Course overview:
Would you like to use breath, body, and sound for emotional regulation with your clients?
Are you interested in combining body-based approaches in your therapy work?
Could you embody these approaches yourself too?
Are you interested in a different kind of CPD?
This training in embodiment has been designed for practitioners in mental health and wellbeing, such as counsellors, psychotherapists, and coaches. Many clients and therapists feel as though they are losing touch with their innate selves, in our increasingly digital and disembodied world. Global events such as the Covid pandemic and armed conflict can increase this sense of disconnection – which affects mental health and wellbeing.
This course shows how focused attention to embodiment can bring us back to ourselves, through intentional use of breath, body, and sound. Through learning a toolkit of techniques, practising them in an embodied way, course participants learn new ways of being and how to facilitate their clients or patients in a more embodied practice. The benefits include greater insight about emotion and internal process, gained through body-based awareness.
The course content is trauma-informed, incorporating understanding of brain and body effects of trauma, plus psycho-education on embodiment in trauma.This creates a safe relational space for therapeutic work, in collaboration with the client to empower their recovery. There is also attention to authentic social identity.
The format of the course has been structured for ease of access by Zoom, followed by consolidation of skills through meeting as a group – which makes sense for an embodiment course.
The training begins on Zoom for the 4 dates in June and July 2023. These 4 dates are in 2 blocks of Friday and Saturday: 16 & 17 June, then 7 & 8 July.
The second part of the course is attended in person for a coastal weekend retreat in East Sussex to embody the learning and skills practice. The dates of the retreat are the afternoon of Friday 22 September through to Sunday 24 September 2023. The retreat brings exclusive use by our group of the whole retreat centre house and grounds, including accommodation, breakfast, lunch, dinner, plus unlimited tea, coffee, and fruit. Which means that you can totally focus on the course as an embodied experience, because everything else is looked after for you.
Further information about the retreat venue
Florence House, Seaford, East Sussex
- Give you greater confidence to take a more fully embodied approach to client work.
- Enjoy an enriching retreat, to include embodied experiential skills practice weekend away on the beautiful south coast of England.
- Learn the neuroscience, psycho-educative elements of using movement, breath and sound as a healing practice. Incorporating trauma informed teaching and polyvagal theory.
- How to use breath, sound and movement to help a client regulate their emotional states
- Taking an embodied approach to defences: such as resistance and ‘stuckness’
- Using the body story in therapy practice.
- Toolkit for applying breath, sound and movement in relation to specific mental health diagnosis.
- Working with movement, breath and sound to integrate and transform as part of post-traumatic growth.
- Offer a valuable mix of Zoom teaching and in-person experiential work with retreat-based skills practice.
The 6-day CPD Certificate programme covers the following:
Day 1 – Welcome and Introduction to Embodiment.
- Setting the course ethos and intention
- Consider Breath, Sound and Movement as a developmental model
- Exploring the trauma informed viewpoint to working in an Embodied way.
- We will look at the mechanisms in the body that respond to working in an embodied way.
- We will offer tools and psychoeducation for you to use with your clients.
Day 2 – Breath.
- A deep exploration of the breath from an integrative standpoint
- Discovering its potential to heal and to restore balance to our emotional state.
- Exploring the trauma informed viewpoint to working in an Embodied way.
- Explore a broad range of different breathing techniques from a variety of Western and Eastern disciplines.
- Skills practice - integrating breath work into your therapy practice.
Day 3 – Sound
- A deep exploration of the sounds we make as humans
- How they relate to our ability to self-regulate and to other psycho-spiritual aspects of the body
- Exploring Sounds and integrating breath work
- Skills practice – integrating sound and breath into your therapy practice.
Day 4 – Movement
- A deep exploration of our bodies movements and how they relate to possible insights and discovery of ourselves.
- Exploring movement, sound and breath work together.
- Skills practice – integrating movement into your therapy practice.
Day 5/6 - ‘Retreat Style’ Skills Practice Weekend in outline
- Arrive Friday PM: Welcome / Group check-in / Embodied arrival
- Group Dinner
- Night-time yoga session led by Tamsin (optional)
- Morning cold water swim (optional)
- Group Breakfast
- Outdoor Embodied sessions
- Skills practice using breath, sound and movement in triads
- Bonfire ritual
- Morning cold water swim (optional)
- Group Breakfast
- Embodied practice
- Group ending
Learning is absorbed by attendance and participation on the course. There is no assessment other than attendance and participation. Although a reading list is provided, there is no formal requirement for further reading – although additional reading is suggested to enhance your professional development subsequent to the course.
The award of the CPD Certificate will be issued upon completion of the course, provided a minimum of 5 days attendance has been met and the course fee has been paid in full.
A digital certificate is provided as a matter of routine. Paper certificates despatched by Royal Mail are available upon request. Replacement certificates are available on request.
Tamsin Olivier
Many of us in modern culture become overly focused on the trappings of success at the cost of our happiness and health. In this process we often forget our dreams and our essential nature. Tamsin’s passion is to help people reconnect to this true nature and to let go of layers of conditioning which no longer serve them.
