A Self-Paced Embodied Course on feeling your feelings
Most of us were never taught how to feel our feelings. More likely, we were taught how to think our way out of them, stuff them down, pathologize them, problem-solve them, or simply numb out when difficult feelings arose.
And that might have worked for a while.
Until it really, truly didn’t.
It’s never too late to learn how to how to feel our feelings.
Which is great, because any positive transformation we want to create in our personal and collective lives is absolutely going to require us to feel what’s happening within us and around us.
This is where How to Feel comes in.
I created How to Feel out of a desire to support more adults to build skills in noticing, identifying, embodying and actually feeling their feelings.
I’ve taught this online four times to over 200 students, and am now happy to make it available as a self-paced offering for you to work through on your own timeline.
May How to Feel (pre-recorded during the Jan - March 2022 round) help you move through your feelings and your life with more kindness, presence and skilfulness.
With you in feeling it all,
Varia
education + practice
This course combines practical teaching and guided audio practices to help you deepen your understanding, build new neural pathways and expand your embodied capacity to move through emotion. We will use the principles behind somatics, Gestalt psychotherapy and anti-oppression to flex new muscles, learn to re-inhabit our bodies and create a felt sense of safety even when rolling through intense emotion.
In This Course You Will Learn:
a more complex and nuanced understanding of your feelings, and their relationship to your thinking, embodiment, nervous system and behavioural patterns.
how to identify what you feel and what is happening underneath the feeling using awareness, physical sensation and deep listening.
how to actually feel your feelings by moving them through your body without getting stuck in thinking, avoidance, or harmful coping.
how to notice and re-direct when you find yourself projecting (aka blaming) your discomfort onto something or someone else.
embodied practices to help regulate your nervous system and feel grounded.
How to feel Includes:
6 Pre-recorded Classes
Six 60 - 90 minute live class replays with corresponding guidebooks, originally recorded Jan - March 2022.
8 downloadable Audio Practices
10 - 15 min audio embodiment practices to implement new somatic feeling skills.
2 Pre-Recorded Q&As
Two pre-recorded Q&A answering questions on feelings and embodiment.
COURSE OUTLINE
Class One: fear
Learn about fear from a nervous system perspective, and disover how to re-establish an “in this moment” sense of safety. This week’s embodiment practice is resourcing.
Class Two: Anger
Yes, it’s safe to feel your anger. Learn how to move the hot energy of anger through you in a non-harmful way. This week’s embodiment practice will focus on containment.
Class Three: Grief
Explore what grief is, how to create support for yourself so you can grieve, and how to move in and out of it so it doesn’t swallow you whole. This week’s embodiment practice will focus on softening.
Class Four: Joy
Struggling to access joy or feeling guilty about it when it comes up? “I’m scared to lose it.” Sound familiar? Joy is a very vulnerable thing to feel. Let’s learn to savour it. This week’s embodiment practice will focus on orienting.
Class Five: Shame
Shame is an evolutionary survival mechanism which can wreak havoc in our lives if left unchecked. Learn how to notice and ease feelings of shame. This week’s embodiment practice will focus on pendulation.
Class Six: overwhelm
Everything is happening at once. Learn how to pause in the moment of feeling overwhelmed to find your centre and regain your agency. This week’s embodiment practice will focus on titration.
TUITION AND REGISTRATION
How to Feel tuition is on sliding scale pricing which offers financial accessibility to those who need it and a chance for those with financial stability to share from it. A great big thanks to Alexis J. Cunningfolk for their writing on sliding scale pricing .
Self-Paced Supported Price
$200 USD upfront
*$55 USD X 4 months
The Supported Price is for you if you struggle to meet basic needs and paying for this class would be significant or stressful. BIPOC, queer & trans, working class, disabled, neurodivergent and immigrant folks to the front please.
Self-Paced Standard Price
$350 USD upfront
$95 USD X 4 months
The Standard Price is the actual cost of the course. It’s for you if you have some financial stability and some expendable income. Paying for this class will likely mean prioritizing this above other non-essential spending choices.
Self-Paced Redistribution Price
$500 USD upfront
$130 USD x 4 months
The Redistribution Price is an invitation for those of you with financial security to contribute to the tuition and lives of your peers with less financial privilege. White, cis, able-bodied, settler, university educated folks to the front please.
GENEROSITY AND REDISTRIBUTION
If the Supported Price 4 month payment plan isn’t feasible for you, please be in touch with me at contact@bewith.org to request a longer payment plan or a PWYC (pay what you can) scholarship.
Got privilege that’s lead to financial stability? Here’s a chance to redistribute: contribute to the HTF scholarship fund here!
In celebration of queerness and mental health, 10% of self-paced HTF profits go to Planned Parenthood Toronto - the place where I first learned to feel my own feels.
