The Teachings of Ray Castellino
Dropping into Prenatal and Perinatal Implicit Memory with Ease
From Self to Social Nervous System: Working with Energetic Systems
In this class, Ray Castellino teaches the energetic embodiment meditation: Mother Earth Father Sky. Based on the work of Randolph Stone and the years of understanding the baby's experience in relationship with families, the Mother Earth Father Sky meditation is an embodiment sequence that regulate, reinforces and enhances our natural energetic blueprint. Each practitioner who wants to practice prenatal and perinatal somatic psychology learns this sequence, practices it everyday, and shares it as an energetic medicine to support our physical health and connection to the present.
The Principles: Creating a Safe Container to Deepen into PPN Implicit Memory
Over the five decades of work, Ray Castellino developed a series of Principles that create a container of safety to explore prenatal and perinatal implicit memory. These Eight Principles can greatly support early trauma healing and family life.
They include:
- Principle of Welcome
- Principle of Mutual Support and Cooperation
- Principle of Choice
- Principle of the Pause: Self and Co-regulation
- Principle of Self Care
- Principle of Brief and Frequent Eye Contact
- Principle of Touch and Attention
- Principle of Confidentiality
Assessing Safety and Intention Setting and its Role in Working with PPN Implicit Somatic Therapy
Prenatal and perinatal somatic psychology has a keycode that it uses to explain, examine, support and repair ruptures in our earliest life development. We call it "The Sequence." While not unique as an approach to understanding our neurodevelopment, the Sequence is an easy, deep and effective way to notice somatic patterns related to our earliest experiences. Setting an Intention is the beginning of the sequence. Our clinical plan unfolds from there, as we support the client's intention for what they want for themselves. The Intention allows for a treatment plan to emerge. This class will explain the role of Intention and how important it is when working with clients in healing early imprints. This class will also explore the importance of assessing one's safety in the present time.
Leading Edge, Titration and Pendulation
The Leading Edge is a term coined by Ray Castellino in his work training practitioners to understand prenatal and perinatal somatic therapy; it is one of the most important and basic skills a practitioner can have. What is a Leading Edge? It is primary therapeutic window for healing and repatterning imprints that are overwhelming, and running unconsciously in our lives. While working in our Leading Edge, we can bridge and integrate the energy that has been frozen or encapsulated in our bodies with the skills of presence, conscious awareness and the bodily, felt sense. You can learn to recognize your Leading Edge, and gain skills and practice to change the pattern! You can choose a new way. In some circles, the Leading Edge is a place of dual awareness, of being both in the present and having a memory. Once this territory is recognized, we employ the tools of titration (small doses in a slow manner) and pendulation (shifting states), to encounter earliest imprints and then slowly integrate them into the lived experience of the client.
Working with Movement and Resistance in PPN Somatic Therapy
Movement is part of the way baby's show their story. In this class, Ray Castellino will show how babies communicate with movement, and then instruct participants in ways they can experience their own history, especially how the Leading Edge can then stimulate movement. Participants will be taught to read movement as content of the story. There are three approaches: facilitated movement, tracking the movement of the tide (subtle movement), and gestures. The gesture will have somatic information related to the verbal statement. These three movement categories are paired with language. There are also movement therapeutic approaches: Creative Dynamic Opposition and Dynamic Squeeze. This wisdom is part of the way early experiences get laid down in the body, and are still expressed today.
Introducing "The Form" as Part of a Pre- and Perinatal Somatic Therapy Toolkit
Ray Castellino developed a clear and distinct "Form" for doing the work of healing early imprints. The practitioner needs some strong but gentle tools to help clients navigate the terrain of implicit memories when seeking to re-pattern and differentiate earliest overwhelming states. The "Form" is one of these tools. It is a clear map for the practitioner starting with Intention Setting, then unfolding from there with relevant history, facilitation of a somatic experience using touch, inquiry, presence and the felt sense, and integration of the experience with a more somato-cognitive narrative that recaps the work of the work of the client. This class will present this "Form" for the learner, and inspire participants to practice on their own.
Ray Castellino
Dr. Castellino developed the Womb Surround Process Workshop for small groups of adults. He had discovered and developed clinical approaches and skill sets that carry over to family work with children and are applied in both Womb Surrounds, BEBA Family Sessions and in About Connections. As such BEBA, About Connections, the Womb Surround Process Workshops, Professional Training. Body into Being and Community outreach seminars and workshops constitute wings of integrated pre and peri-natal delivery and educational system.
These innovations include the Castellino 8 guiding Principles for small groups and families. These principles are cornerstones for the emergence of safety in babies and children in the context of relationships in their families.
He has developed a teachable method for working with families and small groups of adults as an energetic relational field. This innovation is a major game changer for facilitating families and adults in a relational social nervous system field. His work emphasizes harmonic resonance and co-regulated states while supporting individuation and differentiation at the same time. His work is collaborative in nature. Some of his primary collaborators are Mary Jackson, homebirth midwife, Tara Blasco, co-director of BEBA, and Anna Chitty, director of the Colorado School of Energy Studies.
Dr. Castellino is a frequent presenter at national and international conferences including the Association for Pre- & Peri-natal Psychology and Health, the American Polarity Therapy Association, the Craniosacral Therapy Association of North America, and others. He was a founding board member of the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children.He has been practicing and teaching in the healthcare field since 1970, and offering prenatal and birth therapy since 1993.
(Read full curriculum vitae).
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