Certified in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Certificant of MD Psychotherapy Association of Canada
Creating Safety Groups
“If you want to improve the world, start by making people feel safer”
Dr. Stephen Porges
Trauma Informed -
Neuroscience-Informed -
Grounded in Compassion
In order to face our challenges and heal our wounds, we must first feel safe. This goes much deeper than just the thought that we are safe. We need to feel safe within our own skin. We need to deeply experience safety at the level of our nervous system, of our bodies.
Creating Safety groups emerged from our vision of offering readily accessible tools to assist those who suffer without fully understanding why. We wanted to foster education and a sense of feeling safer in the world. We understood that this is a complex process. We also knew that even small increments of awareness and abilities to self-regulate could stimulate dramatic effects on well-being and the capacity to heal.
Our introductory groups focus on three domains that determine our felt sense of safety:
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Breath: Our breath lies at the interface of conscious and unconscious, explicit and implicit, mind and body. It remains the most powerful domain for utilising our conscious will to effect change in our unconscious physiology. We teach and practice a wide array of techniques for employing breathwork to regulate ourselves. Some techniques are designed more for long-term resilience of our nervous systems, while other work best during moments of triggering and overwhelm.
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Grounding: We teach and practice various body-based skills for coming out of hyperarousal or dissociation. These help us to come back into our bodies and into our ability to cognitively process our experience. Over time, confidence in our ability to ground allows for a more enduring sense of safety.
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Boundaries: The foundations of our sense of personal space lies in our embodied, somatic sense of boundaries. Without that sense, we are either too closed off or too open to what life places in our path. Without establishing a felt, somatic sense of our boundary, it is difficult to break patterns of endangering ourselves, enmeshing or distancing in relationships, or feeling insecure and lost in the world. Through various mindful, body-based exercises, we develop our felt sense of having an adaptive and flexible boundary.
Irina and Harry come from a strong background in yoga and meditation.
They have experienced firsthand the benefits of long-term sustained practice.
They have adapted tools from traditional yoga, the new wave of trauma-informed yoga therapy and from somatic psychotherapies in order to provide short-term interventions that impact the brain, body and nervous system and that help cultivate a sense of safety and calm.
