Apprenticing with Irene over 12 weeks brought about a major, salutary lifestyle change for me. It’s not just the lessons/labs themselves but her optimistic, grounded spirit, the supportive facebook community, and how she weaves in the very personal and intimate phone calls with theory and practice. The experience is like be-friending your body at a deeper level while fine-tuning your awareness of how it interfaces with your emotions, your environment, and deeper memories and experiences. It’s a renaissance blend of science and humanity that feels like an antidote to a modern world that is overly segmented and compartmentalized. It is both remedial education and a radical, root-level healing journey.
Irene deconstructs the body’s underlying processes so that you begin to sense on an intuitive level the patterns of holding and/or overload lying just beneath your conscious awareness, allowing you to bring more focus and choice into how you relate with your body, allowing gentle releases and re-organization over time. It sounds esoteric, but is very down-to-earth. Her integration of many disciplines – Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Kathy Kain’s Somatic Touch, and the work of Moshe Feldenkrais – creates a “toolbox” that works for those with a severely compromised nervous system perhaps accompanied by disease as well as for those needing help in unwinding shocks to their system to gain back nervous/emotional stability and resiliency. The effectiveness of the program is in large part due to Irene’s embodied, intimate style of delivery, shaped by her own well-regulated nervous system. This piece is key, for in nervous system recovery, the teacher’s level of healing resonates with and influences your own.
Results are palpable. I entered the program after a cathartic workshop that had re-awakened old traumatic memories too quickly, resulting in what my network chiropractor called an “imploded” nervous system. With Irene, I immediately started feeling more energy and “support” during even the most basic neurosensory exercises. I could sense I was on the right path. By the end of the program, my chiropractor said my system was “more flowing with better organized energy”, the coherence Irene speaks of. As I continue to work with her “toolbox” on my own, his most recent diagnosis was that “you now have a solid foundation/structure so that your energy is not constantly ricocheting around and compensating but is now manageable.” I am so grateful that Irene came into my life when she did so that I could turn a major corner in my life.
