Four Days Designed for the People Who Are Holding Everyone Else Together

Let’s be honest about something.

The people most likely to attend a symposium like this are the ones who care the most. The educators who are still thinking about a child on the drive home. The early childhood professionals who lie awake wondering if they handled something well. The school social workers and mental health leads who are absorbing a lot from a lot of people, and not always sure where they put it all down.

Attending to Stress Load

We designed this symposium with that in mind.

Not just what you learn, but how you feel while you are learning it. The structure of the four days reflects the same Self-Reg principles we apply to children: attending to stress load, building in restoration, creating genuine connection, moving between challenge and calm.

Building in Restoration

That means experiential sessions that are genuinely restorative: a guided forest walk through the trails of Trent University, yoga and breathwork, collective meditation, music, movement, creative art-making. These are not scheduled so you can feel refreshed enough to go back to the real learning. They are the real learning. You cannot understand co-regulation from a lecture. You need to feel it.

Restoration and Connection

It also means being in a place designed for connection. Trent University’s riverside campus is deliberately chosen. Walking paths cross the Otonabee River. The setting invites conversation beyond the session room, over meals, on trails, in moments that are not scheduled but end up mattering the most.

Co-Regulation Begins With Us

And it means being with people from across Canada and around the world who understand what this work actually feels like. That alone does something for a nervous system that has been carrying a lot.

Caring for the Caregiver

Come to learn, to be with people who get it and to fill something back up.

Sessions related to this post:

• July 6, 4:00 PM Block 3: Exteroception Forest Walk Bath, Trent University Trails
• July 7, 10:45 AM Block 2: Yoga and Breathwork: Shifting Our Own State, Susan Hopkins
• July 7, 4:00 PM Block 6: Creating Art Through the Five Domains, Kristin Wiens and Casey Burgess
• July 8, 4:00 PM Block 6: Collective Meditation: Come Try It, Susan Hopkins
• July 9, 12:45 PM Block 3: Caring for the Caregiver, Paula Jurczak and Teri Rubinoff

Join us for the 12th annual Self-Reg Summer Symposium at Trent University – live in person for the full embodied experience, and online with key sessions live-streamed worldwide – to bust myths, practice five-domain Co-Reg in real cases, and leave re-skilled and re-energized for what kids need now.