Pre- and Perinatal Education:
The Opportunity of a Lifetime!
Get beyond the stories you’ve been told about your birth,
and learn to work with the truth that’s held in your body.
Pre- and Perinatal (PPN) research, and it’s attendant healing practices, is a broad field that touches on many aspects of the life of babies and families before, during, and after birth. Taken as a whole the work now being done in this arena can and has directly improved the lives of many people.
My offering to this field is a training melding together the study of a somatically grounded view of the psycho-emotional patterns arising during birth and prenatal life, with a well-titrated and safely contained personal healing process.
We have all gone through an embodiment journey from being discarnate to incarnate, from being a single-celled entity to becoming a whole, living human being. During our embodiment journey seminal patterns are established at key moments in utero and during birth, fundamentally shaping our being. These patterns are the templates for all of our relationships and literally shape our experience of life. 
They manifest in our body as nodal points of inertia and pain, as emotional suffering, in our psyche as neurotic relationships with ourselves and with others, and in our spirit as the illusion of separation from Source.
This training is an immersive experience: learning comes through your practice as a facilitator of the healing process with your peers, and through the exploration of your own story of embodiment with the support of your peers, and the training staff. To truly engage with birth as a healing arts practitioner, whether your modality is somatic or psychological, requires going beyond learning about birth from a purely cognitive perspective, and investigating the details of your own experience.
Course Offerings
Introduction Class: The First Step
A three-day seminar that presents a balance of experiential explorations and didactic learning. The core feature of this class is a choreographed group process in which each participant is supporting in exploring their complete birth is a container of safety and trust.
Called “the birth tunnel game,” we come together to create a symbolic tunnel for each participant, once to research the experience of birth, and once to work on healing and re-patterning a difficult aspects of one’s experience. The final day focuses on small group work that extends the research and re-patterning, while introducing the primary experiential context utilized in the next levels of the training.
Anyone interested in expanding their capacity to offering healing to others, while also attending to their own growth and healing, will find great value in this seminar. This class is the required prerequisite for the Foundation training.
The Foundation Training: The Four Stages of Birth
Until recently the story of birth has been told from the perspective of the obstetrician, who has supplanted the Midwife as the keeper of the gateway of new life. PPN Education differs from this worldview in that we explore birth from the perspective of the being entering the world: our self, our clients, and really, everyone we encounter. We have all been born, and we each have a unique story that has fundamentally shaped our being human.
The PPN Foundation Training will provide each participant an exploration of human birth and its effects on body, emotions, and mind. During embryonic and fetal gestation, and through the entire birth process, the prenate has a sense of ‘self’ in relationship with the environments of the womb and mom’s life. Various prenatal, birth, and neonatal events can be experienced as challenging and traumatic, creating patterns of confusion that become templates for how we live and experience our lives. The PPN process looks closely at the biology of prenatal life and birth in a well-paced, defined curriculum illuminating the key biological moments and events that shape our life.
The Foundation training is designed as a series of four sequential modules to explore the experiences and outcomes of each stage of the birth process. Our classes are based on the groundbreaking work of William Emerson, Ph.D., Franklyn Sills, Karlton Terry, and others, correlating a baby’s physical transition through the birth canal with somatic and psychological imprinting a baby undergoes during birth. Emerson and Terry created a sophisticated set of psycho-somatic explorations for learning the details of the birth process through an immersive experience.
In the PPE Foundation learning occurs experientially, allowing the clarity of application to come through your personal healing process. Utilizing simple practices, you will have the opportunity to understand what happened to you during your prenatal life and birth and the impact to your life. The psycho-somatic explorations at the core of the experiential dimension of the training are carefully choreographed re-enactments of the four somatic stages of birth. By engaging in these re-enactments, what you discover through your bodily experience promotes healing in body, mind, emotion, and spirit through the clearing of unresolved birth shock.
A key feature of this training is the limited size of the training group, combined with an experienced teaching team. Creating a depth of safety, containment, and personalized interaction, this course container is designed to optimize your learning and personal journey. After this Foundation training, practitioners have been able to successfully integrate this healing process into their existing somatic healing arts and psychotherapy practices. The embodied learning process of the training allows you to bring the capacity for healing birth trauma to all of your clients as a natural extension of what you already offer as a practitioner.
Our Pre and Perinatal Foundation training offers this trifold focus:
- Becoming intimate with the four stages of birth and their variants, encompassing the somatic, emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. Each birth stage is explored in an individual course module, providing ample time for discovery, reflection, and integration.
- Learning how to facilitate an individual through a therapeutic re-enactment of their birth and facilitate the resolution of held shock still present from birth.
- Healing your own self through ample opportunities to recognize, process, and resolve your own birth shock. Working through your whole birth in a well-contained and step-by-step process provides a titrated experience that avoids the bypassing of crucial healing details.
Pre and Perinatal Education: Foundation Series Training Modules
Stage One: Meeting Obstacles. The first stage includes pre-labor considerations, along with the process of descending into the pelvic inlet. This stage ends when contact with mom’s pelvic bones prevents continued forward motion. The key theme of this stage involves the meeting of obstacles, somatically and psychologically, and the ways in which we become stuck in life.
Stage Two: Finding Inner Direction. This stage begins when we recognize the need to shift the dynamic of our own birth by turning our head to find a successful pathway through the birth canal. By initiating a change in direction we go from being a passive to an active agent in our birth, a significant event that plays out daily in our life after we are born. The manner in which we find direction and establish our own path is the focus of this module.
Stage Three: The Final Push. Finding our direction, and then acting upon the guidance of our inner wisdom to move out into the world sets the tone for this stage. Once we have our heading, we have the opportunity to follow our own initiative through to completion. Exploring the continuity of this experience, and the first encounters we have with the outside world, are the focal points of this module.
Stage Four: Successful Completions. Entering a new world, a new realm of existence as a biological being, and the manner in which we are greeted at birth all offer a deep imprint for our journey through life. This module focuses on the meta-theme of completion, with specific attention given to the challenges and opportunities of how we were and are received in the world.
A Special Note: Not everyone enters the world via a head-first birth. We also teach the dynamics of breach and caesarian section births, tailoring specific processes to support participants who were born in a variety of ways.
Top Photo: The young woman in the photo at the top of the page has just completed a special healing and re-patterning process for her caesarian birth. She is being held by her mom who was also a participant in the training, and supported by a classmate. Subsequent to this process the young woman has experienced numerous positive changes within herself and in her life. The relationship between mom and daughter has also transformed.
Schedule of Upcoming Trainings
Foundation Training
Begins 2025
Dates: TBD