The Politics of Trauma

“The difficult times are the most important times to keep practicing.”

Self-Paced Online ● 8-Modules ● Live Q&A ● Somatic Practice Library ● Movement Leader Interviews

Facilitators and Teachers + Live Q&A

Staci Haines

Erika Lyla

Brandon Sturdivant

Inspiring and clarifying interviews with Movement Leaders and Visionaries to help make meaning of our times

Maria Poblet

Alicia Garza

Marielena Hincapié

Malkia Devich Cyril

Alok Vaid-Menon

Deepak Bhargava

+ Evelyn Lynn, Amado Uno, and May Boeve

Additionally, we’ll be offering FREE Practice and Q&A sessions with Staci for folks enrolled in any of our Politics of Trauma courses, past and present. You’ll have the opportunity to ask Staci anything, make new connections with other participants, and deepen in practice.

The struggles and complexities of our times are uniquely overwhelming, and uniquely ours.

While we are impacted and often traumatized by the polarizing conditions of global politics, ongoing genocide, climate crisis, and rising authoritarianism.  This is a scary time.  We also have the capacity to change, grow, organize and heal on purpose. A beloved teacher once said, “The difficult times are the most important times to keep practicing.”

Transformative, embodied change helps us to more deeply heal, to better organize, to innovate, and to creatively meet our times and our moment — individually and collectively. Embodied transformation empowers us to navigate complexity. 

Join us as we navigate these complexities together. With a program you can tailor to your own timeline —  learn to cultivate your visions and resilience, heal, and practice purposeful action under pressure, while holding joy, love, and relationship amidst it all.

Why practice now? Showing up for our times

In these times, our organizations need us, our communities need us, the Earth needs us, and we need us. We have the chance to prioritize connection and strategy, to hold onto hope, and to purposefully cultivate our resilience. How can we best show up for our times?

The Politics of Trauma Self-Paced Online Program offers a pragmatic understanding of the impacts of personal and collective trauma, and ways to cultivate vision, connection and transformative practice to navigate the contradictions and complexities we are living in. This self-paced program will support you in embodied healing, bringing your longings into practice and action, and cultivating relationships that can weather the chaos of healing and social change. These relationships are integral to our resilience in facing a difficult world, together. 

We can affect life-affirming social change by engaging in our own healing, while joining social and climate justice organizations - bringing our best to our communities.

Embodied practice transforms reactivity
into skillful action.

Through this program you will:

  • Build a joyful and sustaining vision for your life, your leadership, and your social justice work, while staying responsive to what is.

  • Discover the unavoidable embodied habits and reactions we take on to navigate our lives, trauma and oppression, and the challenges of social justice work — and how to transform what doesn’t work anymore.  

  • Learn to generate more trust and range in relationships, and cultivate our ability to learn and grow together — rather than keeping our healing and movements small and protective. 

  • Use transformative practice to strengthen our organizations and movements, not limit them. Cultivate embodied resilience, individually and collectively.

This program is based on three decades of experimentation at the intersection of somatics and social justice, through generationFIVE and transformative justice, generative somatics, and many partnerships with social and climate justice organizations and alliances.

This program is in the Living Lineage of generative somatics and Strozzi Institute. Learn more. 

The Politics of Trauma
“The Difficult Times are the Most Important Times to Keep Practicing” consists of

  • 8 Modules, each with theory, practice, and demos

  • Live Q&A sessions with Staci,  for anyone enrolled in The Politics of Trauma, past & present

  • Movement leaders in social and climate justice  inspire us through interviews that clarify our times

  • Practice Video Library and an online learning platform with handouts, readings, social and climate justice resources and more

  • Self-paced Join with friends, co-workers and community, and get to discover and practice together

Opening Session:
Welcome, Core Practices, and Community

Module One: Joy & Justice in the Apocalypse

We begin by looking at our current conditions, and what it’s like to live individually and collectively amidst so much care and pressure. From there, we introduce a roadmap for embodied transformation and trauma healing that integrates an understanding of how we are shaped by our social and political conditions. We’ll start to get to know our embodied reactions and habits (conditioned tendencies) and how to work with them.

