Dear Global Somatic Experiencing community,

Recently, the Somatic Experiencing International Board of Directors had our first in-person board meeting since November 2019. Our hope for this meeting was that we would be able to have our international partners join us in person in Boulder, Colorado. Unfortunately, COVID-19 safety and restrictions made this impossible, but we had a wonderful hybrid meeting with several of us together in person and several others on Zoom from around the world. This conversation was the first step to open the space for what the word International means in our new name – Somatic Experiencing International.

Somatic Experiencing International is only one of the Somatic Experiencing® organizations. Our international partners include the European Association of Somatic Experiencing (EASE) and Associação Brasileira do Trauma (ABT) in Brazil. Within EASE, every country has their own local organizations. Other local organizations are beginning to blossom around the world as well. As more trainings open throughout the world, we continue to ask ourselves how we stay connected, support each other, and help bring Somatic Experiencing to more people. Our meeting included representatives from EASE and ABT as well as faculty from around the world. Also present was Monica Simionato, our most recent former board member who has lived around the world and who we miss dearly on the board.

I expect that everyone in this community already understood the interconnectedness of the world, but I also expect that it was made even more apparent these past 18 months. While we have used the phrase “going viral” to describe internet phenomena for years, this was the first time in our lifetimes that any of us experienced exactly what that can mean when used literally. The traumatic impact of this pandemic is likely incalculable. As we know from SE, however, the healing capacity can meet that incalculable traumatic impact. Our ability as a community to share that healing capacity with the world begins with our ability to hold our own international community container. The board meeting was one such step in that direction. Our Global Town Hall events are another. The listening@traumahealing.org email address is another.

Of course, the next big international SE event is the upcoming Somatic Experiencing International Virtual Conference, happening October 22-24, 2021 (23-25 on the other side of the international date line from North America). The conference will bring together SEPs from around the world to share their specialized knowledge and the ways they use SE in their practices, SE students, and potential students who want to learn more about SE. It will be an opportunity to connect, to learn from one another, and to continue to grow our web of resilience. As I wrote about before, the more we can hold each other across the globe, the more we can enlarge the container for the big problems that occur in the world. We hope you will join us at this conference. We hope you will continue to join in our community-building events around the world. And we hope that we can all share what connects us and learn from our uniqueness around the world as we grow into our international vision.

As always, if you want to reach out, you can email me directly at rmstahl@traumahealing.org or the organization directly at listening@traumahealing.org.

Warmly,

Rebecca