Hi Community I am so incredibly excited and honored to be one of the trainers, along with @Jessica Jurcak in New Hampshire with the Forest Therapy Hub in September. This is an amazing opportunity and I am thrilled to be back in New England to connect to the land and the international community that is growing a science based moevent! Check it out! https://foresttherapyhub.com/summer-school-2026-usa/ He @Kirk Ward promised I would share.

The Dojo and the Dirt: What Cultivating Resilience Actually Takes There is a man who shaped the way we think about resilience here at Hope Reimagined. His name is Tesfaye Tekelu, a trainer with the Strozzi Institute and someone I had the honor to work and learn along side at Destiny Arts Center. Today he lead the Strozzi Community Dojo—a practice space that brings us back to body, in relationship and growing together. This is an open free space and the link is attached. My relationship with Tes and what I have learned from him is deeply embedded in the NSIF. Today Tesfaye led us in practice to cultivate resilience. He reminded me it’s not a trait you either have or don’t. It is not toughness. It is not the ability to push through. It is something much more alive than that: the capacity to be moved by life and return to yourself. To be knocked off center—by grief, by conflict, by overwhelm, by joy—and to find your way back. Not perfectly. Not immediately. But reliably, over time. Resilience is not the absence of being shaken. It is the practiced ability to return. And that return is not a mental decision—it is a somatic one. The body knows the way back. We practice so that path becomes familiar. Within the Neuro-Somatic Integration™ Framework, we understand resilience as a nervous system capacity—not a personality trait, not a mindset, and not something you perform. It is built through patterned, rhythmic, embodied practice. It is built by presenting moments of joy and how they felt in your body,. By recalling in sensation the memories of those moments. It is not toxic positivity it is remembering viscerally authentic moments of joy that help us navigate day to day. Tes talked about resilience as a spring rather then a bucket and our somatic practice is to identify the blocks to resilience and to clear the path for it to flow in ways we can return to over and over again. 🌱 Micro-Practice: The Joy That Lives in Your Body Rather than a centering exercise, it becomes a guided somatic resourcing journey — walking the reader back into a real memory of joy through each sense, in sequence:

Rooted in Science. Guided by Nature. Embodied in Practice. A Framework Update From Regulate to Root: Naming What We've Always Meant Hello, Rooted community 🌿 I want to share an evolution in the Neuro-Somatic Integration™ Framework that I've been sitting with for a while — one that feels small in language and significant in meaning. The first phase of the spiral has been called Regulate since the beginning. Rhythm & Safety has always been its companion phrase. And the substance of this phase has never been in question — it's where we tend the nervous system, where we work with rhythm, breath, co-regulation, nature, play, and somatic centering. It's the soil everything else grows from. But over time, I've noticed something. The word regulate has come to carry a narrower meaning in the wider conversation than what we actually do in this work. In popular use, "regulate" has become shorthand for calm down — soothe the system, lower the activation, return to neutral. And while there is absolutely a place for soothing, that is not what regulation has ever meant within this framework. Regulation here is capacity, not calm. It is the ability to feel what is happening inside, sense what is happening around us, and respond with choice. Language matters. And when the word we use keeps being heard as something smaller than what we mean, that is worth listening to. So we're updating the language: The first phase of the spiral is now Root: Rhythm & Safety. Same framework. Same science. Same practices. A more honest name for what we have always been doing. Here is why Root carries more of what this phase actually is: When we root, we are not simply calming the nervous system. We are tending to something deeper — the relationship between body, land, physiology, and presence. Rooting brings together what this phase has always pointed toward: - We find our ground. Literally — through the feet, through the breath, through the contact between body and earth. - We connect to what is important. Values, meaning, relationships, the things that make this life worth being present for. - We feel our body in relationship to the earth. Not separate from nature, not isolated from the more-than-human world, but in living, reciprocal contact with it. - We presence our dignity. This one matters most. We are not problems to be regulated. We are living beings worthy of taking up space, worthy of the time it takes to land in our own body.