Team resilience
“We have to get really quiet and listen… we can’t use the same models of progress and push and control and force things to happen. We’re really being asked to approach [things] very, very differently.”
- Francis Weller
What is embodied resilience for teams?
Embodied resilience for teams is a 12-week online training and practice programme.
It expands your team’s capacity to navigate change, challenges and uncertainty with clarity, courage and care.
The programme teaches participants the foundations of embodied resilience, a highly practical, trauma-informed approach to real-time stress navigation.
You will come away with:
Practical skills to manage stressful situations, both individually and collectively, without burning out
Greater awareness of yours and other people’s patterns around stress and trauma
Clarity about how you can strengthen the team’s collective resilience
What participants have said
What are the benefits?
Embodied resilience unlocks benefits both at individual and collective levels.
At an individual level, it supports people to:
Notice their stress activation in real time
De-escalate their stress response if it is safe to do so
Change their stress response if it is too strong, lasts too long or is no longer helpful
This brings more stability, balance and coherence into the nervous system.
This, in turn, enables more presence and helps prevent chronic stress and burnout.
At a collective level, embodied resilience expands people’s capacity to:
Notice their own boundaries and limitations before they have been crossed, which enables sustainable working
Increase trust and safety across a team, which prevents fragmentation
Grow their ability to communicate with more emotional clarity and presence, which prevents misunderstandings
Increase their ability to receive feedback without getting panicked or defensive, which builds integrity
Recognise other people’s stress responses and how to offer them support, which enables mutual care
Navigate tension and conflict in ways that preserve rather than rupture relationships, which strengthens team cultures
Access more creativity, ideas and imagination, which unlocks new strategic possibilities
A 2025 study by Lumos Transforms 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.
Why embodiment?
Our bodies are microcosms of the whole world. They hold vital information about us and our environments that we can learn to tap into.
However, in the dominant culture, cognitive skills are seen as superior to embodied knowledge.
Embodiment is an antidote to dehumanisation, division and disconnection.
Our bodies are not only a powerful tool but a doorway to ourselves, to each other, to our imagination and our shared humanity.
Why resilience?
Resilience is often understood in individualistic terms as the capacity to endure and bounce back from ever more difficult conditions.
This ignores the systems, relationships and wider conditions that shape our lives, stress and trauma.
Embodied resilience reframes resilience as inherently collective.
It sees resilience not as bouncing back from injustice and dehumanisation, but bouncing forward together to create a world that includes all of us.
What’s the methodology?
Embodied resilience is a multi-modal approach based on The Resilience Toolkit. It combines the following cognitive and embodied elements:
Body-based practices
Simple, portable and adaptable exercises that can be practised anywhere and in under 2 minutes to help the body de-escalate its stress response when it’s safe to do so.
Systemic frameworks
Designed to help you put your own experience into a wider systemic context and illuminate the connection between personal embodied practice and collective action.
Scientific models
Drawing on models from neuroscience, ethology, psychology to illustrate how stress manifests in the body, mind and emotions and how our survival responses are shaped by the conditions around us.
Peer learning
Learning, reflecting, co-regulating and building community with people who share similar questions are central for expanding individual and collective capacity and resilience.
Trauma-informed facilitation
Trauma often occurs when people have no choice. Agency, care and collaboration are central. Everything we do is invitational, so you can choose what works for you and let go what doesn’t.
What does a typical programme look like?
I work with teams for an initial period of 12 weeks to lay the foundations, embed the practices into their daily routines and adapt them as we track shifts over time.
All sessions are delivered over Zoom, which makes the programme suitable for remote or geographically dispersed teams.
The programme below can be tailored according to organisational needs, schedules and priority issues.
Month 1: Foundations
1 scoping session (1 hour)
1 learning workshop (3 hours)
3 weekly practice sessions (1 hour)
Learning outcomes:
Building trust and safety across the group (a pre-requisite for practice)
Expanding common notions of resilience to include a collective dimension
Learning to read signs of stress and relaxation in the body
Distinguishing between fight, flight and freeze
Familiarity with baseline practices
Month 2: Embedding
1-to-1 check ins - optional (1 hour)
1 learning workshop (3 hours)
3 weekly practice sessions (1 hour)
Learning outcomes:
Understanding how survival responses are shaped
Identifying risk factors and protective factors for resilience at work (incl. what can / cannot be changed)
Developing individual and collective ‘tiny habits’ that can fit into the team’s daily routines
Deepening personal understanding and practice (optional)
Month 3: Expanding
1 celebration (1 hour)
1 learning workshop (3 hours)
3 weekly practice sessions (1 hour)
Learning outcomes:
Embedding ‘tiny habits’ into the team culture and everyday processes
Working in buddy groups to build collective accountability
Reflecting on wider implications for the work of the organisation and/or sector
Identifying and celebrating shifts in individual and collective capacity
Why does it matter?
Developing embodied and relational skills is essential internal infrastructure for navigating increasingly challenging environments.
The difficulties people face at work, in their own lives and in the wider world require more than a cognitive approach because they impact people physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
This shows up as burnout, internal conflict, illness, high staff turnover or people over-reacting to situations at work in ways that seem disproportionate.
These issues are not a sign of failure, but a symptom of the challenging times we are in.
Organisations are working under increasingly difficult conditions, with a huge demand on their services, often perpetual struggles to make ends meet and an increasingly divisive political rhetoric.
In such a context, people’s survival responses are activated a lot of the time. This diminishes the collective capacity of the organisation and the wider sector to change the systems that create the issues they are trying to address in the first place.
Embodied resilience is an approach that recognises the connection between people’s individual experiences and the systemic reality around them and intentionally brings them into conversation.
It builds up people’s embodied, emotional and relational capacity so they can show up to collective change work with more presence, stability and flexibility.
In doing so, it resists individualising things that are systemic (such as the chronic lack of time and resource) or pathologising normal responses to impossible conditions (such as overwork, exhaustion or dissociation).
With compassion, gentleness and a clear understanding of how systems of power operate, this work invites everyone into a shared process that builds connection, intimacy and trust as well as immediate application into the team’s day-to-day work.