Creating Safer Spaces for Relationship & Healing: Shelby Leigh

It has become common to talk about creating safer spaces for healing work. And this is a good thing. Everyone in the field of conscious sensuality, embodiment, and healing work should be looking to improve their practice and rise to higher standards of care, support, awareness, and sensitivity.

At the same time, it has also become common to resist this advancement in favour of the idea that self-development spaces should reflect the level of safety in the outside world. And sometimes, for some people, the world can feel really dangerous. People who take this view might say that this is how we learn resilience, or how we can turn difficulty into growth. 

But for our guest in this episode, somatic psychotherapist Shelby Leigh, if we are interested in the resolution of the trauma that affects so many of our lives, the spaces we enter for healing simply must be environments grounded in values of connection, responsibility, and trust. 

For Leigh, trauma is anything that overwhelms us, and it can stay with us if we never have a chance to naturally complete our body’s survival response to that overwhelming thing. The feeling of overwhelm can stay with us, separating us from our sense of belonging in the world, and inhibiting our capacity for healthy relationships. 

In her conversation with ISTA facilitator, Usha Rose, Leigh speaks about just how important it is to learn skills of self-regulation, stillness, and boundaries in a safe environment. It is then that we are in a great position to step into the revolutionary practice of taking those skills into the dynamic, playful, and perhaps riskier outside world. 

Some of the topics covered in this episode are: 

• Relating with others as the medicine we need.
  
  
• Understanding your ‘attachment style.’
  
  
• Growing up with narcissistic parents. 
  
  
• When complex trauma gets misdiagnosed as ADHD or anxiety. 
  
  
• Protocols for people working in healing spaces.
  
  
• Not pushing past your ‘no.’ 
  
  
• Stepping slowly into healing spaces. 
  
  
• Nervous system regulation as meditation. 

You can learn more about Shelby at her website: https://www.shelby-leigh.com/

And to learn more about ISTA, visit our website: https://ista.life/

Or follow us on social media: @ista.community