Additional Advanced Bodywork Classes

The additional Advanced Bodywork Classes offered are divided into those with a personal development focus and those with a technical focus. These unique classes are designed to enhance and expand any practitioner's ability to work with clients. Unless otherwise noted, each elective course is worth 32 continuing education hours and is held in Seattle, Washington.

Classes with a Personal Development Focus

Prerequisite: Students do NOT have to have a background in Cranio-Sacral to take these 3 courses as the material is valuable and applicable for any bodyworker, regardless of the techniques they use.

Why the focus on personal development?

"Therapy does not depend on how deep the client can go, but how deep the practitioner is."
~ Tom Kenyon

"An appreciation of our inner world is crucial for efficient clinical practice. This awareness of our own interior world is critical to the creation of a safe and efficient healing relationship. In this process, we will come directly into relationship with our own human condition and our own suffering. This is a huge understanding. It means truly inquiring into who we are. The ground of this exploration is a commitment to learn about ourselves."
~ Franklyn Sills

For our work as bodyworkers, it is crucial that we explore our own beings and know ourselves. There is pain and suffering with all of us. When we let ourselves experience the depth of this reality, we realize that we are far more than this, and we experience our connection to all people as well as a greater wisdom at work in this world. When we do our own personal work, we enhance our ability to stay present with our client’s pain without feeling compelled to fix them.

Heart-Centered Methods of Healing
Please Note: This is a 2-day class, offering 16 CEUs. Cost: $300

"Before we can experience the beauty outside ourselves, we must see and honor our own beauty." ~ Sandra Ingerman

This class is open to all bodyworkers and healthcare practitioners. It introduces you to an experiential approach to healing and provides very powerful and supportive ways to work with inner wisdom, purpose and sense of direction, rather than focusing on what is wrong or not working. We will draw on various indigenous traditions, including Native American and Tibetan and explore and experience their understanding of health and healing. This workshop offers a wonderful opportunity for you to refine the most important healing medium: YOU. You will be supported in connecting with your inner strength and thus rejuvenated, ready, and excited about your life and work, and you will leave with new tools for helping your clients—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

At the end of the class the student will have experienced an open heart as a foundation for seeing and trusting the many ways the spirits are working miracles. The student will also take home new ways of calling for help and receiving it, for one's personal life and for one's practice with clients.

"Excellent class! So much information, it felt like it could go for another couple of days." ~ S.K., Seattle

"This class impacted me personally because I had huge shifts in my awareness of what to do in this lifetime." ~ S.K., Seattle

"This class felt like a gift to myself." ~ V.A., Seattle

"This class helps me deepen into myself and my work as a therapist." ~ D.S., Seattle

The Healing Power of Self-Nurturing
Please Note: This is a 2-day class, offering 16 CEUs. Cost: $300

"What is necessary, after all, is only this; solitude, vast inner solitude. Walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain." ~ Rainier Maria Rilke

Take time away from your busy life for yourself! Take away self-care tools and exercises - an important component of healing - for you and your clients. We will find deep stillness within, move our bodies to express our feelings, share in community for connection, and spend time in nature; all to nurture body, soul and spirit. This retreat like class will enable you to return to your life and work re-inspired, with strength and joy, deeply rooted in your body, connected with your spirit, and less daunted by the long Northwest Winter.

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." ~ Albert Camus

"This class gave me a sense of freedom and more self acceptance." ~ H.A., Seattle

"This class has impacted me at the core of my being. To have a safe place to be with myself in all aspects, to be able to connect with others and experience our common humanity is very important to me." ~ C.R., Seattle, 2003

What to Do When Emotions Arise: Psychological Concepts 101

This class is designed to help you develop ease with your client's emotions and expand your comfort zone when emotional content arises as a result of the bodywork. Due to lack of training, many bodyworkers are fearful and at a loss when this happens. We will study different psychological concepts and their historical development to gain a framework for understanding the psyche. We will develop skills for dialoguing with our clients and learn to support the flow of information from inside our clients when they are in an altered state of consciousness. We will study the need for integration of this information and learn how to facilitate it. This class will help you overcome any resistance or fears you might experience when clients exhibit strong emotions and enable you to offer your clients a more holistic and complete healing process.

You will acquire:

• The ability to establish your resources for working with client's emotion.
• The ability to establish and make available the resources your client has for working with their emotions.
• The ability to skillfully monitor the client's experience of their emotions.
• An understanding of different schools of psychology and your relationship to them. Your common, everyday knowledge about psychology will be reframed and expanded into a professional understanding.
• Knowledge and skills to work with the relationship between you and your client.
• Skills for assisting your clients in articulating the wisdom of their disease ("Cell talk").

