Course Timing
This 20 week offering meets for two hours every week on Zoom on Wednesdays at 12:00 pm ET. In between the live sessions noted below, participants will also be assigned Focusing Partners; it is up to each partner pair to schedule an independent meeting time together.
Live Zoom sessions meet on the following dates:
•Session 1: May 21
•Session 2: May 28
•Session 3: June 4
•Session 4:June 11
•Session 5: June 18
•Session 6:June 25
•Session 7: July 2
•Session 8: July 9
•Session 9: July 16
•Session 10: July 23
3 week break
•Session 11: August 13
•Session 12: August 20
•Session 13: August 27
•Session 14: September 3
•Session 15: September 10
•Session 16: September 17
•Session 17: September 24
•Session 18: October 1
•Session 19: October 8
•Session 20: October 15
Course Description
This new Community Practice Groups follows Jan Winhall’s Felt Sense Polyvagal Model presented in her new book, “20 Embodied Practices for Healing Trauma and Addiction.” This is a paradigm-shifting, deeply somatic approach that challenges current pathologizing models of trauma/addiction.
The Community Practice Group will help you:
Manage distressing emotions and physical sensations to preempt trauma/addictive behaviours such as numbing, dissociating, and struggling with bad habits.
Create a well-paced and structured lifestyle.
Engage in healthy, meaningful relationships.
Live a life of integrity where your values align with your behaviours.
Over the course of 20 weeks, a small group of no more than 36 participants will be guided through the 20 embodied practices in live 2-hour sessions by Jan and her FSPM-Certified Facilitators: Soo Strong, Claudia Goetzelmann, Ragna Reiske, Travis Goodman, Elizabeth Moitoza, Robert Ragucci, and Jessica Zormann. Each participant will be paired in a felt sense/focusing partnership. You and your focusing partner will meet in between the live sessions to engage with the practices. After each focusing session you will submit a process recording that describes your experience. You will have the opportunity to connect directly with Jan as she reads and responds to each of your submissions.
By looking at both addiction and trauma through the lens of the nervous system’s survival responses, this offering will present participants with tools to:
Recognize and rewire autonomic states through learning how to regulate your autonomic nervous system.
Practice the 6 Steps of Focusing and experiencing the felt sense of body wisdom.
Create a Four Circle Harm Reduction Practice to create a map for healing your trauma and addictive responses.
Together we will build an ongoing safe space designed to help you heal from trauma and addictive processes.
Register to attend a free Author Talk and Info Session about this offering, here.
Access the event recording, here (coming soon!)
Payment Information
This offering costs $2,500. Participants may choose between different payment plans. Learners will have access to the course for 365 days from the date of the first live session.
Course Requirements
To foster co-regulation and feelings of safety, it is a requirement to keep your camera on during live sessions.
*Important Disclaimer:
This offering is not designed to be a substitute for psychotherapy with a licensed professional. This can be quite an intensive journey. As such, it is highly recommended that participants be in an existing and ongoing therapeutic relationship with a licensed mental health professional. If you are having trouble completing the first three practices, this is an indication that you need to find a therapist to accompany you on this journey.
This offering is not intended for those currently in crisis.
Course Format
Course Framework
Each two hour live session will consist of a grounding practice, a teaching piece, a shared practice, break out rooms with FSPM certified facilitators (Soo Strong, Claudia Goetzelmann, Ragna Reiske, Travis Goodman, Elizabeth Moitoza, Robert Ragucci, and Jessica Zormann) leading groups, a whole-group reflection & closing.
With a 36 participant cap, each of the 6 breakout groups will contain no more than 6 participants, each with their own FSPM trained facilitator. Jan Winhall will be a floating facilitator and accompany a different group each week.
In between the weekly 2-hour live sessions, participants will meet in their Focusing Partnership. The practices and live sessions each build upon one another. Participants will need to commit to full attendance. If someone is ill, it is their responsibility to check in with their Focusing Accountability Partner to be updated and to do the practice. This attendance policy is designed to help you intentionally commit to the process, yourself, and to the group, to create co-regulation and feelings of safety.
Recommended Audience
Course Outcomes
The goal of the Community Practice Group experience is to make progress towards:
Managing distressful emotions and physical sensations to preempt trauma and addictive processes
Creating a well-paced and structured lifestyle
Engaging in healthy, meaningful relationships
Living a life of integrity where your values align with your behaviors
INSTRUCTOR(S)
Jan Winhall, MSW, FOT
Jan Winhall, M.S.W. P.I.F.O.T. is an author, teacher and seasoned trauma and addiction psychotherapist. She is a Course Partner with the Polyvagal Institute where she offers a training program based on her book Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, Routledge 2021. Her new book, 20 Embodied Practices for Healing Trauma and Addiction: Using the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, (Norton) is due out March 18, 2025. She is an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Toronto and a Certifying Co-Ordinator with the International Focusing Institute. Jan is Co-Director of the Borden Street Clinic where she supervises graduate students. She enjoys teaching all over the world.
"In Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model Jan Winhall introduces a new strategy to treat addiction that brilliantly integrates Gendlin’s classic concept of a felt sense with Polyvagal Theory. The author shares her intellectual journey in which unique insights transform two disparate perspectives into obvious complements leading to a powerful treatment model." ―Stephen W. Porges, PhD, scientist, author, creator of Polyvagal Theory.
"In this insightful volume Jan Winhall brings together the essence of groundbreaking modern therapeutic practices with her own decades of hard-won clinical experience to fashion a new, deeply humane and promising model of addiction treatment, illustrated by poignant clinical vignettes." ― Gabor Maté, MD, is the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.
"Reframing addiction and its treatment through the lens of Experiential Psychotherapy, Polyvagal Theory, Interpersonal Neurobiology and Imago Relationship Therapy, Jan Winhall has produced a brilliant synthesis and expansion of addiction theory and treatment that should be read by all therapists, not just addiction specialists." ―Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD, authors of Doing Imago Relationship Therapy in the Space Between
Jan Winhall, MSW, FOT
