testimonial

Our course, Welcoming Ourselves Home (WOH) is a foundational journey celebrating and honouring the rich and multi layered inner lives of women. 

It is the result of a series of piloted workshops with Baba Yangu Foundation (online), The Children's Wood staff and volunteers and its G20 project for women (in person). Most recently, in 2022, WOH was offered online as part of The Wee Retreat programme of wellbeing classes funded by Foundation Scotland.

WOH is not counselling or therapy but a means through which women come together to learn tools to elevate and refine their communication skills, enhance their wellbeing, relationships, and experience of being a woman. It is a space where women come together as peers to share and meet one another in community.

WOH’s aim is to create a culture of welcoming ourselves first as a basis from which we then welcome others.

Practically, WOH focusses on building and developing emotional literacy skills and knowledge using compassionate processes, the tools of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), journalling, pair / group interactive tasks, mindfulness, movement and body based practices.

Welcoming Ourselves Home creates a space to be brave and curious and enter into conscious relationship with our body, our feelings and thoughts. We do this at our own pace, easing into and facilitating a return to our fuller self with growing awareness of the times we become identified with our emotions and negative beliefs and act them out.

The process of reconnecting with our body, and inner life, means finding ground within, in order to welcome ourselves home. It is an ongoing practice of developing conscious awareness of our body and its felt senses as well as pathways, which help us come back to ourselves in the here and now without the “stickiness”of old past survival stories and defence mechanisms. It is also about developing a relationship with whatever is taking place within as opposed to being overcome and overwhelmed by it. In my experience, doing so is empowering, and strengthens our capacity to navigate the internal ups and downs. 

By doing so, we begin to galvanise more of our vital self, and its capacity to relate compassionately to those parts of us that are less resourced. 

Welcoming Ourselves Home means choosing vulnerability because herein lies the rawness and essence of our authenticity and integrity. 

It means taking responsibility for, stating and expressing our needs, creating new life nurturing stories where for example, relationships are resourcing and a resource as opposed to being a demand and a threat. 

The journey asks us to be able to receive and give from a place of choice and to create the support we need to thrive.

Will you join us?

We are pleased to announce our partnership with SiSu and Recovering Justice in delivering WOH programme and workshops.

To access resources to live the life you choose.

To develop strategies to stay resourced, grounded and embodied using creativity, movement and mindfulness.

To build meaningful communication, which affirms compassion, inclusion, common grounds and mutual understanding to support you to see your self and others from a place of greater humanity.

To stay with the edges of emotions you find challenging and identify core beliefs, which keep you in the place of the victim.

To develop an increasing quality of life and sense of wellbeing within you by stating connected to choice and autonomy.

To create the conditions to enable and support authenticity and vulnerability.

To navigate relationship in all its nuances and complexities with your self and others by staying committed, in integrity and vulnerability.

To grow and build a language to name your internal world, experiences and emotions.

To develop an internal relationship with yourself.

To understand what brings you quality of life and wellness.

To recognise negative core beliefs and habitual disconnecting patterns of defence.

To find ground in the here and now.

To power your embodiment and presence through creativity and movement.

To understand the relationship between your emotional and mental states with food and eating.

To make healthy food and lifestyle choices, and use food as medicine to heal.