In this mindfully curated guest expert series, we will be bringing a group of incredibly experienced practitioners to share their expertise on healing trauma through yoga. They each have areas of speciality and unique insights into these areas, that we believe will profoundly impact the lives of the trauma survivors that attend their sessions. As well as the practitioners that work in these areas or are aspiring to specialise in these areas.
Monday (28/11/2022)
Opening session: the deeper healing mechanisms of yoga for trauma, with Candice Clark (17pm SAST)
Healing trauma through yoga: trauma-sensitive restorative practices, with Carla Collins (19pm SAST)
Tuesday (29/11/2022)
Healing trauma through yoga: sexual and domestic violence, with Kris Silvestry (17pm SAST)
Healing trauma through yoga: school settings, with Tori Albright (19pm SAST)
Wednesday (30/11/2022)
Healing trauma through yoga: miscarriage & pregnancy loss, with Candice Clark (17pm SAST)
Healing trauma through yoga: children and teens, with Michelle Fury (19pm SAST)
Thursday (1/12/2022)
Healing trauma through yoga: an experience of trauma-sensitive restorative practices, with Carla Collins (17pm SAST)
Healing trauma through yoga: neurodiversity and anxiety, with Yael Sunshine (19pm SAST)
Live attendance is free, recordings access can be purchased here (8 weeks access – ZAR 590 before we begin on 28 November, ZAR 890 thereafter). Bookings to the live events close on Sunday, 27 November ’22.
An attendance certificate (for CPD purposes or otherwise) can be purchased for ZAR 100.00 per talk attended, or for ZAR 300 for attending the entire live event. Alternatively they are included for free in the recordings access purchase.
About your hosts
Candice Clark
Candice is a licensed counsellor and yoga therapist that specialises in trauma and mental health. She has worked with numerous individuals and on group therapy programs in South Africa and internationally, supporting the recovery from psychological trauma. She is currently completing her Masters thesis on trauma-sensitive yoga in the South African context. She trains local psychologists, counsellors, healthcare practitioners and yoga teachers on trauma, trauma recovery and nervous system informed approaches to mental healthcare.
Carla Collins
Carla Collins is an experienced restorative yoga teacher trainer and trauma-sensitive yoga facilitator. She has over a decade of teaching practice and is passionate about how yoga can be used therapeutically in both movement and stillness, to restore safety, attunement, and joy in bodies, hearts, and mind. She truly believes that yoga should be for all, but equally, it needs to be molded to the communities we serve.
Kris Silvestry
Kris Silvestry is a Licensed Professional Counselor in New Jersey, and nationally (USA) board certified with a Master’s Degree in Mental Health Counseling. She has completed a number of advanced trainings in trauma-sensitive yoga, and somatic therapy for trauma in her quest to better serve sexual and domestic violence trauma survivors. From this point, she began using yoga and meditation with the people she saw for counseling. Kris saw better regulation skills, an increased window of tolerance, and better trust in their own bodies. Trauma-sensitive yoga just made sense to her. She believes that by using creative, anti-oppression interventions along with yoga and meditation, we can work on teaching people how to regulate their bodies and help them heal from their past traumas.
Tori Albright
Tori Albright is an experienced educator and now assistant principal of a large, diverse, urban middle-school. She is passionate about the ability of yoga to help transform trauma into post-traumatic growth. With deep, lived experience of trauma growing up, Tori has done the work to heal and to show up as an educator that can support children on a trauma recovery journey. She combined these experiences, with her professional yoga teacher trainings and in partnership with a colleague, to put together a comprehensive program for refugee and immigrant children at her school. She is an inspiring advocate for children, and mental health, and truly believes that the body keeps the score of everything we have ever experienced.
Michelle Fury
Michelle Fury is an experienced yoga therapist, that became the first full-time yoga therapist in a hospital setting at the Colorado Children’s Hospital (she spent 15 years in this setting). She has also obtained her Masters in counselling and is a licensed counsellor. Michelle has an impressive resume in the field of yoga therapy for children and teens, having written a book on the topic of paediatric yoga therapy for children’s and adolescent mental health, and written articles and spoken on the topic at conferences for many years. She is driven by the belief that yoga therapy can help create a world where people thrive, and thoroughly enjoys pioneering yoga therapy for paediatric mental health.
Yael Sunshine
Yael Sunshine is an experienced yoga therapist who is also a special needs educator. In her beginning days as an ABA therapist working with young autistic children, her supervisor trained her to look for the underlying cause when her students were triggered. She began to notice how many triggers were responses to body sensations; hunger, sleepiness, a hard wired nervous system, etc. She began using simple movement activities to help her students. They became more relaxed and related, and progressed more quickly, when they were given a regular sensory diet. She now applies these underlying principles to her work with all her clients suffering with anxiety and trauma.