Dynamic Stillness: Listening, Touch, and the Heart of Coherence

Presenter: Clara Cunningham LMT

About the Class: In this class we will focus on growing our capacity to access stillness as a resource that cultivates safety and deepens coherence in touch modalities. As well as deepening a practitioner's therapeutic presence stillness, whenever integrated into sessions, also can support our clients to have more lasting change. It can also give us therapists more subtle sensitivity to create the input to their system that is most effective. Learning to work more consciously with the nervous system allows us to go at a pace that our treatment is more easily integrated and supports our clients to develop greater interoception. Interoception is the ability to sense, interpret, and respond to the body's internal physical and emotional states, both consciously and subconsciously. It includes information about sensations like heart rate, breathing, hunger, fullness, temperature, pain, and emotions. In this world where overstimulation is now the norm, massage is a profound tool for growing interoceptive capacity and this in turn is a way to increase Health.

Clara will be teaching ‘listening’ contacts that help to balance the nervous system and settle the client, as well as give you a deeper felt sense of resonance with your client's system. She will go over 'soft assessment' skills for determining when these contacts may be most beneficial. In this class you can strengthen therapeutic tools and verbal skills for working with client overwhelm and hypotonicity of the nervous system. You will gain more confidence to assess your client's 'window of presence/tolerance' and more effective ways of dialoguing around trauma and resiliency while staying within our scope of practice as Massage Therapists.

Why are you a massage therapist? What is in the heart of your work with people in your practice? Clarifying our own intention and passion for why we do what we do is an essential part of having a fulfilling practice. An element of our time together will include a meditative way of arriving in a deeper place within yourself, through heart coherence practices we can be more fully embodied, and more easily access the clarity of our own knowing to work with a greater sense of purpose and ease.

What to Bring: Massage tables and accessories to be comfy.

About the Presenter: Clara is co-director of The Human Development Center. She is a biodynamic craniosacral therapist in Bellingham, WA. She began studying craniosacral therapy 20 years ago while working as a care provider for children living with disabilities and in hospice.

Growing up in Alaska gave Clara a deep respect for and intimacy with nature and the raw elemental power of this earth that has shaped her views of life, and the continuum of life. She currently works with prenates, newborns, infants, children, families, and individuals of all ages offering somatic process work, attachment and bonding support, birth work/education, infant massage, BCST, and holistic resiliency. She offers experiences to groups and organizations facilitating womb surrounds, Systemic Family Constellations, intergenerational trauma resolution, trauma intervention, ceremony, guided wilderness experiences, and movement therapy for somatic reclaiming. Clara is a biodynamic organic Apiculturist of symbiosis honey farm.

Clara is currently teaching a two-year personal development course in pre and perinatal somatic process work, and also assisting Myrna Martin in PPN trainings around North America. She has worked for many years internationally as a holistic health practitioner that has included a variety of bodywork modalities including myofascial release, somatic experiencing, Chi Nei Tsang, meridian massage, teaching yoga/breath awareness, meditation and shiatsu. Clara has apprenticed for the past 20 years in tai chi, sensory awareness, and pre and perinatal somatic process work with both Judyth Weaver and Myrna Martin. She is a facilitator and educator in Pre and Perinatal Somatic Therapies.

Born with a natural curiosity and focus of living in the spirit, Clara’s path has woven through many heart-centered disciplines which have guided and manifested her course of life studies and learning of what it is to be truly human. She is currently the director of The Human Development Center which she founded in 2016 in Bellingham WA. Clara and her husband lead a simple and are blessed with a thriving practice. Inspired by the process of personal transformation to live clearly in truth, simplicity and love, Clara is devoted to the unfolding of the inner most nature in herself and others.

She operates her business under massage touch therapy license through Washington state and specializes in body centered education.