Training & Models for a New Paradigm
Are you ready to script a tale of resilience, empowerment and renewal; to turn the pages of crisis and adversity into chapters of strength and well-being?
The GrowFree Community stands as a beacon, uniting peers, practitioners, and families to break intergenerational trauma cycles of separation and co-create new models for personal, collective, physical, spiritual and planetary health and cohesion.
We are excited to offer a Trauma-Informed Nature-based Training package in 2024 for practitioners, co-workers and peers to develop coherent and flexible community approaches to transforming trauma and creating wellbeing.
The training is phased with a mix of online and face-to-face outdoor sessions. Online courses present and explore trauma and healing processes in creative, practical, and experiential ways that weave together contemporary science and traditional knowledge.
Trainees will get to know how knowledge and practices from approaches such as Polyvagal Theory, Neurobiology, Internal Family Systems, Yoga, Contemplative and Indigenous traditions interplay give a practical and holistic understanding of traumatic experience and how it affects perception, behaviour and health. Together we will become intimately familiar with the nervous system in self and other and explore how narratives, models, archetypes and practices can be used to re-navigate ourselves into connection and wellbeing.
The outdoor, nature-based workshops will explore how working and spending time in nature is both an essential and magical element to any approach. We’ll explore why story and setting are so powerful as well as submerge ourselves in the subtle somatic experiences of attunement, mutuality and resonance, which are key skills for forming transformational relationships and spaces for community and wellbeing. Participants will come away with embodied knowledge and an outdoor facilitation kit for working outdoors, one-to-one and in groups.
Families with Adverse Childhood Experinces (ACEs) and intergenerational trauma that passes down through parent-to-child experience high levels of stress, mental illhealth and dysfunctional relationships. This has been shown to compromise health, lower attainment and income levels and lead to multiple forms of marginalisation. The GrowFree Peer & Practitioner Training package will cover early attachment, pre- and peri-natal, intergenerational and ancestral trauma to reveal how even deeply held imprints and cycles can be transformed.
The GrowFree Community brings together peers, parents and practitioners with a passion for transforming trauma, ill-health and separation into resilience, purpose, creativity and connection. By creating resources, joint-learning, therapeutic community and nature-informed, cultural events that are accessible, we aim to break harmful intergenerational cycles and nurture new models for wellbeing. GrowFree has attracted highly-trained, respected practitioners and increasingly mature peers who have combined their professional and lived-experienced, wisdom and knowledge to create unique, experiential learning opportunities and training.
Our training package is phased in three parts. Phase 1 sessions in 2024 are online on Tuesday evenings from February 27th to the end of April. The phase 2 outdoor workshops take place near Kemnay in central Aberdeenshire Wednesday 5th – Saturday 8th June. The phase 3 GrowFree Peer2Peer course runs in September-October, with dates to be confirmed.
Designed with a train-the-trainer model, participants can become apprentices and then facilitators of the package and are encouraged to draw on their own inspirations and passions. Each part can be taken flexibly – starting at any point – and separately for personal healing and development. The package can be taken in full in 2024, or in stages into 2025 (and beyond) as dates fit with routines. However, priority for phase 2 places in 2024 will be given to those taking the full package during this year. These ‘incredible’* outdoor workshops are being co-created and co-facilitated by our wonderful practitioner member Jon Cree. To guarantee not missing this experience with him, we recommend booking up for this year and as soon possible.
Our one-day workshop in 2023 with Jon got amazing feedback – “The days with Jon Cree last year were *incredible. I can only imagine the benefit of another 4 days and to spill out that knowledge to those we support”.
Main – Photo by Harald Arlander on Unsplash
