Team resilience
“We have to get really quiet and listen… we can’t use the same models of progress and push and control and forcing things to happen. We’re really being asked to approach [things] very very differently.”
- Francis Weller
What is embodied resilience for teams?
Embodied resilience is a trauma-informed, somatic approach to real-time stress navigation that expands people’s capacity to navigate difficult situations with more stability, freedom and coherence and without burning out.
It is a highly effective form of training and support for teams who want to sustain doing difficult work in challenging contexts, deal with conflict and uncertainty and adapt to change.
It consists of both theory and daily practices that your staff can embed into their day-to- day work routines in a way that is easeful and sustainable, even when there is little time or motivation. Through regular practice, people will learn to:
Identify their stress level in real time
Discern whether that level of stress is helpful to the situation they are in
De-escalate their stress response using a range of practices if it’s safe to do so
Access more internal safety and stability to change the conditions that are causing their stress in the first place
This builds the foundation not only for individual healing but for collective transformation.
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.
Why does it matter?
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?
If any of these questions resonate, know that you are not alone in asking them.
Organisations are working under increasingly difficult conditions, with a huge demand on their services and perpetual struggles to make ends meet. The people who run them often feel the weight of those challenges – they are trying to help, witness and support while also reckoning with the limits of their own capacity, an increasingly divisive political rhetoric and on-going injustice.
In such a context, people’s survival responses are activated a lot of the time, leading to chronic stress, interpersonal conflict, cynicism, burnout and illness. This diminishes the collective capacity of the organisation and the wider sector to change the systems that create the injustices they are trying to address in the first place.
These struggles are not a sign of failure, but a symptom of the challenging times we are in.
Embodied resilience is an approach that recognises the connection between people’s individual experiences and the collective, systemic reality around them and intentionally brings them into conversation.
In doing so, this approach resists individualising things that are systemic (such as the chronic lack of time and resource) nor does it pathologise normal responses to impossible conditions (such as overwork, exhaustion or dissociation).
Instead, embodied resilience helps people expand their inner resources and gain more access to presence, stability, freedom and capacity to do the collective work of changing the conditions around them that diminish their resilience in the first place.
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 stress responses that are too strong, last too long or are no longer helpful
This brings more stability, balance and coherence into the nervous system, which enables more presence and helps prevent chronic stress and burnout.
At a collective level, embodied resilience creates the foundation for things like:
People being able to notice their own boundaries and limitations before they have been crossed, which prevents burnout and enables sustainable working
Expanded trust and safety across a team, which prevents fragmentation
Increased ability to communicate with more emotional clarity and presence, which prevents misunderstandings and conflict
Increased ability to receive critical feedback without getting panicked or defensive, which builds integrity and leadership
Learning to recognise other people’s stress responses and how to offer them support in moments of stress activation, which enables mutual care
Learning to navigate tension and conflict in ways that preserve rather than rupture relationships, which strengthens team cultures and prevents staff turnover
Having access to more creativity, ideas and imagination, which unlocks new strategic possibilities for the work of the organisation