Description
On a deep, radical level, how do you experience being alone? Have you rarely experienced being supported, known or considered with generosity? What happens in you when no one reaches for you, understands you, notices your distress, or responds in the way you most need? Do you collapse, freeze, pursue, withdraw, perform, over-function, disappear, and/or become fiercely self-reliant?
When do you allow yourself to ask for support, and what do you need to do first before you can risk needing anyone? When connection finally comes, are you able to receive it, or does it feel unfamiliar, unsafe, too much, too little, or already on the verge of being taken away?
Would you be willing to experiment with healing that would allow you to be:
- steady instead of braced
- connected instead of guarded
- receptive instead of defended
- trusting instead of vigilant
- relaxed instead of watchful
- present instead of preoccupied
- warm instead of numb
- and accompanied instead of alone inside yourself?
Did you ever promise yourself you would be nothing like your mother, father, or primary caregiver, while finding yourself reproducing their strategies for surviving isolation, misattunement, overwhelm, or emotional absence? Our relationship with aloneness is revealed in the ways we respond when we have the sense that no one is with us. Becoming awake to the shadow qualities in our self-protection, our independence, our longing, and our fear of needing others is a tender and complicated request of ourselves. And it becomes both more complex and more merciful when we begin to take into account the ways our caregivers, too, may have been frightened, unsupported, or alone.
As we look at these questions in the context of relational neuroscience and the development of our nervous systems, we can bring compassion, understanding, support and a radical self-love to the protective strategies that have kept us isolated from others. When we begin to understand that deep accompaniment is radical and essential, we start to invite warm curiosity into our lives, our lives and hearts soften, we create connections across differences, we become more aware of how much we love the people in our lives, and all the ecosystems and their elements, and we begin to enjoy life and one another.
Where?
The course will meet via Zoom. Recordings and course materials will be made available to support participants who are unable to attend every session live; however, we recommend attending as many live classes as possible, especially if you’re new to this work, so that you may benefit from learning and connecting with others. Recordings are only available for those who are enrolled in the course, including those who join throughout the year. Do not share recordings; they are for personal review only.
When?
Thursdays | 10:30 AM – 11:55 AM Pacific Time
December 3, 2026 – November 4, 2027
Click Here to convert to your time zone
What To Expect
Each of the 13 chapters of this book is covered in two classes (three classes for chapter 8), in a series of twenty-nine 85-minute classes including a bonus session. Each class will include lectures, Q&A, discussion of exercises, demos, and personal explorations of the abilities and growth that make our brains good and comfortable places to be. This journey will take us from December of 2025 through to November of 2026, and support participants to remove the blocks to self-nourishment. The full series package also includes the monthly Neuroscience and Resonance webinars during the period of the course plus opportunities for community practice.
As a participant you will:
- Become acquainted with the interplay of your mother’s ability to nourish with your own ability to receive
- Explore the depths of your denial of nourishment and its unconscious effect on you
- Welcome the parts of yourself you’ve never known how to love
- Invite yourself into a deeper sense of self-mothering
- Release the contracts that separate you from self
- Know yourself more fully and compassionately
- Allow for new levels of complexity and paradox in this experience of being human
- Infuse self-care into your everyday life
- Delight in new freedom and access to joy
- Learn in-depth in community
- Find your way toward an invitation to experiencing more freedom from hidden patterns while exploring the fundamental concepts of resonance through the YRS Workbook
- Transform your brain into a more comfortable and kinder place to live
What You'll Learn
Weeks 1 – 2: December 3 and December 10, 2026
Chapter 1 – Affection for the self as the foundation for healing alarmed aloneness
- These two classes set the stage for our year. We’ll learn attunement, imagine self-attunement, investigate the blocks to self-warmth that arise from unconscious contracts, and learn about how we can tear ourselves down with our Default Mode Networks. We will begin to understand how inner criticism, self-abandonment, and the absence of warmth toward ourselves can deepen the experience of alarmed aloneness — and how affection for the self becomes a foundation for feeling accompanied from within.
Weeks 3 – 4: December 17, 2026 and January 7, 2027
Chapter 2 – How trauma impacts the ability to feel accompanied, and blocks the flow of warmth and self-warmth
- In these two classes, we bring our learning about unconscious contracts into relationship with the resonance skill of time travel empathy, demonstrating the integration of these two approaches to healing. We will explore how trauma can leave parts of us suspended in moments of unbearable aloneness, still waiting for someone to come, notice, understand, protect, or stay. As we bring resonance to these places, we begin to offer the warmth and accompaniment that was missing then — and that can be received now.