Tamsin’s first career was as a professional actress. She trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama. After 10 years as an actor realising that she was more interested in the intricate psychologies of understanding character and enabling effective teamwork than actual performance, she shifted careers to create The Engineer, which soon became an award-winning early gastro pub in London. Her fervour for providing good organic food, nurturing a creative artistic and community-orientated atmosphere was realised.
Having discovered the life-changing benefits of the therapeutic journey herself, following personal life challenges, including the great gift of becoming a mother, she completed 3 diploma courses: Transpersonal Counselling and Psychotherapy, Supervision, and a Post-graduate Diploma in Spiritual Guidance through Transpersonal Dreamwork, at the Centre for Counselling and Psychotherapy Education.
She has been working for the last 17 years with individuals and groups within the charity sector, the NHS and in her private practice. She also worked with Psyched Global and has for 10 years been a member of staff at CCPE facilitating trainings and supervising students most recently creating 2 trainings for Body Awareness in Psychotherapy, and Healing with Breath & Sound. She works holistically with individuals and groups integrating a range of creative skills including dreams, constellations role-play, body-work, finding your authentic voice, nutrition and meditation.
Tamsin discovered the benefits of yoga in her early 20s. Five years ago she completed a Hatha Yoga Teacher training with Marianne Wells and delights in combining body mind and soul work, for men and women of all ages, to connect to their highest potential.
Other workshops for groups have included ‘Letting go of the story’ and ‘The practice; from fear to love’ as well as Supporting Balance & Authenticity, a yoga and wellbeing workshop for therapists and caregivers.
Robert Rees
Robert Rees Dip (Psych, Trauma) MUKCP – Individual and Couples Psychotherapist, Supervisor, Complex Trauma Therapist, Organisational Consultant and Executive Coach
Robert is a Director of The Grove Practice in London. He is a UKCP accredited psychotherapist, supervisor, qualified executive coach, group facilitator, writer on mental health issues and tutor on The Grove’s trauma and emotional regulation training courses. He works with individuals, couples, groups and organisations. He is a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional and works using many body-based approaches, informed by poly vagal theory and somatic approaches.
Robert brings a wealth of experience in the field of trauma and emotional regulation and works extensively with individuals and groups using a trauma-informed therapeutic approach. He works extensively outdoors with clients and has a keen interest in working with nature as a therapeutic resource.
Weekend 1: 16 & 17 June on Zoom
Weekend 2: 7 & 8 July on Zoom
Weekend 3: 22-24 September (in person at the retreat venue)
£1,975 + VAT = £2,370 payable in full or by instalments. A non-refundable deposit of £300 is payable at the time of booking in order to secure a place on this course. Further payments toward reaching the full fee are due in two stages: £1,000 by 30 April 2023; £1,070 by 30 June 2023. This can be paid by instalments as long as those deadlines are reached. Details will be shown on the invoice.
The course fee includes all training materials and the CPD certificate. Travel costs to/from the venue are not included.
The course fee can also be invoiced fully or partially to an employer or funding organisation. Some reduced-fee places may be awarded depending on student circumstances, subject to availability. Please contact us for details.
Application criteria
Applicants are expected to be qualified and experienced professionals in a mental health or helping profession, who are established in their practice. This will be covered in the application form. All applicants are expected to:
- be qualified and experienced in their field
- be full members of their professional body with a code of ethics and complaint procedure for public protection (such as but not limited to BACP, UKCP, COSRT, BPS, AHPP, NCP, NCS, ACC)
- hold professional liability insurance
- have supervision arrangements in place for their client work as well as access to support for any clinical or organisation practice they undertake during the course
Professional standards
The Grove Practice is accredited by NCIP (National Council for Integrative Psychotherapists) as a CPD training centre. As such, all The Grove’s courses are awarded NCP accreditation for CPD (Continuous Professional Development). This accreditation provides reassurance regarding high standards of teaching and course content. The NCP is one of the longest established membership organisations for this profession, formed in 1971 following the “Foster Report” on the statutory registration of psychotherapists, with a national and international network of therapists.
The Grove’s courses have been successfully recognised as CPD for members of the following membership bodies: BACP, UKCP, COSRT, NCP, NCS, AHPP, BPS, among others. Organisations such as universities, colleges, the NHS, Relate, MIND, and Place2B have also supported their therapists in taking training with The Grove. This is a mark of unofficial validation of our courses as worthy of being listed on the CPD logs for these organisations and therapists.
This course is taught at Level 5 equivalence, for mature professionals who are established in their mode of practice. The title "Level 5" is drawn from the numbered educational levels according to Ofqual's Regulated Qualification Framework operating in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. (Scotland has its own educational levels in place.) This is a post-qualification training which requires theoretical evaluation, self-reflection, and interpretation of how to apply the models in mental health settings such as clinical practice or multi-disciplinary teams in organisations. The Grove is setting its own courses at a training level in line with industry-wide language for setting the academic level of the course.
Our guidance to anyone researching CPD courses is to ask any training provider stating a Level, to provide the Ofqual qualification number (which looks like this 601/8674/4). If the training provider cannot give this information for their course, then the course is unlikely to be allocated an official Level by Ofqual. In our view, any other course provider should state that their course is taught “at a level equivalent to Level x but is not a qualification regulated by Ofqual”. This approach is implemented by The Grove.
