I almost didn’t raise my hand.
It was Intermediate — the second year of the three-year SE professional program. Abi Blakeslee was at the front of the room — sixty SE students seated behind her in the longest line of volunteers I had seen since starting the program. The invitation was open: who had a headline related to falls?
Something in me moved before my mind could negotiate with it. My hand went up.
By the time I reached the microphone, my heart was racing. My legs were unsteady. The room narrowed to that single line of faces watching me. I stated my headline: a traumatic fall from my mountain bike on the trails near my home in Hood River, Oregon. Multiple fractures. And something harder to name — a loss of trust in myself and others that had already been quietly present long before the fall, and was now worse.
I sat across from Abi, still shaking inside. Her presence was completely calm.
I don’t remember much of what happened next. I remember my feet on the floor, my seat in the chair, my back supported — the orientation Abi had guided us in so many times. I remember the microphone in my hand, Kevin steadying the sound, and the reassuring eye contact of my dear friends Chris and Kelly from my cohort. I remember sitting on a yoga ball. Stillness in my arms and feet at first. Then some movement. It was, all at once, a complete and incomplete experience.
For years, I had named the patterns — with mentors, coaches, therapists, masterminds, podcasts, books. I could describe exactly what was wrong with me. Nothing had changed.
That is the paradox SE eventually taught me to trust: there is a form of work where you can name everything and nothing shifts. And there is a form of work where you cannot name anything, and everything changes.
Among the assistants moving through our small dyads and triads — at least a dozen dedicated, kind, and skilled practitioners — was Peter Cellarius. He taught me so much in those practice spaces that when the training ended, I sought him out for individual sessions. He has been my counsellor and a trusted presence ever since.
What I couldn’t have named then was grief.
Not the acute grief of the fall or the fractures. The older, slower grief of outgrowing what I had been most loyal to — the places, the people, the version of myself that was good and dedicated and real — and that no longer fit who I was becoming. For two years, I had reluctantly introduced myself as a PT and bodyworker, because that was the honest truth.
answer, while something in me strained toward something I couldn’t yet name. I was witnessing deep transformation in others and feeling, with a clarity I couldn’t ignore, that this was why I am still here—my raison d’être.
In 2025, I took a gap year to do my personal work with Peter before I was ready to return to the training. That year was not a detour. It was the work.
SE gave me a container for that grief. Not to resolve it. To metabolise it — slowly, in community, with practitioners who understood without explanation that the good version of yourself can be exactly what you have to grieve on the way to becoming who you are.
This year, I will complete Advanced I and II with Abi in Idyllwild, California, in June and October. Peter will be there as an assistant. The man who sat with me in dyads during Intermediate and held my personal work during the gap year will be in the room again. That continuity is not coincidental. It is the SE community doing exactly what it is designed to do.
I have built RECLAIMED, an 8-week nervous system regulation cohort for post-treatment breast cancer survivors. The work I do with my clients is inseparable from what happened when I raised my hand in that room — and from every dyad, every triad, every assistant, every student, Kevin, our sound guy, every member of the support staff, and every moment of being witnessed in the years since.
The SE community gave me back something I didn’t know I’d lost. I am still integrating it.
Written by Heidi Roberts, Somatic Practitioner