When Every Day is Traumatic the Little Things Matter

I was holding my youngest daughter at the Koi pond in a local garden today orienting to our environment by watching the large orange, grey and speckled white, and golden fish lumber through the water.  Something made me look across the rectangular pond to see a panicked mother plunge her hand into the pond and Read More…

A Veteran’s Day post by Eva Belanger, Executive Director and Founder of Warriors Live On. A nonprofit helping Combat Veterans with PTSD returning to a meaningful life, WLO is rooted in Organic Intelligence®, and engaged in research around the effectiveness of their approach. WLO’s Veterans could really use your help. Make a donation at warriorsliveon.org. Read More…

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. In the world of positive psychology, resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress, such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. Resilience, in that context, means bouncing Read More…

I remember my teenage years as unbelievably fun, adventurous, traumatic, disorienting, scary, exciting, disappointing; basically an emotional roller-coaster which in retrospect appears to highlight the polarity and pendulation concepts I’ve come to understand through Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) and Organic Intelligence® (OI). Adolescents: Emerging Nervous Systems As a clinician at an adolescent inpatient/outpatient treatment program in Read More…

My work with children using an Organic Intelligence® approach began in a pediatric hospital setting. While the child’s journey toward healing didn’t end with our time together, the hope I held, and continue to hold, is that their system received what it needed in those first moments to allow for processing and integration with greater Read More…

“To come into the present is to stop the war.” — Jack Kornfield This is a personal account of my direct experiences with Orientation, as an incredible gift to ourselves, and to those who come to us seeking relief and solace from their inner storms. When I was in my last year of training with Read More…

As I complete the final edit for this blog post in late April of 2016, there are stories about the recent earthquakes in Ecuador and Japan. This last week also brought the announcement of Kathryn Schulz winning the Pulitzer Prize for her New Yorker article “The Really Big One,” about the 10-30% likelihood of a Read More…

Complex Family Systems: in reality each of our psychobiological systems is complex in and of itself. Therefore, each relational system we create is bound to be complex and multifaceted. The complex family systems that I will address in this blog post, are families with one or more of the following issues present: •   Poverty • Read More…

Over the years, I have had a fascination with the physiological theories underlying activation and deactivation, fight, fight, and freeze states and social engagement (thank you Stephen Porges!). Intellectually, I could tell you how these theories offer a map for sessions, yet something was missing. It felt as if all of the information I’d learned Read More…

Over the past year and a half, with the help of many people around the world, I’ve been assembling a learning portal and brand new Organic Intelligence® training program at organicintelligence.org. This process has been one like birth, and if you know me, it’s not just a professional thing, it’s the forum for engaging in the Read More…