The way in which we experienced the umbilical relationship creates a template for our later relationships with others and with the wider environment. Central to this is the embodiment of feelings of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’, which are both internalised and projected out onto others. The workshop uses embodied exercises that enable us to research how our prenatal umbilical experience has shaped us. This is supported by a theoretical understanding of prenatal life, based on many years of clinical experience. Time is also given to integrating the experiential work, reducing the effects of negative umbilical conditioning and developing new resources and possibilities.

Topics discussed include:
– The survival strategies we develop to regulate emotional and environmental toxicities that come through the umbilical cord and how these become rooted both somatically and psychologically.
– How our relationship with food, money and intimacy is constellated through our prenatal umbilical experience.
– Different forms of ‘umbilical affect’.
– The sense of ‘badness’ that we may internalise as a result of ‘negative umbilical affect’.

Matthew Appleton MA UCKP RCST is a registered Body Psychotherapist and Craniosacral Therapist living and working between Bristol, England and Budapest, Hungary. He is a member of the International Society of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine and has more than 20 years experience of lecturing, facilitating workshops and training practitioners in working therapeutically with babies, children, and their parents. For ten years he worked as a houseparent at A.S. Neill’s famous democratic school Summerhill. He is the author of more than a hundred published articles, on subjects
ranging from democratic education, sexuality, psychotherapy, craniosacral therapy and the effects of pre and perinatal stress on babies and children. He has also written two books; A Free-Range Childhood. Self-Regulation at Summerhill School (2000) and Transitions to Wholeness. Integrating Prenatal, Transpersonal and Somatic Psychology (2020). The former has been published in German as Kindern ihre Kindheit zurückgeben. Selbstregulation in der Erziehung – das Beispiel Summerhill (2nd Edition 2021).

Website: www.conscious-embodiment.co.uk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/preandperinatal

This workshop is focusing on how we can normalise, include and work with disgust as part of body-oriented trauma-therapy. Anger is often more known and included in body-psychotherapy than disgust is. Disgust is often hidden within hypo-patterns – and thus hidden under anger. They both play a role in re-establishing boundaries after trauma – but in very different ways.

Disgust establishes boundaries from deep inside – and supports us in being able to get rid of something toxic. Anger is focused on taking action outgoing. The methods that are functional when working with anger don’t work in relation to disgust. We will introduce a specific bodily methodology that supports regulation of disgust – and we will explore what emerges bodily and emotionally after this regulation. The workshop includes a short theoretical presentation, practical exercises and exchange in the group. Merete Holm Brantbjerg and Kolbjørn Vårdal are both founders of Relational Trauma Therapy. RTT is specialised in including hypo-states and disgust in trauma-work.

Merete Holm Brantbjerg has worked since 1978 as a body-psychotherapist and since 1985 as a trainer in Denmark and internationally. She is a co-founder of Bodynamic Analysis – and she is the founder since 2003 of Relational Trauma Therapy (RTT) together with Kolbjørn Vårdal. RTT is a psychomotor, neurocentric and systems-oriented approach. She is specialized in including hypo-states in trauma-work.

Kolbjørn Vårdal is a body psychotherapist with a master’s degree in Violence and Traumatic Stress. Since 2001, he has worked in Oslo as a teacher, supervisor, and psychotherapist. Since 2003, he has co-developed Relational Trauma Therapy together with Merete Holm Brantbjerg. He is specialized in using neurologically informed practices in body-oriented trauma therapy.

Primarily experiential, participants will enjoy a day of easefully paced learning. Included will be perspectives on client work that will speed the stage of stabilization, build agency, and offer a glimpse into the organic arising of non-dual and non-conceptual states. You are warmly invited to come as you are, bring your curiosities and therapeutic challenges, and rest into a productive day that promises to be as restful and connective as it will be practical and illuminating. The day’s tools have been refined and tested with professional trauma therapists and their clients over 20 years. Participants will receive incisive therapeutic maps, clinical feedback, numerous experiential “A-ha’s”, felt-meanings and belly-laughs. The practices will help participants work with greater ease and confidence by facilitating the states most suitable for organic self-organization.

Steve Hoskinson is the founder of Organic Intelligence®. He is an internationally recognized teacher, mentor and author in Post-Trauma Growth (PTG). Over the past 20 years, he has presented at professional conferences globally, and trained thousands of helping professionals worldwide. Steve has served as Adjunct Faculty for JFK School of Psychology, Advisory Board Member for The Trauma Foundation, the US Association for Body Psychotherapy, International Transformational Resilience Coalition (ITRC), and former Senior International Instructor for the SE ® Trauma Institute.

This experiential workshop engages the EABP Congress theme, Body Psychotherapy at the Edge: Moving Through Polarities, by exploring how our bodies organize around power, difference, and threat – and how therapeutic spaces can reproduce or transform these dynamics. Rather than treating polarization as abstract ideology, we approach it as embodied inheritance and adaptive strategy. Through sociometric mapping, kinesthetic empathy, nonverbal communication practices, guided somatic exercises, and small-group dialogue, participants will experience how relational fields organize around difference. The focus is practical: developing embodied skills to recognize, regulate, and work constructively with sociopolitical charge in the therapy room and beyond.

