
HESTER PHILLIPS
"My deepest self speaks through movement, dance is my native tongue.”
Hester is dedicated to liberating the creative spirit in others and is passionate about how creativity and most especially dance can support and empower people and communities.
Hester holds a Master of Arts in Art Therapy and is a professional Arts Therapist. Hester has a busy private practice where she specialises working with clients living with Trauma using a wide range of embodied practices evolving from the field of Somatic Psychology. Alongside individual clients, Hester co-facilitates four healing groups for trauma survivors each week and is an accredited Open Floor movement meditation teacher and co-founder and director of Conscious Dance Aotearoa. Since 2005, she has facilitated regular conscious dance classes and workshops. Hester has an enduring interest in how collective spaces facilitate or not personal liberation. Hester holds a degree in Political Science and facilitates Conscious Dance spaces that embody the liberation she longs to see in the wider world. Hester is a mother and in her spare time she likes to DJ.
An Intro to Trauma Informed Facilitation
Trauma informed teaching is far more interesting and important than a list of do and don'ts. Trauma Informed (TI) facilitation assumes our nervous systems, bodies and DNA carry imprints from our lifetime and the lifetime of our ancestors that are both useful and not so useful. TI facilitation assumes we bring these imprints with us to learning spaces. TI awareness supports facilitators to speak with respect and safety to these emerging parts. TI facilitation guides participants to an embodied experience of empowerment (power from within). It is innately inclusive, humanising and liberating and it creates the safety that makes real, lasting change not only possible but perhaps inevitable. This workshop is for teachers of any kind.
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