Therapists need times of nourishment, time to release and restore.
Written by Katrina Curry
The work we do in the world is heart work, that requires presence, attunement, flexibility, and creativity. Our practice becomes sustainable when we are caring well for our own beings.
Body Songs: Movement for Therapists is a pocket of nourishment for therapists amid the intense times we are living in. This program centers the health of practitioners. When we are burnt out, or are saturated with the pain of the world, our own life feels constricted or flattened and it’s very difficult to offer nourishment for our clients.
Come gather at a shared creative well spring, with the nuance of somatic inquiry and the supple beauty of movement, woven with reflection through art and creative writing. It is true that dance, art, and storytelling are ancient methods for personal and collective health. They are ancestral wisdom, offering beauty from the hum of the murmuring deep, and they are tactile methods for tending our aliveness with precision and spaciousness.
When we or our clients are impacted by trauma, our bodies respond in patterns of fixed tension in relation to gravity: bracing, contracting, pulling back, puffing up, or collapsing. The defense cascade of sympathetic activation – Freeze, flight, fight, fawn – and dorsal vagal states – such as death feigning – are wise responses in the moment of danger and life threat. When trauma is not metabolized, however, these patterns of embodied response become more fixed and can persist long after the moment of danger has passed.
Movement is a wise antidote. Movement is suppleness, flexibility. In movement, we can play our range from micromovement to fuller expressive movement through the whole kinesphere 360 degrees. Movement helps us reclaim embodiment, confidence, ground, and center. Movement also effectively adjusts our breathing patterns, deepening the exhalation that communicates safety to our nervous system. Movement evokes heart rate variability – shifting us into a ventral vagal state. Movement can invite playfulness, offering a felt sense of joie de vivre that lingers as aliveness afterwards.
Somatic inquiry rooted in mindfulness is a gentle welcome into nuance, helping us sense our inner experience as it is unfolding. This creates a felt sense of inner accompaniment: we feel with our own life force. Rather than being pulled into the undertow, somatic inquiry helps create stability amid intensity. This is valuable learning to bring to our own lives and our clinical practice.
Come learn about somatic inquiry and movement as wise practices in psychotherapy, in a program that centers your own health as a therapist. You will learn core principles for somatic movement practice, to support you in offering this approach with your clients and gather a range of wise practices to nourishing your own wellbeing. This collective care workshop will be spacious and focused, gentle and enlivening, welcoming and inclusive, exhilarating and tactile. Grounded in 26 years of learning as a somatic movement psychotherapist, Katrina Curry will hold a container of depth and levity, playfulness and tender quietude, rooted in neuroscience, wisdom lineages, and liberation praxis. We will be held by the beauty of Cortes Island, by the waters and the forest, and by the kindness of Hollyhock retreat center. Come soak in the beauty and restore your own creative life force.
Join Katrina Curry this Spring, May 27 – 31, 2026 for Body Songs: Movement for Therapists
This five day program offers enlivening care for therapists, sharing movement—somatic and creative expression—nourishment and experiential learning methods to support your well-being and sustenance for ongoing practice. We will practice techniques that will help you expand and strengthen your embodied practice as a therapist, while resting into creative community.
