Description
What happens when we begin to see the influence of our mother’s shadow on our own lives? What blocks to self-warmth do we discover? Does unhealed trauma inhibit experiences of self-understanding? What happens when we understand the impact of trauma on our brains? What happens when we release some of the contracts that keep us tied in knots?
Do you want to truly take in the world of resonance and unconscious contracts? Do you love this work, but is it hard to do it alone? Would you love to experience the journey to an invitation to a bigger life with support and community? Would you like to live through a year of healing through the release of hidden forms of self-sabotage?
Join Sarah Peyton for an exciting, rich 12-month exploration of the Your Resonant Self Workbook in Shadow of the Mother: a Year of Inner Healing. 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 2024 through to November of 2025, and move participants from removing the blocks to self-warmth to claiming their right to living consciously in good relationship with their own and their mother’s shadow. The class series 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 influence of your mother’s brain on your brain
- Explore the depths of your mother’s shadow and its unconscious effect on you
- Welcome the parts of yourself you’ve never known how to love
- Individuate and separate more fully from your mother
- 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 kind place to live
When?
Thursdays, 10:30am-12:00pm Pacific time, December 5, 2024 – November 6, 2025
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See below for a detailed list of dates and topics for all 29 sessions
Classes will meet online via zoom.
Each class will be recorded for viewing in different time zones and for review, and for sale after the series is over.
Continuing Education Credits
We are delighted to offer CE hours for this course. Stay tuned for more details!
Cost
Early Bird Price for the series: $800
Regular Price for the series: $1200
Purchase of this class does not include the purchase of the Your Resonant Self Workbook. Please purchase the book separately.
*PLEASE NOTE:
- Your tuition payment is non-refundable, but it is transferable.
- Some partial scholarships may be available after December 1. Please write to Sarah to inquire.
- 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.
Bonuses for those who enroll in the full series:
- 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
What You’ll Learn
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- Weeks 1 & 2: December 5 and December 12, 2024: Chapter 1 –Affection for the self: Did mother have it? Can we have it?
- These two classes investigate the blocks to self-warmth that arise from unconscious contracts, and from family traditions of self-talk as reflected in our Default Mode Networks.
- These two classes investigate the blocks to self-warmth that arise from unconscious contracts, and from family traditions of self-talk as reflected in our Default Mode Networks.
- Weeks 3 & 4: December 19 and January 9, 2025: Chapter 2 – How trauma impacts mothers, and blocks family life energy
- 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 16 and January 30, 2025: Chapter 3 – How did mom see the world, how do we see the world? Understanding our two lenses
- This pair of classes addresses contracts that have negative results on our daily lives 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 6 & 20, 2025: Chapter 4 – How healing shame heals the generations
- 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 6 and March 13, 2025: Chapter 5 – Anxiety and alarmed aloneness in our mother’s shadow and in our own
- 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: March 20 and March 27, 2025: 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 17 and April 24, 2025: 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 bring our resonance skills to support exquisite gentleness in the face of immobilization, and track the journey from collapse to the reclamation of relaxation without fear, and we learn to rejoin the real life of relationships.
- Weeks 15, 16 & 17: May 8, May 15 and May 29, 2025: Chapter 8 – Attachment and freedom (with Jaya Manske)
- 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 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,” which 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, and we enjoy the signs of the movement into secure attachment.
- Week 18: June 5, 2024 **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 19 and July 10, 2025: Chapter 9 – Clearing disgust and contempt
- The use of self-hate, disgust and contempt to manage emotions is an aftereffect of traumatic attachment, and can be passed down intergenerationally as part of the Broken Mother Field. 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 mother’s shadow. 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 24 and August 14, 2025: Chapter 10 – A new look at depression
- Contracts that limit our life energy can lead to hopelessness and depression. Without an understanding of the nervous system, people often think these conditions are set in stone. The release of these contracts in these two classes supports the reclamation of movement and agency. Both contract work and resonance skills are needed in this life-changing journey toward joy. 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 4 and 18, 2025: Chapter 11 – Addiction and 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 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 25 and October 9, 2025: Chapter 12 – The relationship between sexuality, emergence and the broken mother
- 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 with the mother that stop us from becoming who we really are, 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 23 and 30, 2025: 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 6, 2025: **Closing Session**
- During this class, we will close our year of work together and make time for questions and celebrations.
- Weeks 1 & 2: December 5 and December 12, 2024: Chapter 1 –Affection for the self: Did mother have it? Can we have it?