Description
On a deep, radical level, how do you do self-care? How do you pretend you are taking care of yourself when you really aren’t? What and how do you make food for yourself? When do you rest or relax, and what do you need to do first, before you allow yourself the luxury? Do you feel rested and rejuvenated after your downtime? Do you get to discover and pursue what you most deeply enjoy, and what nourishes you, physically, spiritually, and emotionally?
Do you long to be flexible with yourself and others instead of rigid, kind instead of harsh, calm instead of anxious, gracious instead of awkward, energized instead of paralyzed, successful instead of struggling, or aware instead of unconscious? Did you ever make a promise to yourself to be nothing like your mother (or other primary caregiver), while finding yourself reproducing her survival strategies at a core level? Have you found a way to be gentle with the mother that is in every cell of your being, shaping your digestion, your sense of safety in the world, the way you breathe, and the way you care for yourself? Would you love to transform your relationship with receiving nourishment, from food, from water, from the air, from friendships, from work, and from partnerships?
Our relationship with self is revealed in the ways that we nourish ourselves. Being awake to the shadow qualities in our self-care, though, is a complicated request of ourselves, and it becomes both more complex and simpler when we begin to take into account the ways we were nourished and the ways that our mothers were nourished.
We can ask ourselves complex questions like, how am both I caring and not caring for myself in:
- What I eat?
- How much and when I sleep?
- What I drink, when and why?
- When I rest and whether I feel better afterwards?
- My social media habits?
- My use of substances, shopping and gambling?
- The kinds of friendships I pursue?
- My activism activities?
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 our self-care strategies. When we begin to understand that deep nourishment 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 the moment.
In this 29-week beyond-the-book course, focused around Sarah Peyton’s Your Resonant Self Workbook, we will look at the different kinds of unconscious contracts involved in our self-nourishment, in our attempts to keep ourselves safe and self-regulated, keep our sense of belonging, and save those we love the most. Join Sarah Peyton for a year of radical, life-changing, self-love and love of others.
Participants will have opportunities to work as a group and in smaller breakout groups to begin to name, disentangle and release the unknown agreements we have with ourselves which keep us from truly nourishing ourselves and others.
When you sign up for this year-long course, you also receive access to Sarah’s monthly neuroscience and resonance webinars, optional practice groups & resonance partner practice, and a bonus Q&A session!
Where?
The course will meet via zoom. We welcome participants from all time zones who wish to learn asynchronously for some or all of the sessions. Recordings and visuals will be made available to those who are registered for the live program (typically available within 72 hours of the live session).
When?
Starts: December 4, 2025
Ends: November 5, 2026
Day of Week: Thursday
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific Time
Click Here to convert to your time zone
See below for a detailed list of dates and topics for all 29 sessions
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 4 and December 11, 2025
Chapter 1 – Affection for the self as the foundation for the ability to receive nourishment.
- 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.
Weeks 3 & 4: December 18, 2025 and January 8, 2026
Chapter 2 – How trauma impacts the ability to receive, and blocks the flow of warmth and self-warmth.
- In these two classes, we bring our learning about unconscious contracts as a tool into relationship with the resonance skill of time travel empathy, demonstrating the integration of these two approaches to healing.
Weeks 5 & 6: January 15 and January 22, 2026
Chapter 3 – Self-care through the instrumental and relational lenses? Understanding the brain’s two points of view.
- This pair of classes addresses contracts that have negative results on our daily lives and nourishment in simple ways. We learn about the instrumental brain and the relational brain and how they impact relationship. Links between reductivism and self-sabotage will be explored.
Weeks 7 & 8: February 5 & 26, 2026
Chapter 4 – How healing shame heals our ability to receive.
- 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 further our resonance practice with metaphors.
Weeks 9 & 10: March 5 and March 19, 2026
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 resonance remedies for anxiety.
Weeks 11 & 12: April 2 and April 9, 2026
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, to either never be angry, or to punish ourselves or others for getting angry, and learn how to release them, making more room to be different people from our mothers. We also learn that when others’ actions cause us to break our own contracts, this can bring about rage. We will also connect our work with Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory and practice resonant language skills.
Weeks 13 & 14: April 16 and April 23, 2026
Chapter 7 – The movement from dissociation into embodiment.
- 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, both in terms of classic dissociation and in terms of the left shift into the instrumental brain and out of relationship. We look at the contracts we make not to receive, or to hide from real participation 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,” and we learn to rejoin the real life of relationships.
Weeks 15, 16 & 17: May 7, May 21 and May 28, 2026
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 and receiving 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, 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.
Week 18: June 11, 2026
Bonus Q&A Session
- The Q&A session will give you an opportunity to ask any questions you have about resonance, contract work or course content.
Weeks 19 & 20: June 18 and July 9, 2026
Chapter 9 – Disorganization from charisma to unpredictable availability and violence.
- The use of self-hate, disgust and contempt to manage emotions and stop nourishment 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 our SEEKING circuit, and this illuminates an avenue for work. The dissolution of trauma-based contracts is supportive in resolving the flow of nourishment. The work we have done to this point in this series supports us in looking at these knots of trauma, and untangling them to move us toward well-being.
Weeks 21 & 22: July 23 and August 13, 2026
Chapter 10 – A new look at depression.
- The root cause of depression is unresolved alarmed aloneness. Both contract work and resonance skills are needed in this life-changing journey toward joy and release of the burden of the refusal of nourishment. We also take a look at the attachment contracts that can prevent connection in order to support a movement away from the life-long loneliness that can also be a contributing factor in depression.
Weeks 23 & 24: September 3 and 17, 2026
Chapter 11 – How addiction can be transgenerational hunger.
- 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 hunger travels transgenerationally. Our deepest hunger is for relationship, and when we can’t have it, our emotional starvation leads us to our addictions. Just as our brain makes 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 our mothers’ contracts regarding nourishment forward. 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 during this process.
Weeks 25 & 26: September 24 and October 15, 2026
Chapter 12 – The relationship between sexuality, emergence and nourishment.
- 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 and our emergence. The contracts that diminish this circuit diminish our life energy and our awe. 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 that society judges and ranks bodies in terms of mattering.
Weeks 27 & 28: October 22 and 29, 2026
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 and connection also stop joy from happening. We will dissolve these contracts and celebrate and practice the resonance skills which 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.
Week 29: November 5, 2026
Closing Session
This Course Includes Resonant Assistant Support
Assistant support is available during classes. There are three ways this happens:
- In groups of three with one assistant and two participants, so that participants can practice the breakout exercises with support.
- In small groups, with 1 assistant and 3+ participants, with work with one participant occurring by lottery, and the remaining participants observing.
- Depending on assistant availability, the third option is 1-1 support to receive resonant processes like time travel and unconscious contracts for material that comes up during class.
Cost
$800 Early Bird (before November 21, 2025)
$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 15, 2025.
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.
