Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP)
Module 1 - May 9 - 12, 2025 (F-M)
Module 2 - Sept 25 - 28, 2025 (Thursday - Sunday)
Module 3 - May 22 - 25, 2026 (F-M)
Instructor Raja Selvam Phd
Integral Somatic Psychology ISP
Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP™) is an effective somatic psychology approach that helps clients achieve optimal mental health by fully embodying their emotions.
Learn more in Dr. Selvam’s book The Practice of Embodying Emotions.
ISP has been developed to shorten therapy times and improve diverse outcomes (physical, energetic, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, relational, and spiritual) in all therapy modalities, including body psychotherapy systems such as Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy.
It can also be taught to clients as a self-help tool for healing and enhancing their lives.
What is the science behind it?
The emerging science of embodied cognition, emotion, and behavior in affective neuroscience and cognitive psychology is increasingly establishing that our thoughts, feelings, and actions are dependent not just on our brain but also on our body and our environment; and that the lack of involvement of our body in any of these three inter-related functions can compromise all three and reduce our well-being.
The field of body psychotherapy has established that our inability to tolerate emotional experiences in our bodies is the primary reason for the formation of physiological defenses such as muscular constriction. These defenses reduce our body’s involvement in cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functions and cause psychophysiological symptoms.
Using these research findings, Integral Somatic Psychology seeks to improve our thoughts, feelings, and actions by making our body more available for them, by improving the body’s capacity to tolerate emotional experiences so that it does not shut down in the face of difficult emotions in therapy or life.
Who can benefit from the ISP Professional Training?
Integral Somatic Psychology™ is an advanced-level training for experienced clinicians who are engaged in psychological work with individuals or groups in therapeutic practice or teaching. The training is geared towards psychologists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, addiction counsellors, and professional counsellors. If you are a psychiatrist, art, movement or breath therapist, coach, bodyworker, energy worker, psychology trainer, educator, clergy, meditation or spiritual teacher, you may find the training valuable to your professional development.
How is it done?
The practice of embodying emotions in Integral Somatic Psychology involves the following steps:
1. The situation: Knowing how to work with details of a situation to evoke the emotional experiences as quickly as possible.
2. The emotion: Knowing how to find and support a wide range of emotional experiences including the always-present and often-overlooked sensorimotor emotions such as feeling bad or good, so as to work with emotions from the very first session.
3. The expansion/regulation: Knowing how to work with physiological and energetic defenses in the body and brain physiology against emotions so as to expand and regulate emotional experiences in as much of the body as possible.
4. The integration: Knowing how to find and support physical, energetic, and other resources that arise spontaneously in response to the increasing capacity for emotional experiences from the first three steps, to further stabilize the process of embodying emotions and to facilitate deeper healing in the body and the psyche.
What You Will Learn
The professional training has been designed to help improve cognitive, emotional, and behavioral outcomes in all therapies on the basis of clinical implications of older and newer evidence-based theories in cognitive psychology and neuroscience on the physiology of cognition, emotion, and behavior, including the newer paradigms of embodied and embedded cognition and enactive emotion.
Learn how to...
· Work with a wider range of emotions from the very first session
· Help your clients undo body defenses and embody their emotions
· Build tolerance for all feelings—especially uncomfortable ones
· Improve cognitive and behavioral outcomes in your work through embodying emotions
· Improve your results in working with psychophysiological or psychosomatic symptoms
· Help clients heal from traumas efficiently
· Improve your capacity for embodied emotional attunement
· Help clients heal their attachment wounds effectively
· Shorten treatment times in your practice
· Improve mindfulness and spiritual practices by embodying emotions
The Core Clinical Strategy in Integral Somatic Psychology
The 7-Step Protocol for Embodying Emotion is the core clinical strategy in Integral Somatic Psychology.
The practice is taught during the ISP Professional Training, with concrete steps and tools for how one might go about “embodying emotions,” or building a greater capacity for tolerating emotions through expansion of its conscious experience to as much of the body as possible, to improve treatment times and diverse a range of outcomes in all therapies including other body psychotherapy systems.
ISP Practitioner Training Includes:
72 Hours of In-Person Training (3, 4-day modules)
Live Demonstration Sessions
Daily Supervised Practice Sessions
It is particularly effective for working with clients who have a low capacity for tolerating emotions, with complex traumas, psychophysiological symptoms, and syndromes.
Raja Selvam, PhD,
Raja is a licensed clinical psychologist (California, PSY30233), a senior trainer in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) professional trauma training program and the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP). ISP, based on emerging paradigms of embodied cognition and emotion in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, is a new paradigm in body psychotherapy that offers all therapeutic modalities a complementary approach for improving outcomes and shortening treatment times through greater understanding and embodiment of a larger range of emotions.
Dr. Selvam teaches in as many as twenty countries in North and South Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Far East. Dr. Selvam’s eclectic approach draws from bodywork/energywork systems of Postural Integration, Biodynamic Cranio-Sacral Therapy, Polarity Therapy, body psychotherapy systems of Reichian Therapy, Bioenergetics, Bodynamic Analysis, Jungian and Archetypal psychologies, psychoanalytic schools of Object Relations and Inter-Subjectivity, Somatic Experiencing (SE), Affective Neuroscience, Quantum Physics, Yoga, and Advaita Vedanta.
Further Details
Schedule
9:30 am
Lunch 1:00 pm- 2:30 pm (may break earlier at times)
6:00 pm
Location Saskatoon, SK.Canada
Venue
To be announced
Tuition
The early registration deadlines of $885.00 + GST $44.25 = $929.25 are:
February 1, 2025, for module 1
June 19, 2025, for module 2
February 23, 2026, for module 3
After the early registration deadline, the tuition is $935.00 + GST $46.75 = $981.75.
A deposit of $350.00 must accompany the Registration form.
If you miss a module, catch up by video.
Students who need to miss a module can catch up by video. All students will receive access to the recordings.
Cancellation and Refunds
· If an applicant is denied access to the training for any reason, a full refund will be issued.
· If the training is cancelled by ISP, a full refund will be issued.
· If a training module is rescheduled, tuition will be transferred to the rescheduled training or another location. No refund will be issued.
· If a student cancels a training at least 21 days before a training module, a full refund, less a $100.00 non-refundable cancellation fee, will be issued.
· If a student cancels a training within 20 days of the start date of a training module, a 50% refund will be issued for the tuition for that module; if the student paid in advance tuition for additional future training modules, a full refund will be issued for those additional future training modules.
· No refunds will be issued for no-shows.
Registration Form Below. Please download, complete and email to j.s.training@sasktel.net
ISP Application Form 2025-26 PDF Form
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