Estuary Center for Healing Presents: Regulate Before You Celebrate

About this event

The Estuary Center for Healing Presents:

Regulate Before You Celebrate

The Neuroscience of Nervous System Regulation + Experiential Somatic Tools

Old triggers. New moves.

The holidays have a funny way of bringing old stuff right back to the surface.

You can understand exactly why you react the way you do and still find your nervous system reacting before your thinking brain has caught up. Insight helps. But nervous systems don’t necessarily update just because we understand them. In this two-hour experiential training, we’ll look at one of the more current ways researchers and clinicians are thinking about trauma: predictive processing. Instead of only asking, “Where is trauma stored?” we’ll ask, “What is the nervous system predicting, and what kinds of experiences help it update?”

Then we’ll get out of the chairs.

Using Kali Connection Therapy® (KCT), we’ll work with movement, bilateral stimulation, rhythm, co-regulation, play, and partnered exercises so you can experience these ideas instead of just hearing about them.

KCT's regulating and co-regulating exercises are layered underneath real-life self-defense movements, giving the nervous system an experience of agency, choice, effective action, and empowerment. It's like Karate Kid for adults. Add movement, partnership, rhythm, and play and something else tends to happen: people break out in empowered smiles. KCT is designed to be nervous system training. You’ll practice these empowering moves so your nervous system becomes familiar with them, then learn how to visualize them during stressful moments, even while sitting perfectly still. You’ll also take home videos to keep practicing, helping those new responses become more familiar long after the workshop ends.

If you’re a therapist, you’ll leave with another avenue for clients who understand everything, have talked about everything, and still feel stuck. If you’re coming for yourself, you’ll leave understanding your own nervous system differently, with practical exercises you can use at home, at work, and during those holiday moments when everybody’s nervous system seems to walk into the room at once.

You do not need to be a “movement person” to do this. There’s no performance and no getting it right. Everything can be modified, and you’re always welcome to sit out a round or just watch. Mobility is not a barrier here. Most exercises can be done seated, and you’re always welcome to participate in whatever way works best for your body. Interestingly, watchers get regulated too.

Designed as an intimate experiential training so everyone has room to move, participate, and actually practice. Space is limited.

Held in The Estuary’s gorgeous new Wedgewood-Houston space.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Explain predictive processing as a framework for understanding how past experience influences present-moment perception and nervous system responses.

• Identify how trauma-related predictions can persist even when current circumstances have changed.

• Describe how novel, tolerable sensorimotor and relational experiences can create prediction error and opportunities for nervous system updating.

• Apply experiential Kali Connection Therapy® practices incorporating movement, bilateral stimulation, rhythm, and co-regulation to support regulation, agency, and new learning.

About Mara

Mara Giovanni, MSW, is the creator of Kali Connection Therapy®, an experiential nervous system approach now being used in treatment settings including Onsite Workshops with certified practitioners working across the country.

Her work sits at the intersection of trauma, predictive processing, movement, play, co-regulation, and real-world self-defense principles, with one central question underneath it all: how do we help the nervous system learn something new when insight alone isn’t enough?

Mara has presented her work in clinical programs and professional conferences and is especially interested in making neuroscience usable, experiential, and a whole lot less boring.

A new KCT professional training is coming to The Estuary in January.

The Estuary Center for Healing is entering an exciting new chapter in its expanded Wedgewood-Houston space, and this training is part of that growing calendar of offerings. The Estuary Center for Healing has a thirty-year history of helping people experience conscious, balanced lives through self-discovery, connection, education, and integrative healing—offering a sanctuary where true healing can take root.

It’s a beautiful space built around connection, learning, and whole-person healing, and I’m genuinely proud to be part of what they’re building.

“ This program qualifies for Two (2) hours of Continuing Education Units. It has been approved in partnership with the Nashville Psychotherapy Institute (NPI). NPI is recognized by the TN Dept of Health Division of Health Licensure and Regulation as a CE Provider.”