This Sunday: At TEAO Canada, we believe healing does not happen in isolation. ♥️ Our Collective Care Series creates space for group processing that happens not only through conversation, but through breath, movement, and embodied connection. This is how we approach trauma care and trauma health within communities. We are resuming our Collective Care Series, free and open to the community, led by Nicole Brown Faulknor, embodiment coach and psychotherapist. These circles offer a space to be heard, held, and supported, especially within systems and institutions that often erase lived experience. Through psychoeducation, somatic practices, breathwork, and movement, participants are invited to rebuild their relationship with their bodies and begin processing trauma beyond words. This work is grounded in the understanding that emotional health is collective, and our wellbeing is deeply connected. Location: The Branches Address: 9 Samuel Street, Kitchener, ON Time: 1:00-2:00 PM Cost: Free Register here: link in bio OR https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/collective-care-series-tickets-1529134515499?utm_experiment=test_share_listing&aff=ebdsshios&sg=40d7f0942232fbfa76923d5891e5cddcc52a962231c92fa474bb8d3b0472c3d2c9196c0f88289eaf9883b55d729e21297357ddc700cfade123ce7378d8b0dd0bbdb208cfce4bc3334b52f29e08 This free care series is supported by @wrcommfdn (Waterloo Region Community Foundation), and we are grateful for their commitment to racial equity and community wellbeing. All are welcome. #TraumaInformed #SomaticHealing #CollectiveCare #MentalHealthAtWork #EmbodiedLeadership HealingInCommunity

In December, our Foundations of Care Series at TEAO Canada explored a powerful question: What does trauma teach us about survival and safety? One key insight stayed with many of us. Trauma teaches survival, not safety. The nervous system learns how to stay alert, keep going when exhausted, anticipate danger, and override needs. These responses are often mislabeled as personality traits like being “strong,” “independent,” or “resilient,” when in reality, they are learned survival skills. Safety, on the other hand, is not a mindset. It is a felt experience built slowly through repetition, choice, and permission. At TEAO, our work centers on creating safer, relational spaces where people can begin to feel seen, felt, and heard. This is why our approach continues to shift toward trauma-responsive and community-rooted care, moving from fixing to empowering and from individual resilience to collective healing. As we move into the new year, we invite you to join our next Foundations of Care session: Embodied Equity: What It Means to Be Seen, Felt, and Heard in Systems That Erase Us Friday, January 23 12:00 PM - 12: 45 PM Virtual and free Register here: https://linktr.ee/TEAOCanada OR LINK IN BIO. This conversation will explore how equity is not just structural, but embodied, and what it means to create systems where safety and belonging are possible. We hope to see you there. #CommunityCare #SomaticSupport #PeerSupport #TraumaResponsiveCare #HealingInCommunity TEAOCanada

We’re Reconnecting After Our Winter Pause ❄️ As a community, we moved gently through a winter pause — a season of rest, reflection, and tending to capacity. This rhythm of slowing is part of how we practice care, not just talk about it. We’re ready to reconvene. Our Soma-Peer Support Group (Virtual) resumes bi-weekly on Wednesdays, beginning: 🗓 Wednesday, January 14 ⏰ 6:45pm – 8:00pm This space is for grounding, shared presence, and peer-led support rooted in embodiment and collective care. ♥️ Interested in joining? Registration details are available via: the link in our bio or by DMing us directly to receive next steps We look forward to welcoming familiar faces and new ones alike. You belong here. #CommunityCare #SomaticSupport #PeerSupport #TraumaResponsiveCare #HealingInCommunity TEAOCanada

