Description
LIVE STREAM: May 12 – 14, 2025 from 8:30am – 4:00pm (Saskatoon, SK) Please adjust your start time according to your specific time zone.
ON-DEMAND: Recorded footage & course content (certificate, videos, quiz) will be available until June 2, 2025. Please allow 3 – 10 business days for footage to be processed. Extensions cannot be granted under any circumstances.
Registration will close May 11, 2025.
Tuesday, May 13, 2025 | Day Two
Healing Through Spirit: Integrating Indigenous Healing Practices in Education and Mental Health
This workshop offers educators a transformative opportunity to explore the intersection of trauma and spirituality within Indigenous communities, focusing on the impact of intergenerational trauma and how cultural wisdom can support resilience and well-being. By examining both traditional and contemporary healing practices, participants will deepen their understanding of how Indigenous spirituality, storytelling, and community-centered approaches can foster healing, restore balance, and strengthen the individual and collective health of students and families.
Indigenous communities have long faced the repercussions of colonization, forced assimilation, and systemic violence. These traumas have been passed down through generations, affecting the mental, emotional, and social well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Yet, alongside these challenges, Indigenous cultures possess profound spiritual traditions and healing practices that have endured. These practices remain a vital source of identity, resilience, and recovery, offering pathways to healing for those impacted by trauma.
This workshop is designed to empower educators and other professionals working in or with Indigenous communities. Participants will learn culturally grounded approaches to support healing in educational settings, incorporating Indigenous spiritual traditions, cultural practices, and storytelling to enhance student well-being and academic success. The workshop will also provide practical tools for integrating these healing methods into classroom teaching, school activities, and community-based programs.
Through engaging hands-on activities and thoughtful discussion, participants will gain the knowledge and skills to create healing environments that acknowledge and address the wounds of the past while fostering hope, empowerment, and community revitalization.
Culturally Affirming and Strength-Based Narratives to Promote Healing
Morning
Culturally Affirming and Strength-Based Narratives to Promote Healing
Indigenous worldviews are deeply rooted in unique cultural traditions, teachings, and spiritual practices that reflect a holistic and strength-based understanding of the self and community. These worldviews offer invaluable insights that can support the development and healing of Indigenous children, youth, families, and communities across the lifespan. The emphasis on relationality, interconnectedness, and respect for all living beings forms the foundation of a culturally affirming approach to care.
In this 3-hour morning session, participants will explore how culturally distinct Indigenous narratives can be integrated into healing practices, development strategies, and social service delivery. Drawing on Indigenous ways of knowing and being, participants will gain practical tools to apply culturally grounded practices that promote holistic well-being, decolonization, and healing. This session will offer a space to reflect on the ways in which practitioners can walk alongside Indigenous peoples in their roles, while honoring their inherent strengths and wisdom.
Afternoon
Gathering Our Medicine: Strengthening and Healing the Kinship Circle
The devastating impacts of intergenerational trauma resulting from colonization, residential schools, and forced assimilation have created long-lasting scars in Indigenous families and communities. These traumas have disrupted the traditional kinship structures and ways of being that once supported health, connection, and well-being. Mainstream, Western approaches to trauma treatment have often proven inadequate for Indigenous peoples, failing to address the complex, community-based nature of healing.
In the afternoon session, Denise Findlay will introduce Gathering Our Medicine, a cross-cultural model designed to restore dignity and balance to the role of caring for one another in Indigenous communities. This innovative approach emphasizes the restoration of kinship ties and cultural practices as central to healing from intergenerational trauma. Drawing from attachment theory, developmental science, and the science of emotion, Gathering Our Medicine provides a framework for healing that is deeply rooted in community, culture, and the relational bonds that naturally emerge within kinship circles.
During this session, participants will:
- Explore the Gathering Our Medicine Approach: Learn how this cross-cultural model provides a restorative framework for helping families and communities heal together.
- Restoring Dignity to the Care Role: Understand how restoring dignity to the act of caring for one another—across generations—can be a direct pathway to collective healing and resilience.
- The Power of Cultural Rituals: Discuss how Indigenous cultural rituals, rites of passage, and traditional ceremonies play a key role in healing by providing the context in which emotional, spiritual, and relational healing unfolds naturally and organically.
Healing Through Spirit: Integrating Indigenous Healing Practices in Education and Mental Health
- Understand the Impact of Intergenerational Trauma:Explore the historical and systemic factors that contribute to trauma in Indigenous communities and how these experiences continue to influence the well-being of students and their families.
- Spirituality as a Path to Healing:Examine the role of Indigenous spiritual traditions, ceremonies, and cultural practices in promoting resilience and mental health within educational and community settings.
- Integrating Cultural Practices into Education and Mental Health:Learn how to incorporate Indigenous wisdom, spirituality, and trauma.
Culturally Affirming and Strength-Based Narratives to Promote Healing
- Weaving Indigenous Worldviews and Developmental Science: Understanding how the complementary nature of Indigenous worldviews and developmental science can be integrated to offer culturally distinct, affirming care.
- Creating Healing Conditions: What must be cultivated within communities, institutions, and relationships for culture to truly provide a healing context for children, youth, and families.
- Four Relational Wisdom Practices: Practical strategies for applying Indigenous relational practices that foster healing, growth, and well-being across cultures.
Gathering Our Medicine: Strengthening and Healing the Kinship Circle
- Healing through Kinship: Explore how restoring the natural capacity of communities to care for one another can rebuild the kinship circle as the foundation for healing and well-being.
