Healing Together Groups

Small Group Somatic Support for Sensitive Folks
Every other Monday starting May 26th, 5 - 6:30pm EST

 
 

Healing Together groups are trauma-informed small groups that combine group sharing, somatic practice, and parts work.

Each cohort of 6 - 8 people begins with a six-month commitment with an option to become an ongoing support group based on participant interest.

The goal of the group is to form a long-term, stable and reciprocal space for healing and growth.

 
 

Who is Healing Together For?

Healing Together is for women and non-binary people who have done at least 2 years of individual therapy, and are looking for a well-facilitated relational space to support their healing and growth.

This might be a good fit if:

  • you want more capacity to feel safe and stable, be yourself, set boundaries, state your needs, deepen your connection with self and others, and do what you want.

  • your want more agency and choice around your adaptive survival strategies such as:

    • co-dependancy and over functioning

    • anxious, avoidant and especially disorganized attachement patterns

    • shame and blame

    • anxiety and the need to control yourself and others

    • unmanageable emotional reactivity

  • you are some combination of sensitive and neurodivergent, queer and/or trans, spiritual but not religious, have no/low/fraught contact with parents, living with chronic pain, and in resistance to imperialist white-supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy

 
 

Words From Past Small Group Members

“Varia adeptly holds a nurturing, safe container that allows for both deep vulnerability and expansive space. They guide us to deepen our understanding of ourselves at a pace that works for each of our individual bodies. If you’ve spent some time getting to know your body, and you can sense that you’re needing more support - this group is for you.”

“This is a container of inspiring folks willing and ready to dive deep into themselves, in relationship with and in support of each other. Varia is your intuitive and knowledgable guide, cultivating a safe, caring environment in which your are free to learn about, explore and express yourself.”

“This is a wholly unique and magical experience of gently pushing your capabilities while being accepted entirely as you are. This was one of the most beautiful, healing experiences in community that I have had and I am deeply grateful for it.”

 

What Healing Together Looks Like:

 

Group Sharing & Support

  • check-ins and check-outs at the beginning and end of our sessions

  • personal sharing in response to guided group reflection

  • facilitated turn taking to receiving the group’s support and witnessing

Somatic Practice

  • embodied practice to help build your skills in nervous system regulation including resourcing, orienting, containment, attunement and more

  • support to better track and be able to attend to internal distress through self and co-regulation

Parts Work

  • parts work practices to distinguish your adult self from the younger parts of you running adaptive stratedgies

  • support to unblend from non-adult parts, and tend to them from an adult, resourced version of self

 
 

Why Heal Together?

Humans are social mammals. 

We’re meant to live in interdependent communities of mutual care, belonging and protection. However for many of us, the thing we long for most - a sense of safety within ourselves and with others - is the very thing that feels most inaccessible and unsafe. 

You may have grown up in a home where you experienced neglect, shame, abuse, or high-control religion. You may be queer, neurodivergent, or simply a sensitive human struggling to make it in a world that prioritizes power, capital and control.

My goal is to offer Healing Together as a soft place for you to land.

In order to unlearn threat responses and adaptive strategies, we require long-term, safe enough relationships to hold us. It is through consistent, relational and embodied attunement that we build stability, a felt sense of safety and connection.

If you’re curious, the folks I am pictured with here are two of my closest firends and my safe place to land. We’ve seen each other through 17 years of healing and growth, and I’m thankful for them every single day. Our friendship is part of the reason I lead and deeply believe in the healing power of group work.

From L to R: myself, Margeaux and Natalie, pictured here in LA Spring 2024

 
 

COST AND REGISTRATION

The upcoming group will be meeting every other Monday starting May 26th from 5 - 6:30pm EST.

Cost is on sliding scale pricing which offers financial accessibility to those who need it and a chance for those with financial stability to share from it. A great big thanks to Alexis J. Cunningfolk for their writing on sliding scale pricing .

 

Supported Price
$100 USD/CAD a month

The Supported Price is for you if paying for this program would be significant or stressful. BIPOC, queer & trans, working class, disabled, neurodivergent and immigrant folks to the front please.

Standard Price
$200 USD/CAD a month

The Standard Price is the actual cost of the program. It’s for you if you have some financial stability. Paying for this class will likely mean prioritizing this above other non-essential spending choices.

Redistribution Price
$300 USD/CAD a month

The Redistribution Price is an invitation for those with financial security to help cover the tuition of your peers with less financial privilege. White, cis, able-bodied, settler, university educated folks to the front please.