"This is my favorite workshop of all I have taken. This is Ursula's core gift as a teacher and model." ~ D.B., Seattle, 2005

"I have peeled back a layer to reach another level of understanding about the course of my life, my gifts and strength. It has given me more confidence to work with clients at a deeper level." ~ A.D., Seattle, 2005

Classes with a Technical Focus

Prerequisite: Students need to have taken the Introductory workshop or have permission from NHRC.

The Brain and 12 Cranial Nerves

This class will give you a deep appreciation of your sensory awareness and your brain’s responses to it. While gaining solid knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the brain and cranial nerves, you will also develop an appreciation of the complexity and beauty of your own mind. You will learn how to use this knowledge and appreciation effectively with your clients, combining cranial techniques, your intuition, and your intent.

Visceral Listening Techniques

"Do something good to your body, so that your soul becomes thrilled to live in it."
~ Theresa von Avila

"This class gave me new tools and a new area of application; now I can do work that few other practitioners can do."
~ Student, 2004

The viscera have a movement and a rhythm that can be felt with the hands. In this class, we will study the anatomy and physiology as well as the energetic components of the heart, lungs, liver, stomach, spleen, kidneys, bladder, small and large intestines, and the gallbladder. We will devote lots of time to practicing the hands-on techniques, listening to each organ, and creating the space to let the organ move freely and find its own health. You will gain the ability to work effectively with issues related to the organs that sometimes do not respond to other techniques.

Unwinding: The Key in Moving from Trauma to Health (Advanced cranial work)

This is a unique and unusual class that will greatly expand your awareness of the healing potential of cranial work, and therefore improve your professional skills. Cranio-Sacral work is very effective at resolving trauma as it subtly allows the body to work out and release the cellular memories of trauma. In this class we will first learn how to establish resources as a foundation for working with trauma in a safe way. Then we will look at how injuries physiologically turn into trauma, and learn effective ways of releasing them, even years after they occurred. We will work with the fascia to increase the flow of the cranial fluids in order to free up blocked energy. An important focus is given to hyoid and mandible to unlock expression and creativity, which are often stifled through trauma. Then we will support the body in releasing often debilitating cellular memories of trauma in long unwinding sessions. Some of these sessions are held in a swimming pool, working in practitioner dyads. The work in water enhances the natural fluidity of the body found in the cranial tides and is very freeing and revitalizing. Working as practitioner pairs is wonderfully healing for the recipient of the work, and deeply and enduringly informative for both practitioners. As we will learn on many levels in this class, you will also personally heal.

In this class, you will

• Learn to establish a safe container for your clients to do trauma work.
• Develop a theoretical understanding of the body’s response to injury and trauma, and develop skills to help you client resolve old trauma.
• Learn to work with the fascia, a missing piece in most cranial programs.
• Learn advanced cranial techniques for working with the throat soul, mandible and hyoid to help your clients unlock expression and creativity.
• Experience wonderful, long unwinding sessions in the safety of a warm swimming pool to inform you about the extraordinary beauty of fluid movement, of the cranial tides. This will expand your experience of unwinding and therefore help you with your clients.
• Increase your confidence in your perception of the cranial tides as a result of working in practitioner dyads.
• Heal some of your own traumas.

Limited to 12 people per class.

"I am continually in awe at how you bring wisdom to each one of us, Ursula." ~ J.P., Seattle, 2005

"So much more awareness of the potential of unwinding." ~ D.A., Seattle, 2005

"For years I tried to understand trauma resolution: this time I got it." ~ W.W., Seattle 2004

Class Details

• Tuition—$545, unless otherwise noted. Note exceptions: Because "Unwinding" is partially taught in a pool, tuition is $595. Two-day classes are $300
• Reviewers—Two spaces are reserved in each class for people who have previously taken the class but want to review at $300 tuition!
• CEUs—32 Continuing Education Units. All classes are NCBTMB approved.
• Dates & Locations—See the Class Schedule for a list of upcoming classes.

Cancellation Policy

Your $100 deposit can be transferred to another class within 12 months if cancellation occurs less than 1 month but more than 2 weeks before the first day of class, thereafter the deposit is non-refundable and non-transferable.

Registration

Registering for classes is easy. Simply print and fill out this registration form (278 KB pdf). (Check the Class Schedule to check for upcoming class dates.) Then mail the registration form with your deposit to:

Natural Health Resources Center
12252 2nd Avenue NW
Seattle, WA 98177

You may also call the NHRC at (206) 783-3922 to register over the phone.

NHRC accepts both checks and credit cards.

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