Module Two: Muscle of Imagination: Visions for Change

We’ll learn how declarations ask us to build muscle for visioning and longing. We’ll hold imagination not as a fantasy, but as a faculty of the soul which is necessary to navigate our times. We’ll learn how to be rooted in what is, while creating both personal and collective visions for change. The Body learns on “Yes.”  What do we want to transform toward?

Module Three: Just Resilience & Regenerating Safety

We will ask what resilience is and what it is not, from a social justice perspective, and learn how to cultivate resilience individually and collectively. We’ll explore a somatic understanding of safety and practice regenerating safety from the inside out. We’ll develop embodied skills like consent, boundaries, and requests considering the I, you, and we. We’ll deepen our ability to discern between triggers and challenging experiences, aligning ourselves with our visions for healing and social change.

Module Four: Roots & Depth

We’ll delve into what deeper transformation is (we call it somatic opening) and how to work with our embodied survival strategies. Somatic opening helps us get to the roots of habitual protective reactions that don’t serve our lives or work, and transform them. We’ll learn how expanding our capacity to sense and feel can expand our choices and skillfulness. 

Module Five: Relationship & Complexity

We’ll explore relational skills, and how we can grow together. We’ll learn to expand, to be with complexity, and increase our emotional range. We’ll explore how we can hold contradictions in our relationships and in our movement work together. Somatics understands giving and receiving love as an embodied skill we can learn and cultivate. 

Module Six: Allyship, Practice, & Embodying Our Visions

We’ll delve into allyship—not as a checklist, but as an embodied skill. Allying and being allied with needs to be based on what the soma needs, rebuilding the link between safety and belonging. We’ll consider embodied transformation as a path, and unpack how you can use practices to help you embody your declaration and navigate the space between who you are now, and who you are becoming.

Closing Session: Gratitude and Path

Program and Live Q&A Dates with Staci

You can sign up for this self-paced program anytime!

The Live Q&A sessions for 2025 are: March 19th, June 4th, Sept 10th and Dec 9th

The Politics of Trauma Self-Paced Program: $497

8-Modules • Live Q&A • Somatic Practice Library • Movement Leader Interviews

  • Payment plans are available: 4 monthly payments of $124

  • Sliding scale is available

  • Engage your organization or community! Groups of 20 or more get a 15% discount and a private group session.

    Inquire at support@stacihaines.com.

Early Bird Special through March 2025 - Get $100 off

Sign up now and get the course for $397.

We are committed to making the Politics of Trauma financially accessible. Please read this resource from the Catalyst Project as a guide in understanding class and financial access, then choose what works for you. If you have any further questions, please contact us at support@stacihaines.com.

Learn more about the 2024 program

Sign up to receive the Open House Recording for The Politics of Trauma 2.0: Embodied Transformation in Times of Polarization, Grief and Overwhelm

FAQ

  • You will have access to the course indefinitely.

  • Once registered, you will immediately receive a confirmation email from us. Within 24 hours you will also receive an orientation email with log-in instructions to the online learning platform, Thinkific. Please check your Spam folder if you don’t see the emails. If you still don’t receive the emails, reach out to us at support@stacihaines.com.

  • We encourage you to sign up with other folks to create  a practice pod - either in person or online - and engage the program together. It is also fine to sign up on your own, for a more internal experience.  The program works both ways.  We will have Live Q&A throughout the year to practice together. 

  •  All Politics of Trauma (POT) past and current students - from 2023-24, and 2024-25, as well as the self-paced course will receive email reminders and details on how to join us. 2025 dates are March 19th, June 4th, September 10th, and December 9th.

  • Please do not share your sign-in. We have put a lot of intention, time and resources into this program. If folks cannot afford the 4 monthly payments or the sliding scale- let us know. We’ll get them signed up.

  • Yes, we offer a 15% discount for groups of 20 or more. Contact support@stacihaines.com to register.

  • Yes, we have a sliding scale option of 25% off. Please read this great resource from the Catalyst Project to support you in your decision and as a guide in understanding class and financial access. 

  • We offer a full, no-questions asked refund for 30 days after purchase.

© Staci K. Haines 2025. All Rights Reserved.