Weeks 5 – 6: January 14 and January 21, 2027
Chapter 3 – Self-accompaniment through the instrumental and relational lenses: understanding the brain’s two points of view
- This pair of classes addresses contracts that negatively affect our daily lives, our relationships, and our capacity to feel accompanied in simple, practical ways. We learn about the instrumental brain and the relational brain, and how they impact our ability to remain connected with ourselves and others. Links between reductionism, self-sabotage, and inner abandonment will be explored, helping us recognize the ways we may treat ourselves as problems to be solved rather than beings to be accompanied.
Weeks 7 – 8: February 4 and February 25, 2027
Chapter 4 – How healing shame heals our ability to feel accompanied
- In these two classes, we learn the dance of facial expressions in early childhood, integrating it with the Circuits of Emotion and Motivation, which help us understand the nervous system’s drop into shame in relationship. We explore how shame can create a sudden and profound sense of being alone, exposed, defective, or unreachable. We further our resonance practice with metaphors, discovering how resonant language can help us stay warmly with the parts of us that learned to hide.
Weeks 9 – 10: March 4 and March 18, 2027
Chapter 5 – Anxiety and alarmed aloneness in the effort to receive love
- These two classes explore the connection between anxiety and the emotional circuits of both FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF, and how differentiation can open the door to a profound sense of accompaniment, reducing anxiety. We will start a practice of embracing our fears and bringing affection to the experience of self-acceptance. We will experience resonant remedies for anxiety, learning how to meet the alarm in the body not as something to conquer, but as something longing to be accompanied.
Weeks 11 – 12: April 1 and April 15, 2027
Chapter 6 – Life-serving rage as fuel and doorway to differentiation
- In these two classes, we trace the development of contracts that can be made during traumatic moments: contracts to never be angry, to punish ourselves for anger, to punish others for anger, or to cut ourselves off from the life-serving force of protest. We learn how to release these contracts, making more room to be different people from our mothers, fathers, or primary caregivers.
- We also learn that when others’ actions cause us to break our own contracts, this can bring about rage. We will connect our work with Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory and practice resonant language skills, discovering how anger can become a doorway out of helpless aloneness and into differentiated, embodied presence.
Weeks 13 – 14: April 22 and April 29, 2027
Chapter 7 – The movement from dissociation into embodied accompaniment
- In these two classes, we continue integrating Porges’ Polyvagal Theory with the unconscious contract tool to uncover and transform patterns of dissociation, including contracts that keep us from fully entering or inhabiting the body. We will look at both classic dissociation and the left shift into the instrumental brain — the movement out of relationship and into management, analysis, or survival.
- We examine the contracts we make not to need, not to reach, not to feel, not to be present, or not to participate fully in life. We bring our resonance skills to support exquisite gentleness in the face of immobilization, and track the journey from collapse to “immobilization-without-fear.” Slowly, we learn to rejoin the real life of relationships, allowing the body itself to become a place where accompaniment can be felt.
Weeks 15, 16 and 17: May 6, May 27, and June 3, 2027
Chapter 8 – Attachment and freedom
- These three classes take us into the contracts we make to maximize well-being in response to our parents’ ways of being with us and being with emotion. These contracts are our foundations for every bit of relating, reaching, receiving, protecting, withdrawing, and longing that we do.
- As well as reviewing the basics of attachment, we discover a resonant language practice that holds our connection patterns as “just right.” This practice is a radical move into secure attachment with ourselves, no matter what contracts we are dealing with, and no matter how much regret we have for our pasts.
- We look at avoidant patterns and contracts, and we have the delight of looking at ambivalent patterns and contracts with special guest teacher Jaya Manske.
- Throughout the classes, we enjoy the signs of the movement into secure attachment: more steadiness, more warmth, more freedom, and a growing capacity to feel accompanied without losing ourselves.
Week 18: June 10, 2027
Bonus Q+A Session
- The Q+A session will give you an opportunity to ask any questions you have about resonance, contract work, course content, or the lived experience of moving from alarmed aloneness toward warm accompaniment.
Weeks 19 – 20: June 17 and July 8, 2027
Chapter 9 – Disorganization: from charisma to unpredictable availability and violence
- The use of self-hate, disgust, and contempt to manage emotions and stop connection is an aftereffect of traumatic attachment, and can be passed down intergenerationally. As we understand this, the root causes of the contracts made in disorganized attachment start to become clear.
- We learn how we can turn predatory aggression against ourselves and others as a distortion of the SEEKING circuit, illuminating an avenue for work. The dissolution of trauma-based contracts is supportive in resolving the terror, confusion, longing, and vigilance that can arise when love has been mixed with unpredictability or danger. The work we have done to this point in the series supports us in looking at these knots of trauma, and untangling them to move us toward safety, clarity, and warm accompaniment.
