Body Songs: Movement for Therapists, May 27-31, 2026
Collective Care Retreat & Training
at Hollyhock Retreat Center, Cortes Island, BC, Canada
For Psychotherapists, Counselors, Social Workers, Psychologists, and Chaplains
The times are intense. Come release and restore in a creative current.
Both a retreat and a somatic-movement therapy training; supporting therapist health and sustainable, meaningful, practice.
Come experience movement and ecosomatics as healing arts in psychotherapy.
Come rest into the beauty of the land and life-affirming embodied creativity. Come learn how to offer these approaches with your clients, with precision and spaciousness.
Therapists need times of nourishment
Release and restore.
The work we do in the world is heart work, and it requires presence, attunement, flexibility, and creativity. Our practice becomes sustainable when we are caring well for our own beings.
Body Songs: Movement for Therapists is a pocket of nourishment for therapists amid the deeply stressful times we are living in. This program centers the health of practitioners. When we are burnt out, or are saturated with the pain of the world, our own life feels more constricted or flattened and then it’s more difficult and tiring to offer nourishment with our clients.
Come gather at a shared creative well spring: the nuance of somatic inquiry and the supple beauty of movement, woven with reflection through art and creative writing.
Dance, somatics, art, and storytelling are ancient methods for personal and collective health.
These ancestral wisdoms, offering beauty from the hum of the murmuring deep, are tactile methods for tending our aliveness.
When we or our clients are impacted by trauma, our bodies respond in patterns of fixed tension in relation to gravity: bracing, contracting, pulling back, puffing up, or collapsing. The defense cascade of sympathetic activation - Freeze, flight, fight, fawn - and dorsal vagal states – such as death feigning - are wise responses in the moment of danger and life threat. When trauma is not metabolized, however, these patterns of embodied response become more fixed and can persist long after the moment of danger has passed. Creative movement is a wise antidote.
Movement helps us reclaim embodiment, confidence, ground, and center. Movement is suppleness, flexibility.
In movement, we can play our range from micromovement to fuller expressive movement through the whole kinesphere 360 degrees. Movement effectively adjusts our breathing patterns, deepening the exhalation that communicates safety to our nervous system. Movement evokes heart rate variability – shifting us into a ventral vagal state. Movement can invite playfulness, offering a felt sense of joie de vivre that lingers as aliveness afterwards.
Somatic inquiry rooted in mindfulness is a gentle welcome into nuance, helping us sense our inner experience as it is unfolding. This creates a felt sense of inner accompaniment: we feel with our own life force. Rather than being pulled into the undertow, somatic inquiry helps create stability amid intensity. This is valuable learning to bring to our own lives and our clinical practice.
Come learn about somatic inquiry and movement as wise practices in psychotherapy, in a program that centers your own health as a therapist.
You will learn core principles to support you in offering this approach with your clients and gather a range of wise practices to nourishing your own wellbeing. This collective care workshop will be spacious and focused, gentle and enlivening, welcoming and inclusive, exhilarating and tactile.
Grounded in 26 years of learning as a somatic movement psychotherapist, Katrina Curry will hold a container of depth and levity, playfulness and tender quietude, rooted in neuroscience, wisdom lineages, and liberation praxis.
We will be held by the beauty of Cortes Island, by the waters and the forest, and by the kindness of Hollyhock retreat center. Come soak in the beauty and restore your own creative life force.
Nourishment
Learn a gentle, enlivening approach for homecoming with the body and nervous system modulation, while deepening resilience and confidence.
Learn how to create the conditions that help clients feel safer to explore embodied inquiries, and how to ease into movement conversation in a way that reduces anxiety and fear, shame and self consciousness.
Learn how to weave somatic resources through movement inquiries, in a way that supports healing from traumatic injuries gently and potently.
Learn how to play with somatic movement inquiries collaboratively and improvisationally together with clients through embodied methodology that rests in attuned curiosity.
Discover movement as personal and collective liberation practice.
Learn a myriad of pathways to revitalize your relationship with Earth and Body; discover somatic experience as a reliable homeland for belonging, courage, and creative aliveness in Life.
What People Are Saying
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I am in awe of her abilities to co-create well attuned spaciousness, closeness, and intimacy in alignment with the individual, group ecosystems and the wider kinosphere we breathed, danced, walked, sang, emoted, and delighted in. The inner-somatic, human-relational somatic, and ecosomatic experiences Katronia offers from their unique medicine bundle are embodied practices that I continue to explore for my own personal wellness and in care of the persons and communities I serve. –Nicole Oliver, MSW, RSW, MA (past participant)
–Nicole Oliver, MSW, RSW, MA (past participant)
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Katrina’s enthusiasm and joy for fostering community and healing through movement is a gift. She offers gentle guidance to your own unfurling, creating space for you to blossom in your own time and in your own way. Leading by example, she illuminates an approach towards dance that celebrates aliveness, interconnectedness, sacred stillness, and the wild wonderful reaches of the self.
-Julie Dillon, Professional Artist (past participant)
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Watching Katrina facilitate is a reminder that movement can be prayer, and group space can be a living organism rather than a performance. Her work is deeply embodied and quietly profound. She listens to bodies, to breath, to the relational field, all with a kind of patience that invites truth rather than extracting it. As a fellow group facilitator, I’m struck by how naturally she weaves safety, depth, and freedom together. There is nothing rushed or imposed in her leadership. Instead, people are met exactly where they are, and something honest is allowed to unfold. I hold enormous respect for Katrina's integrity, presence, and devotion to soul-centered work. Being in space she leads is both grounding and quietly transformative.”
Carmen Cool (she/her) Licensed Professional Counselor & Grief Ritual Facilitator, Boulder Colorado