Carried by Love: A Collective Pause in Costa Rica 🇨🇷 This week, we didn’t come to escape life.
We came to restore the conditions that make life livable. We moved slowly and intentionally — aligning with circadian rhythms, the land, and the nervous system. Mornings began with sunrise walks, forest watching, and sound meditations through nature. We stretched, wrote, rested, and listened inward before any words were spoken. Midday was devoted to trauma-integration work — not to fix or push, but to let the body complete what it has carried for too long. We honored grief and joy as two sides of the same memory, allowing what was unfelt to gently move through. We practiced remembering the self beneath survival — the one that existed before “should,” before adaptation. Afternoons were for rest, play, and spaciousness. Evenings brought us back together for grounding, reflection, and quiet integration. This was not a vacation.
It was an intentional, trauma-responsive space rooted in safety, dignity, embodiment, and collective care — for women navigating trauma, burnout, grief, recovery, and systemic pressures. We don’t believe healing should be rushed, commodified, or done alone.
Here, we let the body lead.
We let stillness do its work.
We remembered what never left. From survival to self-remembrance ♥️♥️ #CollectivePause #EmbodiedHealing #TraumaInformed #NervousSystemCare #CarriedByLove @michelletitian @wounds2wings @somersetrecovery @teao_canada

Not a New Year. A New Season. 🫶🏾 ♥️ We’re not rushing into “new.” We’re not declaring reinvention. We’re not leaving parts of ourselves behind. This moment—often called the New Year—arrives in the deep of winter. A season that asks for stillness, rooting, listening, and gentle integration. At TEAO Canada, we honour what the body already knows: ✨ Winter is not for performance. ✨ It is for reflection, repair, and remembering. 2025 asked us to slow down and deepen. Together, we held trauma-responsive spaces, trained care-holders, supported youth and families, strengthened governance, expanded community partnerships, and laid critical groundwork toward Canada’s first Trauma Health & Embodiment Centre. We grew—but not in a way that required us to abandon ourselves. As we cross this threshold, we’re not “starting over.” We’re bringing everything with us—the lessons, the pauses, the grief, the resilience, the wisdom earned in quiet moments. This season is about tending the roots. Listening to what wants to emerge. Moving forward without urgency. Letting our next steps be informed by nervous system safety, collective care, and embodied truth. We enter this season together—softened, grounded, and aligned. Not because the calendar changed, but because we’re ready to move with intention. With gratitude for this community, and trust in what’s unfolding. — TEAO Canada #CollectiveCare #EmbodiedHealing #SeasonalLiving #TraumaResponsive #RestIsResistance HealingInCommunity TEAOCanada

We Love This 🫶🏾🫶🏾🫶🏾 (for those that need to hear this #collectivehealing #collective #support) Repost from @imterencelester • Words for those who need them 🙏🏾

We love this at TEAO Canada as a healing centred initiative throughout communities. ♥️♥️♥️ Repost from @our.moral.imperative • What our most vulnerable and most marginalized, oppressed, and disinvested students need. What our public school system will never want nor be able to provide. . . . Healing-centered spaces aren’t about staying positive - they’re about telling the truth. At Vocal Justice, healing means naming the harm young people face, validating their anger, and building community so they don’t carry it alone. A healing-centered classroom doesn’t avoid hard topics - it trusts youth to confront injustice, protect their rights, and turn pain into collective power. Thank you to Dr. Shawn Ginwright, who developed the healing-centered framework we implement throughout the Vocal Justice curriculum. 🙏🏽👉🏽 @vocal_justice #Leadership #MentalHealth #Community #Sociallmpact #TraumalnformedCare

We didn’t build an organization - we built a movement. Not from bureaucracy. Not from legacy wealth. Not from political comfort. But from lived experience, community trust, and a refusal to wait for permission. Two weeks ago, TEAO (Trauma & Embodiment Association of Ontario) held its first public Annual General Meeting, and it felt like a landmark moment in a story that began with Nicole Brown Faulknor a lone ranger, working against the grain, fighting to create something that didn’t exist in Canada: a trauma-responsive collective born from community, not compliance. Because trauma healing deserves more than documentation. It deserves embodiment, relationship, and humanity. #Leadership #MentalHealth #Community #Sociallmpact #TraumalnformedCare