We live in a culture where we are not encouraged to explore our pain, follow where it leads and perhaps allow the wounds of our experience to be teachers that show us where we are strong and assist us in uncovering our internal wisdom. It is my sense that having heroically endured the devastating act(s) of sexual violence, survivors have the capacity to travel to great depths within themselves and examine the residual emotion, sensation and stagnation that has been left in the wake of the trauma and in fact begin to clear it from the inside out. It can be enlightening and uniquely empowering to integrate the resources of the body, and all that it holds within, as a primary vehicle for transformation.

The Breathe Network hosted this teleseminar “Introduction to Sexual Violence – A Spectrum of Pain and Empowerment” with Molly Boeder Harris as part of our ongoing educational trainings designed to enhance trauma-sensitivity for healing arts practitioners, empower survivors by sharing a range of insights about healing, and, most importantly, to increase our societal understandings of the layered impacts of sexual trauma. In this teleseminar, we discuss the spectrum of sexual violence and explored its impacts on the body, mind, and spirit, the non-linear journey of healing, what it means to be “survivor-centered” as well as how attending to the whole self in the healing process can bolster resilience and be a catalyst for transformation.