Weeks 21 – 22: July 22 and July 29, 2027
Chapter 10 – A new look at depression
- In this chapter, we explore depression through the lens of unresolved alarmed aloneness. Both contract work and resonance skills are needed in this life-changing journey toward joy, reconnection, and the release of the burden of facing life alone.
- We also take a look at the attachment contracts that can prevent connection in order to support a movement away from life-long loneliness, which can be a contributing factor in depression. As the places in us that have been waiting alone begin to receive resonance, warmth, and companionship, the possibility of movement, vitality, and belonging can begin to return.
Weeks 23 – 24: August 26 and September 9, 2027
Chapter 11 – How addiction can be transgenerational alarmed aloneness
- It has taken a long time for the world to begin to understand that addictions are related to trauma, and it will be a longer time before we fully see the way that alarmed aloneness travels transgenerationally. Our deepest hunger is for relationship, and when we can’t have it, emotional starvation can lead us toward addictions and addictive strategies.
- Just as our brains make contracts with us to keep us safe, our brains can be said to make contracts with us on behalf of our addictions — and to carry forward our mothers’ or caregivers’ contracts around loneliness, comfort, contact, and need.
- These two classes explore what happens to us in relationship to our addictions and addictive strategies when these contracts are dissolved. Resonance skills will be practiced to support self-compassion, steadiness, and accompaniment during this process.
Weeks 25 – 26: September 23 and October 14, 2027
Chapter 12 – The relationship between sexuality, emergence, and accompaniment
- The delight of the SEXUALITY circuit is that it carries us from childhood into our full individuation, maturity, and authenticity. No matter the level of our sexual interest or activity, this circuit is important for well-being and growth.
- There are many entanglements that stop us from really receiving and enjoying our own and others’ life energies, and many of them are connected with our sexuality, emergence, visibility, and belonging. The contracts that diminish this circuit diminish our life energy and our awe. They can also keep us alone with shame, fear, secrecy, or the sense that our full aliveness is unwelcome.
- We will work with these contracts in these two classes and practice supportive resonance skills to help with both personal issues and internalized oppression from the way society judges and ranks bodies in terms of mattering. As these contracts soften, emergence becomes less lonely, and more of the self can come into warm relationship with life.
Weeks 27 – 28: October 21 and October 28, 2027
Chapter 13 – Reclaiming Joy
- In these two classes examining the final chapter of the workbook, we will look at what supports the development and expression of joy, and how the experience of joy becomes deeper and richer when we fully accept and have affection for our shadow selves.
- We will learn how joy is a dyadic experience — we co-create joy — and that contracts that block trust, connection, play, and accompaniment also stop joy from happening. We will dissolve these contracts and celebrate and practice the resonance skills that support the feeling and expression of joy and awe.
- These classes include a look at false Bodhisattva vows, contracts made when children first perceive that there is pain in the world and commit their whole beings to a better world, no matter the cost. Commitment and contribution are very important and life-serving when they do not cost us everything. As we reclaim joy, we also reclaim the possibility of being with others, with ourselves, and with life without abandoning our own aliveness.
Week 29: November 4, 2027
Closing Session
- In our closing session, we gather the learning, practices, tenderness, and transformations of the year. We honor the places in us that have lived in alarmed aloneness, and the many ways they have tried to protect us. We also celebrate the movement toward warm accompaniment: the growing capacity to stay with ourselves, receive others, risk connection, soften old contracts, and discover that even the most frightened places in us do not have to be met alone.
This Course Includes Resonant Assistant Support
Assistant support is available during live classes for participants to practice breakout exercises or (depending on availability) receive resonant process work.
Cost
$800 Early Bird
$1200 Regular Price
The first two chapters of this series are available for purchase individually. Series bonuses are only available if you sign up for the full series package:
- Access to bonus Q&A session with Sarah + Closing session
- Access to Sarah’s Monthly Neuroscience and Resonance Webinars throughout the extended journey
- Opportunities to work with Resonance Partners and to self-organize small practice groups to develop your resonance skills, learn and transform in community
- Assistant Support during classes – experience resonant support from experienced practitioners when you need it during class times
Purchase of this class does not include the purchase of the Your Resonant Self Workbook. Please purchase the book separately.
Scholarship Information
Partial scholarships may be available for this course. For more information, please write to help@sarahpeyton.com after November 26, 2026.
Please Note:
- Your tuition payment is non-refundable (but it is transferable).
- This course will be recorded for those who want to learn asynchronously for some or all sessions.
- This work is not therapy and is not a substitute for therapy. If you have a sense that you would be destabilized by yourself or others speaking about difficult events, then this course may not be for you. While we hope that the processes and information that we share can be of use in your journey, we do not have the resources to support extreme psychological difficulties.
