Open to New Possibilities
We had an interesting beginning to the New Year. We were approached by our TRE® Trainer who is also on the Board of Directors for TRE® for All to make a voluntary contribution of our time for the TRE® Advanced Training Online which ran in February this year. The details that lead up to the request are not for me to divulge, but Eric and I thought that it would be a good opportunity to get to know more people from the TRE® community as well as to provide our support for the sharing and development of TRE®, so we said “yes”.
Learning at a run
The work turned out to be quite a bit more challenging than we had initially thought, including having to learn how to edit a website which had been set up in a way which was unfamiliar to us in addition to having to help registrants sort out payment related matters and deal with questions which we didn’t always have the answers for simply because it took time for information and decisions by the board to trickle down to us.
I can’t speak for Eric, but it was a steep learning curve for me, especially the more technical aspects of the work. And as the course date drew closer, it seemed like everything intensified because many people were keen to attend the workshop. In the end, the initial target we had been set turned out to be modest because we had about 300 sign ups.
It was an amazing experience to get to be a part of the bringing of the event together, and we were fortunate to have great support in terms of the people from the board whom we were able to turn to for help, as well as from the original organizers of the event when it had been planned as an on-site event before Covid-19 had forced a change of plans.
Finally, it was time to attend the workshop itself and it didn’t disappoint. Apart from the featured speakers, Dr. David Berceli, Dr. Stephen Porges and Dr. Sue Carter, there were many other experienced TRE® community trainers and providers who stepped up to share what they had been practicing in their communities, and it was tremendously enriching to watch and listen to everyone.
Some of my key takeaways from the whole experience include:
The 2021 TRE® Online Advanced Training ran from 13 – 16 February this year, and we hope they will run a similar event again because we learnt so much from attending!
While it didn’t require any kind of tech genius to make it happen, I’m proud of having been able to contribute the schedule poster for the event. The coloured table below were the time zones for participants to have an easier time (hopefully) getting a sense of when the workshops would be running live for where they were.
The most important thing is
to be present to the being that is in front of you.
While there is some solid science behind our ability to co-regulate and to vibrationally affect the spaces that we occupy, there is something exceptionally powerful about being in the space of someone who has allowed you to be a witness to what they are going through and what they are processing, and it is similarly powerful for you to let them know that you see them, you receive them and you are there for them.
It is the whole WHY of my choosing to become a coach, a TRE® provider, a CST therapist;
it is part of why teaching is still a passion for me even though I want to explore teaching new things in a new way in this phase of my life.
would I be giving myself the chance to experience?
Grounding myself by keeping the bigger picture in view.
There were so many challenges along the way, some of them technical, some of them human and some of them simply emerging from within as old things got triggered and brought to the surface to let me know they were still there.
And when at one point things had taken an unexpected turn and Eric and I were presented an opportunity to tap out, we decided that we would stick with it because of the bigger picture.
And the bigger picture that really grounded me more than anything wasn’t that the event was happening right the next week or even that if we stepped out, someone would have to scramble to fill the gap, but that these are the choices that make up the journey of our souls, all our souls together toward becoming more wise, more the versions of ourselves that we work hard every day to get closer to being. And on that journey, I wasn’t about to give up on myself or on what I knew I could do to make things happen.
What would life be if I took care to remind myself to be grounded in this knowing all the time?
What we need is to live by love, not fear
There was a whole segment of content that was entirely about the kinds of hormones / chemicals / molecules that our bodies produce which create different kinds of effects under stress of when we are calm and open to bonding. And while I was listening I thought: how very interesting because I have been on a journey to explore how I could live more from love rather than fear and what that means, and to hear how much it shows up in our bio-chemistry – that human connection is what makes co-regulation possible and keeps people safe during TRE® sessions and helps with people feeling safe enough, supported enough to start processing what they need to process anyway. It was what makes us open to healing ourselves, and when we feel confident that we can heal ourselves, we believe even more that we can heal our communities.
Sitting and listening and then doing the TRE® shakes with the community for the sessions we managed to attend live (some of the US timings were less than ideal for us here in Singapore) and feeling that connection, that sense of community despite not really knowing anyone, it really made me wonder:
Really, is loving so hard?
What kind of a world would I be helping to create if I could just be a little more open to love today, enough to heal even a small part of myself? And what if, having experienced that healing, I perhaps come to the conclusion that I have the courage to love a little more after all?
***
I am grateful that we had the opportunity to participate in the way that we did, to not merely attend but to be involved in helping to bring the event together, to close the gap and to feel that we contributed to an amazing event.
More than that, although Eric and I had already formulated the idea of 
, I really felt my creativity get a kick in the butt after the training: I knew better what I wanted to do and what I wanted us to be able to offer, not just to certified TRE® Providers but to all people who need some TRE® to help them heal and to help them cope, people who want to explore what TRE® – and their systems – could be. Much of the clarity that we arrived at came by way of this burst of creativity, and we are excited to move forward and bring what we have to everyone!