Calling You Home
Birth Process Workshops
Healing prenatal, birth and attachment experiences to foster healthy and thriving connections with self, others, and community.
May 17-19, 2024
Sept 6-8, 2024
(Fri 4-8pm, Sat and Sun 9-6pm)
Location: 672 2nd Ave, San Francisco
Participants: 3 people
Fee: Sliding scale $400-1000 / person.
To Register: Contact Livia at livia.ondi.lmft@gmail.com or 415-206-2868.
Who is this for?
If you want to :
experience deeper intimacy in your relationships with romantic partners, family, and friends
feel greater emotional safety and comfort when being alone
connect with a deeper purpose and confidence in life and carry through with intentions and projects
be more at home in your body and experience more balance in your nervous system
transform repetitive destructive emotional and thought patterns (anger, fear, sadness) that hinder your well-being
heal from traumatic birth and family history
If you are:
a parent who experienced traumatic labor
a birthing professional who supports families during the prenatal, perinatal, and postpartum period
a professional who supports children and families during early years of bonding and socialization
a professional who supports adults resolving attachment and relational wounds and related somatic patterns
This workshop is complementary to ongoing psychotherapy and other healing relationships. If you are not currently in a therapeutic relationship, additional pre- and perinatal somatic therapy sessions will greatly enhance the long-term integration of what you discover in this workshop.
Why should I consider the Calling You Home Birth Process Workshop?
We come into this life from spirit world carrying the blueprint of health and full potential. As we enter the human realm of form during conception, we meet the energetic forces of our current family dynamics and the energy of our parents’ emotional, physiological, and spiritual states. We also meet the energetic experience of our family lineage and ancestral experiences, both the strength and unprocessed traumas along with corresponding survival strategies. We are also impacted by the current historical, social, and political forces that our family and community is living in. These experiences shape our growing body and evolving psyche and leave imprints and molds of protective and survival patterns. Blueprint is like a clear sheet of paper and the imprints are multitudes of small and large folds and wrinkles on the sheet. This visual analogy illustrates how we live through our reactive patterns (imprints, folds on the paper) while the larger human potential is always present in the backdrop of our existence (blueprint, the paper itself).
We don’t start to form verbal, autobiographical memories until age 2 when we learn to speak and use words as pointers to refer to our experiences. Before the age of 2, we remember energetic patterns, sensations, movements, posture, sensory experiences (images, smell, taste, texture, temperature, proprioception, and interoception), emotional states, beliefs, and behavior. We know through epigenetics that memory lives not only in our nervous system/brain but also in our cells. We call these non-verbal, somatic, emotional, and energetic patterns implicit memories. These implicit memories shape our reactions and behavior in ways that we can’t understand intellectually but can access through somatic practices and felt sense experiences.
In this workshop we create safe conditions where implicit memories can start to show up and speak to us in their own non-verbal expressions. With layers of support, we attune to, and witness what these memories are holding and what missing experiences are needed to help our imprints unfold and loosen their grip on our daily lives. We explore how our limitations can transform into our most wonderful gifts.
We work hard to ensure that this is a safe space for all people especially people of color, people of all genders, including LGBTQI individuals, people of all religious background, and people living with all variety of neurodiverse experience. As the facilitator, I actively work on confronting my own whiteness, how I benefit from white supremacy and how I participate in maintaining the status quo of white privilege. I am open to feedback on how I can help these healing spaces be safer and more welcoming for Black, Indigenous and all People of Color, and all people on the gender spectrum and all people on the neurodiversity spectrum and everybody else.
What can I expect?
We intentionally create a safe environment following principles of healthy family dynamics with secure attachment connections. In this safe environment we foster support, connection and holding so experiences that want to come forth to heal can show up and move towards integration and healing. The format we follow is based on Myrna Martin’s and Ray Castellino’s tradition and it focuses on connection, safety and somatic, energetic and community resources that support the healing process from the inside out in a way that is not retraumatizing or flooding. Rather we take titrated and digestible steps towards integration of prenatal, birth, and attachment experiences. We create the conditions in which our inherent health can move to the forefront and guide the healing process.
The entire weekend is designed to be a rich experience for all participants. Each person will receive a 2,5-3 hours somatic turn during the weekend and a 30-45 min cognitive debrief of the turn that focuses on integrating healing into daily life practices. We all witness and participate in one another’s turns which in and of itself can facilitate deep healing for each participant.
Each turn is a unique, somatically oriented healing journey. Gentle facilitation and the format are designed to support connecting with non-verbal implicit memories and energetic imprints held in our body and psyche. Participants will receive new experiences in the safety of connection in an embodied way that allows change in one’s entire being and not just on a conceptual/intellectual level.
We slow down to baby time to connect with our young parts that remember and fully feel what it was like in the womb and during birth. We invite these young parts to feel our holding and loving presence so that they can begin to tell, show, move, and express what it was really like for them during the formative early period of life. We listen with our hearts and bodies to what it felt like being them, feeling their mother’s experience and their family connections. We listen to their resilience and the love and support that carried them through, and we also listen to the hardship they endured and survived. In deep resonant connection with these young parts and with each other, we discover the kind of support they would have needed to be able to integrate their experience without disconnecting from their true nature. In this way we create new experiences and new neuropathways in our brain that supports integration, healing, and lasting change in our lives.
Note on Substances:
Accessing subtle somatic and energetic patterns are greatly supported by abstinence from chemical and plant medicines, drugs, alcohol, and tobacco for the duration of the birth process workshop including morning or evening use. The somatic imprints related to chemicals used by or given to our parents while in utero and during birth can be quite strong, which is another reason we want to create a clear field of healing for everyone.
If you currently have an active addiction, we advise that you work with that first before participating in the birth process. If you are micro dosing, please time your break cycle so it aligns with the timing of the birth process workshop so you can come without the medicine.
Medications taken for mental health purposes, prescribed by a psychiatrist, are an exception to this request.
About the facilitator:
Livia Ondi, LMFT, has been studying prenatal, birth, and early attachment patterns for over two decades. She is trained as an early childhood mental health clinician and somatic psychotherapist and studied extensively with Myrna Martin to become a birth process facilitator. In addition, she is currently in training for biodynamic craniosacral therapy. Livia blends her warm presence, somatic skills, and knowledge of attachment and relationship dynamics in a unique and enlivening way. She has a private practice in San Francisco where she supports young children and families during pregnancy, birth and the first 5 years; provides couples therapy; and somatic therapy for adults.