A Day of Circling & Deep Shadow Work

Saturday, July 5th · 10am – 4pm : : Armstrong, BC

Your Facilitators

Charmaine is an intuitive somatic practitioner with a rare gift for helping people drop below the mind and into what the body already knows — the deeper knowing that's been there all along, waiting to be heard. There is a quiet depth to the way she works that speaks of someone still travelling, still listening, still curious about what lies beneath. She has a way of slowing things down just enough that what's been held beneath the surface finds its way up, and when it does, people often find they've been carrying it far longer than they realized.

Liesa has been sitting with people in the depths of their shadow material from the time she was young. She knows this territory from the inside — having walked her own long path through the kind of darkness that either breaks you or opens you wide. It opened her. Deeply intuitive and unshakeable in the places that matter, people often describe working with her as feeling simultaneously seen and completely safe to fall apart, held by a fierce, grounded compassion that makes the darker territory feel navigable rather than overwhelming.

~ Anger that had to be swallowed.

~ Grief that never got to finish.

~ Fear that stayed long after the moment passed.

What Actually Happens on a Day Like This?

Most of us have learned, one way or another, to manage. To keep things moving, stay functional, not make too much of a fuss. And it works — until it doesn't. Until the anxiety that won't quite go away, the relationship pattern that keeps repeating, the low-level heaviness that's just become background noise, starts to feel like it might be worth looking at more honestly.

This day is built on a simple but radical premise: that the emotions we never fully felt didn't go anywhere. They got stored. In the body, in our nervous systems, in the ways we pull back or push too hard or go quiet when something touches an old wound. And that stored material — the grief that got interrupted, the anger that had to be swallowed, the fear that had nowhere to go — doesn't need to be analysed or explained. It needs to be felt. All the way through. In the presence of others who can hold it with you.

Circling is a relational practice that creates conditions for radical honesty and real contact. It works by slowing everything down — bringing genuine attention to what's actually happening between people, beneath the social surface. In a Circling space, what's usually unspoken becomes speakable. What's usually hidden becomes visible. And in being seen, something in us relaxes that didn't know it was braced.

The somatic shadow work woven through the day uses the body as the entry point rather than the mind. Rather than talking about what's difficult, we learn to feel where it lives — the tightness in the chest, the held breath, the constriction in the throat — and to stay with it long enough for something to complete. This is the work of finishing what was left unfinished. And it moves faster than most people expect, because the body already knows what it's been carrying. It's been waiting for permission to put it down.

What tends to emerge over the course of a day like this is hard to fully describe in advance. People cry. People laugh. People say things they've never said out loud and feel the relief of having said them. Old armour softens. A story that's been running in the background for years quietly loses its charge. The particular magic of doing this in a group is that one person's honesty gives permission for another's — the courage becomes contagious, and the room builds a momentum that makes things possible that wouldn't be possible alone.

People leave differently than they arrived. Not fixed — that's not what this is. Lighter, and more themselves. With a felt sense of what becomes possible when you stop managing and start meeting what's actually there.