Upcoming Events 2026

A culturally held gathering on Bundjalung Country — weaving We Al-li Storywork and Somatic Experiencing® through the lens of Two-Eyed Seeing, where Indigenous cultural knowledge meets body-led healing wisdom.

Led by Dr Judy Atkinson and Dr Carlie Atkinson (We Al-li), in collaboration with Dr Peter A. Levine, Maggie Kline, Dr Oscar Serrallach, Ash Dargan,, and Restoring Resilience Co-Founders Anna Skolarikis and Phyllis Traficante.

What This Gathering Offers

Held by Lake Ainsworth — a place of cleansing, reflection, and renewal — participants will experience:

• We Al-li's 6 Stages of Healing — a culturally grounded, relational journey through Creating Culturally Safe Places, Finding and Telling Our Stories, Making Sense of Our Stories, Feeling the Feelings, Moving Through Layers of Loss and Grief (ownership + choices), and Strengthening Cultural and Spiritual Identities
• Somatic Experiencing® teachings — honoring the body's innate wisdom and capacity to restore balance
• Cultural ceremony, yarning circles, and embodied practices by Lake Ainsworth
• GROW Program

Who Should Attend

This gathering is for those who understand that healing from trauma is relational, cultural, and collective. Suited for:

• First Nations community members, Elders, cultural leaders, and knowledge holders
• Mental health clinicians, therapists, counsellors, and social workers
• Somatic Experiencing® practitioners and body-based practitioners
• Health professionals, including Aboriginal health workers and nurses
• Educators, youth workers, and community support practitioners
• People with lived experience seeking healing grounded in culture, land, and community

This is not a clinical training or certification program — it is a held, relational gathering requiring openness, respect for cultural protocols, and readiness for shared learning.

A once-in-a-lifetime gathering. For the first time in Australia, two global leaders in trauma recovery — Dr Peter A. Levine and Dr Judy Atkinson — come together in dialogue.

Join us as we reimagine what is possible for trauma healing in this country — individually, collectively, and systemically.

Colonisation forcibly severed what was once whole — people from land, children from families, families from community, individuals from their spirit, heart, and body.

These ruptures echo across generations. And yet — the pathways home have never been lost. They remain alive in Country, carried by First Nations communities.

Prof Atkinson and Dr Levine illuminate how:

• The body remembers how to release what was too much
• Healing is relational — never meant to be done alone
• Belonging protects us and restores us
• Country and community have always been medicine

This evening honours First Nations leadership in relational, land-based healing — wisdom protected for tens of thousands of years.

Somatic Experiencing® enters this conversation with deep respect, offering language for the nervous system and pathways to complete what trauma left unfinished.

When we heal in connection, we begin to undo what trauma and disconnection created. Together, we can create a future that is more whole than our past.

Who is this for?

• Therapists & mental health professionals
• Educators & school leaders
• Community workers & carers
• Families & allies
• Anyone walking a trauma-informed path

If you support healing in others — or are seeking your own — you belong in this room.

What you will leave with

• Fresh insights from two of the world's most influential trauma teachers
• A grounded experience of what relational healing makes possible
• Practical principles for fostering safety, connection & repair
• A renewed sense of hope and responsibility in this moment of national truth-telling

"A dream which is not understood is like a letter which is not opened" — The Talmud

Without imagination, we are constrained to constantly relive the past. It is only with imagination that we can envision a future different than the past. A future that brings us nourishment and more positive life experiences. Dreams are what allows access to the collective unconscious and to experience the rich border-realm between sleep and wakefulness.

It seems like everybody has a different theory of dreams. In this class we will explore the possibility that dreams exist on their own merit. Carl Jung observed that most of the neurosis today, along with the feeling of isolation, and fragmentation, arises from the disconnection between the "ego-mind" and the unconscious. He also wrote that the most important question that anyone can ask is what myth am I living? Dreams are a royal road to discovering our myths, and living them in our lives.

This workshop is not just about understanding our dreams (which can be revealing) but is primarily about bringing the dreams to life in our wakeful imagination. This way we can be enriched by this source of collective wisdom.

Overview

This first-ever Australian workshop with Dr Peter Levine is designed especially for Somatic Experiencing® students and graduates. It offers a rare opportunity to expand your clinical lens by exploring how imagination, dreams, and symbolic processes can deepen the effectiveness of SE™ work.

By attending, you will:

• Enrich your SE™ practice by learning how dream material and active imagination can reveal implicit patterns, themes, and archetypal forces beneath your clients' somatic experience.
• Strengthen your ability to track meaning-making alongside sensation, helping clients integrate the symbolic and the somatic with greater coherence.
• Explore dreams as an expression of the collective unconscious, broadening your understanding of what moves through your clients beyond personal narrative alone.
• Learn how imagination supports forward movement, allowing clients to shift from repeating old survival patterns into envisioning and embodying new possibilities.
• Understand the role of myth and archetype in healing, and how these deeper currents can provide orientation, purpose, and momentum in trauma resolution.
• Develop skills to bring dream imagery into conscious awareness, inviting clients to engage with these images in ways that support regulation, integration, and transformation.
• Gain clarity on the relationship between the ego-mind and the unconscious, and how restoring connection between the two promotes wholeness and reduces fragmentation.

Dreams – and active imagination – can be sources of guiding transpersonal experiences, knowledge, and wisdom. By working with dreams, we have the possibility to uncover these profound archetypes and to discover how they direct the forward movement of our lives. Once we become aware of these inner-energetic forces, we have the option to change the direction of our lives.

This workshop goes far beyond dream interpretation. It invites you to work with dreams as living experiences—resources that can animate your clinical work, expand your perceptual field, and support clients in accessing their own inner wisdom.

Who Should Attend

Somatic Experiencing® students and graduates

This 4-Day PlayShop cleverly interweaves the basics of Somatic Experiencing® trauma healing with art, movement, attachment principles, and breath work.

What You Will Learn

• The Resilience Roadmap Model for alleviating symptoms and behaviors such as anxiety, depression, ADHD, nightmares, and aggression.
• "The 8 Essentials of Healthy Attachment" to develop a resilient nervous system with activities for ventral vagal and social-emotional development.
• Teaching kids and teens sensory (interoceptive) awareness and tracking skills with art, games, and breathing to increase emotional regulation through charge/discharge cycles, settling, and integration.
• Boundary work with children and teens for empowerment after sexual or physical violation.
• Small group process work with the shock and grief from personal losses such as death, divorce, and abandonment.
• Case material fusing SE™ Principles, Art, and Movement for Individuals, Groups, and Classrooms.

This PlayShop is useful for professionals who wish to integrate the core concepts of SE™ when working with kids, as well as those wishing to deepen their understanding of inner child work with adults. It is a mixture of lecture, videos, experiential activities, and Q&A.