- Cultural Rituals and Rites of Passage: Understand the importance of traditional cultural practices as healing tools that promote resilience and community restoration.
- Role of Professionals as Facilitators: Shift the role of helping professionals from direct service providers to facilitators of the community’s healing processes, supporting the restoration of relationships that enable healing to unfold.
Education and Clinical Professionals: K–12 Classroom Teachers, School Counsellors/Psychologists, Learning Assistance/ Resource Teachers, School Administrators, School Paraprofessionals including Special Education Assistants, Classroom Assistants and Childcare Workers. All other professionals who support students including but not limited to: Nurses, Social Workers, Psychologists, Clinical Counsellors, Family Therapists, Occupational Therapists, Speech Language Pathologists, Addiction Counsellors, Youth Workers, Mental Health Workers, Probation Officers, and Early Childhood Educators.
Varleisha D. Lyons Ph.D, OTD, OTR/L is the Vice President of Practice Engagement and Capacity Building at the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA). Prior to joining AOTA, she served as the Scientific Programs Officer at the American Occupational Therapy Foundation. Dr. Lyons is an international lecturer, researcher, and author. Along with being a tenured associate professor, she was the inaugural chair at Wesley College’s Master’s Program in Occupational Therapy, the first in the State of Delaware. Her areas of expertise include neuroanatomy, self-regulation strategies across the lifespan, health disparities, and paediatric therapeutic interventions. Dr. Lyons founded and operated a private therapy firm for over 10 years.
Dr. Lyons began her career after receiving her baccalaureate degree in Psychology from the University of Delaware. She continued her studies in the field of Occupational Therapy receiving a Master’s of Science degree from Columbia University and a clinical doctorate from Thomas Jefferson University. Dr. Lyons completed her Ph.D. program in Health Sciences Leadership at Seton Hall University.
As an occupational therapist, Varleisha has a passion for designing strategies to support individuals in their journey to live their most independent and fulfilled lives. In addition to being a licensed occupational therapist, she is an author, renown international speaker, and expert in the areas of the neurological connections for self-regulation, sensory processing, trauma responsive care, and health and wellness.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this presentation belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer, organization, committee or other group or individual. Varleisha D. Lyons Phd, otr/l is employed by the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA). This work is independent of her role and not affiliated with AOTA,inc.
Shanelle Brillon-Bath is a nehiyaw iskwew (Cree woman) of mixed ancestry from Treaty 6 & 8 Territory, and also English and Norwegian settler ancestors. She is a proud member of Wapsewsipi, Swan River First Nation in Kinuso, Alberta. Her late Moshum (grandfather) was her family’s last fluent Cree speaker, and is connected to Papaschase Cree Nation and has Métis ancestry also from the Red River.
Shanelle was born and raised on Coast Salish territory, currently residing on unceded kʷikʷəƛ̓əm land. She has a large family with kinship ties to many First Nations communities in BC. She is a mother to 3 french bulldogs. She is currently undertaking her Masters in Education at SFU.
She is a former youth in care, and believes in the learning and healing that comes from the connection to family, nature, ancestors, culture, and ceremony. Prior to her work in Gathering Our Medicine, Shanelle was the Indigenous Cultural Coordinator at the Maples Adolescent Treatment Centre. Her work with Denise has given her insight into working alongside family and community and creating the relational context required for healing. This work has facilitated transformations that she hopes to share through story.
Tselkxáliya (Denise Findlay) is a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh scholar practitioner from the village of Xwemélch’stn and a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Denise is a published academic author whose background is in Philosophy of Educational Theory and Practice, and the recipient of a Social Sciences Humanities Research Council Scholarship (Canadian Graduate Scholarship) for her community-based research. Denise is an autobiographical writer who leads with her Sḵwx̱wú7mesh wisdom and weaves knowledges from the fields of Indigenous education, developmental sciences, and contemplative inquiry. Denise’s academic research and community work is focussed on the cultivation of educator and practitioner wisdom and presence. Denise intersects Sḵwx̱wú7mesh knowledges and ways of being with Indigenous contemplative educational theories and practices in her healing centred work families and communities. Denise is a innovative program and curriculum developer who regularly works with public and private sector organizations to consult on and develop programs and services in response to calls for reconciliation, decolonization and indigenization to better serve Indigenous peoples in Canada. Denise is an advisor to local post-secondary institutions in regard to decolonizing higher education. Denise has spent countless hours facilitating group processes in response to social issues rooted in intergenerational trauma and colonization. Denise holds a Master of Education from Simon Fraser University focusing on Contemplative Education and is on Faculty with The Neufeld Institute where she specializes in Developmental Attachment Theory, Trauma, and Resilience. Denise is a certified BC Provincial Post-Secondary Instructor and Professional Co-Active Coach with advanced training in Process Psychology and systems work.
More information: WWW.NEUFELDINSTITUTE.ORG/PERSON/DENISE-FINDLAY
| Registration | Early bird Fee | Regular Fee |
|---|
| Individual 1 Day Enrollment | $244.00 | N/A |
| Individual 2 Day Enrollment | $484.00 | N/A |
| Individual 3 Day Enrollment | $664.00 | N/A |
All fees are in Canadian dollars ($CAD) and per person.
Group rates and student discounts are available. Please contact webinars@jackhirose.com for more information.
Fees are per person, seat sharing is not allowed. Please respect this policy, failure to comply will result in termination of access without a refund. For group rates please contact webinars@jackhirose.com
