Embodied resilience for apocalyptic times
“Our bodies have answers to questions that we don’t know how to ask.”
- Katherine May
What is embodied resilience?
Resilience is often understood in highly individualistic terms as the ability to bounce back from adversity. Such an understanding of resilience doesn’t recognise that adversity, suffering and oppression are very unevenly distributed across society.
It risks individualising things that are systemic and pathologising normal responses to oppressive conditions.
Embodied resilience is about expanding our inner resources so that we can collectively and intentionally change the conditions that create our stress, injustice, trauma, burnout or alienation in the first place.
I’m a certified facilitator of the Resilience Toolkit, a somatic approach to first-stage trauma healing and real-time stress navigation that is deeply rooted in the political context of our individual and collective lives.
Stress and trauma diminish our capacity to be present, socially connected and respond with intention. This means that without practice, we replicate the very structures that have caused our stress and trauma in the first place (individualism, supremacy, colonialism, ableism, you name it), particularly when we’re under pressure.
By learning embodied resilience, we can develop the inner capacity to stay connected to ourselves and each other, find stability in the chaos, recognise boundaries, de-escalate stress and conflict when it is safe to do so, grieve together, repair harm and, most importantly, access more choice about how we respond in the moment.
Doing so enables more freedom, coherence, tolerance and connection to ourselves, each other and the world around us.
This is inner work that is intentionally connected to what is happening politically and societally around us.
What does it look like in practice?
Embodied resilience is a mix of body-based practices, systemic frameworks and tools to understand how our bodies try to keep us safe.
The practices are simple, portable and adaptable and can be practised anywhere in under 2 minutes. They help the body de-escalate its stress response when it’s safe to do so.
Some of the practices include gentle physical movement, which is optional and can be adapted to your body.
The work is gentle by design, not because the challenges are small, but because gentleness is what allows change to happen without getting overwhelmed or traumas being triggered.
In my sessions, we explore a range of frameworks for understanding stress and resilience and try out different practices together to find out which ones work for your body.
Over time, regular practice helps you grow the capacity to:
Notice your own activation in real time
Discern whether it is proportionate to the situation
Access more choice about how you respond
Know which tools to use to de-escalate your inner stress response
Become more resourced and capable of navigating difficult situations and doing hard things together with other people
This enables you to not only build more stability inside of yourself but also to show up in collective spaces with greater capacity for difference, change, complexity and uncertainty as well as connection, imagination and creativity.
Learn skills, practices and frameworks that help you build both stability and flexibility in your nervous system so that you can navigate the escalating crises we are living through with more intention, connection and freedom.
The free taster sessions are a great way to experience the approach before deciding to go deeper. I look forward to meeting you at one of them!
Learn embodied resilience skills
This 90-minute interactive session offers you an introduction to embodied resilience practices and frameworks, which includes learning how to recognise stress in your body and practising different ways of grounding yourself in the moment.
Upcoming dates:
Thursday, 15 January 2026 from 12-1pm GMT on Zoom
This intro session offers you:
An expanded definition of resilience that is collective rather than individual and recognises how systems and institutions shape our lives
A deeper understanding of how trauma, stress and burnout impact our collective capacity to create change
The chance to try out embodied resilience practices that help settle the nervous system in a supportive environment where all practices are invitational
A space to connect with others who are interested connecting the personal and the structural for the purpose of collective change
I offer these sessions for free to give people a chance to experience the approach before deciding if this is something they want to explore further. I ask for feedback in return so that I can keep making this as relevant and accessible as possible.
Spaces are limited to enable more safety and interaction.
This 3-hour interactive workshop (with breaks) teaches you the theoretical grounding as well as the practices of embodied resilience, which enable you to build more stability in your individual nervous system and strengthen collective resilience.
Upcoming dates:
Thursday, 8 January 2026 from 2-5pm GMT on Zoom
In this workshop, you will learn how to:
Identify your stress state by reading subtle signs from your body
Assess whether your stress response is proportional to the present situation
De-escalate your stress response using a range of simple body-based tools
Normalise and de-pathologise the survival strategies your body has developed to keep you safe
The session offers you:
Knowledge of how our bodies respond to stress and how to read the signs that indicate different levels of stress
An understanding of how survival strategies shape our stress response and the impact this has on our body and social relationships
Critical awareness of how the social, political and economic context impact a person’s stress and resilience
Experiential learning and practice in a supportive environment and alongside others interested both embodied and political work
Cost ranges from £25-£60
1-hour sessions on Zoom at a time that works for you
These are tailored sessions for anyone who wants to figure out how they can resource themselves to create the change for the world they long for.
Working 1-to-1 allows us to take a much closer look at the specific challenges you are navigating and how you can embed embodied resilience practices to create more spaciousness, stability and freedom inside yourself and the work you do out in the world.
The sessions are designed to support you to:
Explore the factors that are currently expanding / diminishing your resilience
Set specific goals for changes you want to aim towards
Understand your default stress response and how it has been shaped by your survival strategies
Identify tools and practices that work for your body to down-regulate your stress response in the moment
Develop a sustainable, tailored practice recipe that you can embed into your daily routine
Track shifts over time, adapt the practice recipe as needed and celebrate big and small changes
The first session is a chance for you to find out if this approach and working with me is right for you.
It will involve some gentle practices and me asking you some intake questions to understand your context better. You will also be able to ask me any questions.
If you’d like to continue after the first session, I ask for a commitment of 5 sessions so that we have a good chance of tracking some shifts over time.
Cost ranges from £60-£140 per session - you pick the contribution that is right for your context.
Feel free to set up a 30-minute call with me to ask any questions and have a chat before signing up.
Boost your team’s resilience
If you have you been asking yourself:
How your team, organisation or group can navigate an increasingly challenging working environment?
Whether you and your team members can sustain working under a lot of external pressure?
How you can best support the people or clients you work with who are dealing with a lot of stress and trauma?
How you can navigate internal tensions and conflict in ways that allow people to stay in relationship?
How you can give and receive generative feedback without sending people over the edge?
Why people are often over-reacting to situations at work in ways that seem disproportionate?
What to do about staff turnover and how you can better support people to stay?
Know that you are not alone with these questions. Many teams, groups and organisations working are operating in an incredibly difficult environment marked by increasing pressure and scarcity. Burnout, exhaustion and internal tensions are not a sign of failure, but a symptom of our times.
By clearly naming the sources of stress, identifying what is within your control to change and learn language and tools to navigate challenges with more intention and spaciousness, you can expand your staff’s individual and your team’s collective capacity to sustain its work, deal with conflict and uncertainty and adapt to change.
I’d love to support you and your team to sustain yourselves and your work in the long term.
A study by Lumos Transforms, published in November 2025, tracked the impact of embodied resilience practice over 11 weeks with nearly 120 participants from six rights organisations.
The data showed significant increases in internal stability and relational capacity across the participating organisations.
What participants have said