In our hyperconnected yet increasingly disconnected world, we have become strangers to our own embodied experience. Left-brain dominated education systems have trained us to privilege analytical thinking over felt sense, creating generations who live primarily “from the neck up.” This linear orientation, while valuable, becomes problematic when it leads to cognitive bypassing – using intellectual understanding to avoid the raw, uncomfortable truths that live in our bodies.

Our bodies are repositories of not just current sensation, but of accumulated experience. Undischarged trauma becomes stored in our nervous system and tissues, creating patterns of tension, numbness, or hypervigilance that disconnect us from our body’s vibrant intelligence. These protective mechanisms, once necessary for survival, can become prisons that limit our capacity for presence, intimacy, fulfilment, and authentic self-expression.

When we learn to turn toward rather than away from our embodied experience, we discover that the body is not merely a vessel for the mind, but a sophisticated intelligence system in its own right. Our bodily felt sense can guide us toward what truly nourishes us, alert us to subtle energies and dynamics that the thinking mind misses, and help us navigate complex relational and life situations with greater wisdom and authenticity.

Drawing from Buddhist meditation practices that emphasize mindful awareness of bodily sensations, somatic inquiries that help us track and befriend our nervous system responses, trauma resolution approaches that honor the body’s innate healing capacity, and attachment theory that illuminates how early relational patterns live on in our embodied experience, Annette offers a deeply experiential learning environment where participants can:

• Develop greater sensitivity to their body’s subtle communications
• Learn to distinguish between past trauma responses and present-moment reality
• Cultivate practices for discharging stored tension and blockages
• Explore how childhood attachment patterns show up in current embodied experience
• Discover their body’s capacity for pleasure, ease, and vibrant aliveness
• Integrate cognitive understanding with felt sense knowing

This work is not about transcending the body or fixing what’s “wrong,” but about coming home to the full spectrum of our embodied humanity. Through gentle, trauma-informed practices, participants learn to trust their body’s wisdom, allowing their authentic essence and innate wisdom qualities to emerge naturally. In befriending our bodily experience, we reclaim our birthright of living as integrated, whole beings – thinking, feeling, and sensing in harmonious collaboration.