HTF STUDENT FEEDBACK
ABOUT ME & MY TRAINING:
I’m a big feeler.
Having grown up in Moscow during the fall of the USSR, there wasn’t a lot of space for me to feel my feelings as a child. As a highly sensitive young person, I learned to ignore, control and hide how I felt no matter the cost.
Then came a traumatic immigration, fundamentalist christianity, chronic depression and multiple painful attempts at coming out as queer to conservative family and friends. The cost of not feeling, not being in my body and being there for everyone other than myself became too much to bear.
Cue thousands of dollars and over a decade of therapy later, I learned how to discern what I was actually feeling, developed the skills and capacity to stay with myself and get through to the other side of any emotion. This new capacity set me free and awoke me to the beauty of life, the wisdom of my feelings, and the gift of being embodied. It also helped me to see myself in the context of a complex world shaped by systems that created much of my suffering, including ableism, racism, patriarchy, classism, colonialism and more.
I’ve spent the last thirteen years offering embodied emotional support through one on one and group coaching, teaching, spiritual care, facilitation, storytelling and community building. My work is shaped by a cross-disciplinary approach to healing that combines my background in somatic trauma resolution, Gestalt psychotherapy, co-active coaching, creative arts and spiritual care. My approach is politicized, non-hierarchical, and process (rather than outcome) oriented. Queerness, immigration, class struggle, and lived experience of trauma orient my work towards justice for all and a practice of accessibility as love. My magic is in being with people. So is my joy.
My formal training includes:
Alchemical Alignment: Bodywork for Trauma Resolution and Embodiment of Spirit
Levels 1-4 , 2021 (100 hours)
Brigit Viksnins MAT, SEP, RCST®, BCTMB, LMTCoaches Training Institute
Co-Active Coaching Fundamentals, 2015 (17.75 hours)
ICF Accredited Coach TrainingCertificate in Gestalt Psychotherapy Theory and Methodology
One-Year Traning Program for Professionals, 2012 (170 hours)
Year Two - Introduction to Field Dynamics , 2013(170 hours)
Gestalt Institute of TorontoFoundations in the Psychology of Counselling
As part of a Master’s of Divinity, 2013 (45 hours)
Dr. Marsha Hewitt, Trinity College, University of TorontoStudies towards a Master’s of Divinity
with a focus on Queer Theology, 2011 - 2013
Queen’s University, University of TorontoBachelor of Arts with Honours in Philosophy
York University, 2005 - 2009
Toronto, Ontario
Lineages of Practice:
My deepest gratitude is extended to my own lineage of practice, built first and foremost on the foundation of my own well-being. This foundation was and is made possible by the long-term support and encouragement of my community, as well as the pivotal guides in my own life - Katarina Maatta-Hebdon and Marika Heinrichs. I extend my deepest thanks to my teachers in healing, Brigit Viksnins and the faculty of The Gestalt Institute of Toronto, as well as Tele Darden and Steph Jagger who offer me private practice supervision and mentorship, respectively. My approach is shaped by the public teaching work of adrienne maree brown, Lindsay Mack, Brené Brown, Janina Fisher, Kathy Kain, Janina Fisher and Rob Bell. My deepest bow goes to each of them, as well as to the ancient traditions that shape the lineages my work flows from, including the teachings of the Buddha, Indigenous teachings, Christian mystics, and earth based worship, ritual and magic.
At this point, I feel my life’s calling is to support myself and others to live in right relationship with self, others & the more than human world.
I am a white queer femme, a Russian immigrant, a cat mom and a wife to Tanya Neumeyer. I live in what is colonially known as Toronto in Canada, but has always been and will be Indigenous land. As both a settler and an immigrant in my lifetime, I hold the privilege, complexity and harm by which I get to call this place home seriously. The land I live on is part of the Dish with One Spoon Territory - a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, Europeans and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. I look to this treaty as a guiding principle for how to live on the land, working towards decolonization through solidarity, education and when called for direct action.
MORE STUDENT FEEDBACK:
WHO THIS CLASS IS FOR:
You consider yourself highly sensitive and/or are surrounded by sensitive folks, and want to support yourself and others better.
You’re seeing how your feelings (or lack thereof) are negatively affecting your relationships, health, or intentions and you want to make positive change in this arena.
You’ve done enough personal development, therapy, or coaching to begin to see that growth is a practice, not a destination.
You’re existentially exhausted from the crises we are living through and want to develop more internal stability to ride the waves of emotion that come with being alive right now.
You sense that it’s time to go inwards to look for your answers, experientially not just intellectually.
You’ve started learning about trauma (personal and/or systemic) and feel curious to explore what that might mean for you.