 

Set Up a Consult Call:

If you’re interested in joining a group, please schedule a free 20 min video consult with me below. The consult is an opportunity for you and I to connect, for me to hear what you’re hoping to get out of small group support, and for you to ask any questions. The upcoming group will be meeting every other Monday starting May 26th, 5 - 6:30pm EST.

 
 
 

Meet the Facilitator:

I come to my work first and foremost as a person who sought healing and support when I needed it the most, and gratefully found it. Like many practitioners, I am passing on the gifts of healing that are offered to me.

After a difficult childhood during the fall of the USSR, undiagnosed ADHD, teen years marked by immigration, conservative religion, homophobia, bullying and a desperate search for belonging, I arrived to adulthood scared, closeted, hurting and lost.

It took me over a decade, and the care of many talented practitioners, friends and teachers to understand and begin to heal from complex developmental trauma, the effects of religious and cultural homophobia, and the resulting depression and anxiety that made life feel impossible.

My healing journey shaped my life and my career as I trained in psychotherapy, coaching and somatic trauma healing. I founded Be With in 2015 with the intention of providing holistic, anti-oppressive and approachable care. I’ve spent the last 10 years offering 1-1 care, doing small group facilitation, leading trainings, and growing as a somatic practitioner and teacher.

I see myself and my work in the context of a complex world - one shaped both by the resilience and goodness of all living things, as well as the oppressive systems we’ve inherited. Ableism, racism, patriarchy, classism, colonialism and other systems of oppression are powerful shaping forces - ones we internalize in order to survive them. As both oppressor and oppressed, I see the way people and systems act as mirrors for one another.

In order to thrive and to create liberation for all, we must heal from and unlearn these oppressions. Personal and collective trauma go hand in hand, but so do our personal and collective healing. Queerness, immigration, class struggle, and lived experience of trauma orient my work towards justice for all.

I am a white genderfluid queer, a Russian immigrant, a cat mama and a wife to Tanya Neumeyer. I live in what is colonially known as Toronto in Canada, but has always been Indigenous land. As both a settler and an immigrant in my lifetime, I hold the privilege, complexity and harm by which I get to call this place home simultaneously. The land I live on is part of the Dish with One Spoon Treaty Territory - a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, Europeans and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect. I look to this treaty as a guiding principle for how to live on the land, working towards decolonization through solidarity, education and action.

 

Previous Small Groups Participants:

What I most liked was to experience real space and freedom to come as I am, to be me without having to do or be something else. This felt vulnerable, but with space to give myself what I need for that vulnerability.

“This was an incredible experience that enabled me to find more comfort within myself.”

This group was a container for sustained shared practice with a very supportive and doable pace, no information overwhelm and lots of experiencing. Varia provided such a safe space for all of us to feel present and share vulnerably with the group.

 
“Varia’s container is a group that you are unlikely to have experienced before. Each opportunity to meet with the group was wonderfully fulfilling, gentle, and insightful. As a practicing therapist, I can say that participating in this group supported my own learning and development as not only a therapist, but a human being in a world that often feels “too much”. Miigwetch to Varia for creating this opportunity and always guiding the group with kindness, compassion, and the perfect amount of lighthearted joy.”
“This is a wholly unique and magical experience of gently pushing your capabilities while being accepted entirely as you are. This beautiful container reflects Varia’s genius knowing, intuition and experience, to bring together folks all committed to their personal work, to learn from each other as well. I am so much better for this experience. It models accepting the ongoing, non-closured process of healing in human existence, and enable you to put in the repetitions to build more of a solid practice. This was one of the most beautiful, healing experiences in community that I have had and I am deeply grateful for it. Thank you Varvara and my group pals!”
“Just do it. Commit fully. You are investing time in yourself above all even if you feel like you don’t know what you are doing or expect. Like all new learning, it is how much of yourself you put in to the practice and being mindful of your takeaways each week. When you know you want to be involved in this work, this is the best time to broaden that discovery. You set your own intentions for yourself. Be tender with yourself while setting intentions. You are doing your best.”
“This is a supportive and safe space to build the skills and capacity for being with the “what” rather than searching for the “why” or “how.” As someone whose pattern is to think their way through feelings and go straight to searching for solutions, searching for WHY I’m feeling this way, or WHY I’m spiralling, or HOW I can move through this and heal, this program was a really beautiful, non-heady way of building up my ability to be okay with not knowing the “why” or “how”, and getting more familiar and comfortable with the “what.””