Empower yourself, dear feeler: Emotions 101 with Yoga
Harness your super power as a feeler: the intelligence of your emotions.
Explore cutting-edge teaching on what emotions are, their evolutionary purpose & neurobiology. Embody what you learn through yoga & emotional mindfulness practices.
Emotions are adaptive, meaning they help us respond to what’s going on around us... if we know how to work with them.
If we don’t then emotions can be... Overwhelming. Scary! Something we shove down to keep moving.
Plus society makes us feel confused and shitty about having them.
No wonder we struggle so much!
But luckily we don’t have to.
Science & wisdom traditions have caught up to each other. We now have a wealth of evidence-based, time-tested tools to demystify emotions and harness their innate wisdom. Especially to navigate these changing times.
In my five-part course I introduce you to some foundational education on emotions that I believe every person deserves to have.
Based on the award-winning book It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LSW you’ll learn the evolutionary purpose behind your emotions, a map for tracking what you experience, and practical skills to work with your emotions in your mind and body.
We’ll cover anxiety, overwhelm, rage, grief, and joy. In each section I’ll share background material to feed your thinking brain & a yoga practice so you can explore what you learn in your own mind and body.
The yoga practices include yogic techniques like asana or physical poses, breath, and meditation, as well as more general emotional mindfulness and movement. Things that invite you to slow down and come into your body to explore what you’re experiencing. As you cultivate this new awareness, we’ll use trauma-informed practices to make sure this is done in a safe and responsible way.
This course is a space for you to better understand how you experience emotions, and through that how you interact with the world.
By doing so we can learn to stop fighting our emotions—and better understand why we’re avoiding them in the first place—and instead learn to harness their power for our own well-being and service to the world.
I welcome you, your inner child, your many parts, your ancestors, your experiences, and your aspirations to this course.
May what we do here be of service to the changing times we live in. And the way these changing times speak to us through our bodies, minds, and hearts.
“Emotions are wired into us by eons of evolution. Their purpose is not to scare us or overwhelm us but to help us cope with our environments and thus enhance our adaptation. Emotion and bodily sensation often reveal us to ourselves.”
Join Empower yourself, dear feeler to:
Learn the Change Triangle, a map to help you navigate your emotional experiences and move towards feeling better.
Understand the evolutionary purpose of your anger, anxiety, sadness and joy.
Learn the neurobiology of how emotions work in the mind and body.
Learn what defenses and inhibitory emotions are and how to lovingly work with them.
Build body-based skills for working with the sensations of your emotions.
Gain healing-centered tools to strengthen your work in the world: reduce burnout, cultivate resilience, firm up your boundaries, root in your sense of purpose.
Better equip yourself to be a healing conduit for things like collective grief and ancestral trauma.
Deepen your subtle activism skills with greater self-awareness. Your presence becomes a service to the world.
Learn practical skills for working with:
Here’s what you can expect from the course:
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From the neuroscience to the evolutionary perspective. Walk away with a concrete understanding of what emotions are and how best to work with them. Go deep on anxiety & overwhelm, anger & rage, sadness & grief, and joy & excitement. Based on the award-winning book It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LSW.
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That feed your thinking brain. Each of the five sections includes a video with background material on the topic. Take notes, print out slides. Learn frameworks for thinking about your emotions you can carry forward.
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Use mindfulness and embodiment practices to explore what you learned in in the video lesson in your own mind and body. Each section provides gentle experiential exercises coupled with yogic techniques, like asana, breath, and meditation.
The yoga practices can be used in 2 different ways: 1) To support you with emotional energy you are feeling in the moment (anger, sadness, overwhelm..). Or 2) to explore how certain emotions show up in your mind and body through working with memories. Both are valuable. You can return to the practices again and again.
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Your health and safety are top priority. Everything offered integrates trauma-informed practices to ensure that inner exploration is done in a safe and responsible way. Use the self-paced nature of the course to go at your own pace. If something doesn’t feel right, step back and reach out for additional support.
Course price
Cost: $60
Sliding scale available upon request, please reach out: connect@wehealforall.com.
Liz Moyer Benferhat
Instructor
Hi, I’m Liz, MPA-DP, 200 YTT 👋 a longtime change maker and norm shaker in the fields of sustainable development and social change, so I know how much heart goes into caring about our world. As a self-identified ‘feeler,’ I’ve been an advocate of feelings my whole life. That’s why in 2018 I launched We Heal For All to offer people healing-centered tools to work with the many normal feelings that come with being alive and attuned to the changes going on in our world - both changes outside of us and within us.
With so much changing at such a rapid pace, it’s my hope that this course can help you better understand what you’re experiencing and explore what wisdom and insight your emotions have about how best to be of service. I hope you walk away with practical tools you can use to thrive in your work and way of being, and help usher in the heart-based consciousness shifts we need to address our world’s challenges.
This course has been such a joy to put together. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
Check out my emotions blog series to get a sense of the course’s content