Learning Objectives

• Develop ethically grounded practices for integrating social awareness into somatic work.
• Identify how sociopolitical polarization manifests somatically in individuals and groups.
• Apply principles of embodied activism within clinical body psychotherapy practice.
• Recognize nervous system responses linked to power, privilege, marginalization, and threat.
• Facilitate relational regulation in charged therapeutic and group contexts.

Rae Johnson, PhD, RSW, RSMT, is a somatic psychotherapist, educator, and activist-scholar integrating body psychotherapy with social justice praxis. The author of Embodied Social Justice (2017) and Embodied Activism (2023) they teach internationally on embodied activism, relational embodiment, and collective nervous system awareness, supporting practitioners to engage sociopolitical realities through grounded, ethically attuned somatic practice. Rae is a professor of somatic psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

This half-day workshop invites psychotherapists to explore liminality as a living force in
clinical practice. Drawing on Celtic wisdom, somatic awareness, ecotherapy and dreamwork,
we will examine how thresholds – whether personal crisis, global uncertainty, or the
therapeutic encounter – can become places of genuine transformation rather than mere
disruption. Through experiential exercises, reflective practice and group inquiry, participants will develop practical and embodied ways of holding the not-knowing in their clients, and in
themselves.

Margaret Brady is a psychotherapist, spiritual companion and supervisor-in-training based in
Dublin, Ireland. She holds an MA in Consciousness Studies from John F. Kennedy
University and an MSc in Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy from Dublin City
University. She is an accredited member of the Irish Association for Humanistic and
Integrative Psychotherapy (IAHIP). Margaret trained in spiritual companionship through the
International Anam Cara Apprenticeship, for which she co-teaches a track on Living Celtic
Myth. Interests include dreamwork, myth, spiritual development and ecopsychology.
Margaret can be contacted at info@margaretbrady.ie

Anna Fiona Keogh is a dance movement psychotherapist and clinical supervisor based in Wicklow, Ireland. Anna Fiona has worked in Ireland since 2008 and has a special interest in mental health and addiction. In addition to private practice, she works with St Patrick’s Mental Health Service and with Minding Creative Minds. Originally a social researcher, Anna Fiona has maintained an active interest in research and worked for 16 years as editorial assistant for the International Journal of Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy. She can be contacted through her website, www.movingthemoment.ie.

By the end of this workshop, participants will:

• Cultivate language and courage to speak about what truly matters.
• Develop a deeper relationship with the reality of death
• Explore unconscious fears and beliefs around mortality
• Understand the link between death awareness and vitality
• Connect with the “soul” or inner life as described in depth psychology

Tricia Healy is a biodynamic and integrative psychotherapist and artist who has specialised in palliative care and end of life for many years. She has researched the potential role of the psychotherapist working transpersonally in end of life care (EOLC) and presented her findings at the Palliative Care Research Network Symposium in Dublin in 2025. She is a passionate advocate of open communication in EOLC and has written and delivered several trainings for health care professionals on care of mind, body and soul, on beginning the conversation in EOLC, on self care in the caring professions.

The workshop combines elements of body psychotherapy, humanistic psychology, and experiential work with horses. You’ll gain initial insights into fundamental approaches and methods—but above all, the opportunity to experience firsthand how contact, presence, and resonance shift in interaction with the horse. The focus is on practical exercises, mindful self-awareness, and collective reflection on the experience. You will both observe and engage in contact yourself—on the ground and also in simple guided sequences with the horse. No prior experience with horses is required.

Stefan Ide: Certified psychologist – behavioral therapy, integrative body psychotherapy, equine-assisted psychotherapy, trauma therapy. Lecturer in body psychotherapy at Sigmund Freud University Berlin and others. Leader of training groups in equine-assisted body psychotherapy at his own horse farm in Brandenburg, 40 km north of Berlin; 1st chair of the German Association for Body Psychotherapy (DGK) since 2021.

(French Translation) A La Recherche Du Noyau Sain En Passant Sous Les Résistances Émotionnelles: Les manques chroniques ou les traumas créent une perte de sensibilité pour protéger la vulnérabilité de l’Etre. Dans cet atelier, il sera expérimenté comment relâcher les réflexes de sursaut chroniques par l’imagerie , différentes expériences sensorielles, et la connexion d’archétypes structurants. On réveillera des mémoires archaïques d’accueil inconditionnel et sécurisant qui nous ramènent irrésistiblement vers la radiance de notre noyau vivant.

Christiane Lewin is a body work therapist since 1981, a trainer, supervisor and lecturer. She is as well the co- founder and co-director of the Ecole Biodynamique (Biodynamic School) in Montpellier – France – since 1987 and responsible for the French Biodynamic Psychology Schools’ training program. As an international training manager, she teaches Biodynamic Psychotherapy in Europe, Latin America and Japan. She is invited by other international Schools.