2013 Keynote Speakers
Annie Brook shares her 30+years of clinical experience working with infants through adults and how creatively meeting the stories of prenatal and birth events bring effective results. She will share case studies, somatic explorations, and her work with early shock and brain state repair. Annie works in a family model, looking at generational impressions as well as current events, and teaches parents to clear their shock as they help their child.
Annie is a highly skilled clinician, author, and public speaker. She coowns Colorado Therapies in Boulder, CO, trains interns, and runs a 2 year training program in pre and perinatal work through BodyMind Somanautics.
Annie is a somatic psychotherapist and movement artist. Annie founded BodyMind Somanautics, a training program for therapists that integrates perinatal experience and early attachment, and is based in movementrepatterning and neuroscience. Annie is a certified BodyMind psychotherapist, BioDynamic Cranial Sacral practitioner, and a certified Body-Mind Centering® teacher. Annie has worked as a therapist in hospitals, clinics, and public schools. She co-owns Colorado Therapies, where she leads an internship program and private practice. Annie is an international speaker and author, and former director of the Body Psychotherapy track for the MA in Somatic Psychology at Naropa University. Annie works both on land and in warm water treating infants.
Through careful observation over twenty years, Pam England noticed that the way a mother or father thinks and talks about their experience of giving birth (or witnessing a birth) goes through a fairly predictable evolution as the storyteller seeks meaning and resolution. Immediately after childbirth, a mother typically feels grateful and accepts what happened. However, weeks, months or even years later, she may find that doubts and negative feelings erupt. This begins her journey “home” through the Nine Birth Story Gates.
When the mother gets stuck at a Gate, her negative beliefs live on in her parenting, relationships, and future birth experiences. The story she tells herself and her child becomes a source of assumptions, rules, and beliefs about what childbirth is or should be for the next generation. Against the colorful backdrop of birth story images, Pam will explore: the six social seeds of birth trauma; how to minimize emotional birth trauma in adults who give birth or witness birth; the nine “birth story gates;” birth story “morphing” and birth story “virus.”
When millions of women tell wounded birth stories, that Story becomes birth in our culture. When we heal the stories we tell each other and our children, we begin to change birth in our culture.
Pam England is a childbirth mentor, founder of Birthing From Within, and former midwife. Experiencing emotional birth trauma prompted her to earn a Masters in Psychology/Counseling and to make healing emotional birth trauma her life's work. Pam wrote the groundbreaking book Birthing From Within (1998), Labyrinth of Birth (2010), and Birth as a Hero’s Journey (2013), and has led workshops and conferences for thousands of birth professionals around the world. She helps integrate and give new meaning to birth stories. Pam brings fresh insight, awareness, compassion and humor to this subject.
We are at a fundamental tipping point in western culture. Our understandings of who babies are, what they are capable of, what they need, and what is happening during their time in the womb, birth and newborn period are in the midst of quantum change. The 20th century Newtonian worldview that considered our core nature to be biological is expanding into 21st century multidimensional consciousness-based worldviews. Our consciousness-based holistic, integrated, and integral lens guide us in new possibilities for health and healing and expand what it means to be human.
As Schlitz and Amorok suggest in their book Consciousness and Healing, “Consciousness shifts our healing efforts and results from a change that expands the range and scope of what is possible, to a change that actually transforms the entire landscape.” Nowhere is that more true than for babies and families at the beginning of life.
At the heart of healing and human potential lies aligning our multidimensional wholeness and awakening our human experience within its embrace. Dr. McCarty weaves essences gathered from prenatal and perinatal psychology, her groundbreaking Integrated Model of early development, heart intelligence research, and energy psychology healing modalities into a multidimensional Integrated Approach to support babies’ and families’ healing and wholeness. Stories included.
A leader in the frontier to optimize human potential and relationships from the beginning of life. Author of Welcoming Consciousness: Supporting Babies’ Wholeness at the Beginning of Life–An Integrated Model of Early Development. Founding chair, co-author, and Associate Faculty of the first degree programs in prenatal and perinatal psychology at Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. Her innovative work incorporates prenatal and perinatal psychology, her ground-breaking consciousness-based early development theory, consciousness studies and energy
psychology healing modalities. Serving families for 40 years. International presenter, educator, and consultant to families, professionals, and organizations–bridging theory, principles and practice.
Gary is an award-winning composer and public speaker dedicated to making a difference in the world by creating music-driven media and events that inspire the heart and catalyze healing. He is passionate about way music can reduce stress, and strengthen our emotional intelligence throughout the transitions of our lives, from birth to death. Gary is the co-creator of the acclaimed CD/book, Graceful Passages, which helps to traverse life transitions with greater mindfulness and compassion. He also recently co-authored (with David Surrenda, Ph.D. and Lisa Rafel) a CD/book called Safe in the Arms of Love, created to support parents and newborns during their bonding process. Gary has recently partnered with the former CEO of HeartMath, Bruce Cryer to deliver presentations and products entitled “What Makes Your Heart Sing?”. Gary has spoken at Google, Harvard’s Conference on Spirituality and Health, Scripps Integrative Clinic, and Kaiser Permanente, among many others. Gary stands for a greater understanding of the power of music as an essential resource for healing and inspiration
