coaching or healing, and/ or running small healing groups. Here are the key elements of becoming a gs practitioner.

Training usually includes:

• Somatics, Trauma and Resilience course (Level 1 and Level 2)
• Embodied Leadership Series (as relevant)
• Receive Somatic Bodywork/Coaching (50 sessions)
• S&T Advanced and/or Somatic Bodywork
• Practice clients (10 x 10 sessions)
• Supervision (one-on-one, small group, or national group)
• Own daily practices → Path. Ongoing self-education, transformation
• Assessment from senior practitioners or gsPN assessment committee as competent. 
• Engaged in a base-building or political organization. (Strongly encouraged)
• Embodiment of core gs theory and practice:  
  • 3 Circles
  • Sites of Shaping/Change (with social context)
  • Arc of Transformation, i.e. developing somatic awareness, commitments, building resilience, regenerating safety, blending, somatic bodywork, holding contradictions, new embodied skills building (boundaries, interdependence, centered surrender, etc.), healing shame and centered accountability, using somatic practices, working with a wide emotional range, 
  • Relational process (projection, transference and countertransference), generating trust and intimacy, and completion.