2025 NCGPS Spring Event: From Sensation to Relation

In this two-day in person training, we will explore the inherent, organic, and restorative wisdom of the body as it relates to interpersonal relationships and intrapsychic dynamics. The voice of the body is often subtle, unspoken, and particular to each individual. Our bodies are in constant relationship with their immediate en- vironment, assessing for safety and guiding our every behavior. Prioritizing the body allows for healthy, vali- dating, and satisfying connections. Conversely, ignoring the body can lead to dissociative, intellectual, or partial communication and compromised living. From a Somatic Experiencing frame, our bodies signal sen- sations, affects, images, movements, and felt-senses; all neuroceptive, proprioceptive, and cognitive experi- ences that authenticate process in psychotherapy.

Through didactic and experiential learning, this workshop will advocate for more somatic awareness, tracking, and utilization to support regulated, congruent, grounded, and centered embodied interactions.

After attending this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Practice Somatic Experiencing principles and techniques.

2. Describe the somatic experience of felt security, as an attachment precursor.

3. Experience and articulate moments of physiologi- cal change (proprioception) around states of intra- psychic and interpersonal safety and danger (neuroception).

4. Assess aliveness, connection, disconnection, and collapse in experience somatically.

5. Evaluate and apply Somatic Experiencing concepts such as orienting, pendulation, titration, SIBAM, settling, and various forms of freeze re-sponses.

6. Assess moments of potential unconscious bias related to issues of racial, identity, or cultural diversity applying somatic principles.

Carlos Canales, Psy.D. is a clinical psychologist, certified group psychotherapist (CGP) and somatic experiencing practitioner in private practice in West Des Moines, Iowa. He is a Fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Association (FAGPA). He is trained in attachment, psychodynamic, gestalt, and somatic therapies with over 20 years of group experience.

Host or Publisher Northern California Group Psychotherapy Society