Meeting and Tending the
Prenatal Person Within

The baby in the womb is a sentient, relational being, although this is often not acknowledged. Prenatal experience, including trauma, also tends to be denied and ignored in our modern world. This experience includes cultural, collective, and inter-generational influences as well as personal challenges of the parents, especially the mother. Without conscious awareness and witnessing, this important material tends to be held in unconscious shadow, creating havoc in our lives as it strives for attention and integration. Our remarkable original potential to develop as we do from a single-celled organism into the complex beings we are can also be in shadow.

In this experiential seminar, we begin to shine light on this prenatal shadow, offering insight into what you may have undergone prenatally and how those formative experiences may be present in your life now, in your relationships, beliefs, behaviours, patterns and perceptions. Informative presentations will be complemented by guided explorations. There will also be demo sessions with Cherionna, in which you can choose to participate. 

This work can profoundly enhance our ability to be present in our lives now. Our intention is to meet and tend the prenatal person within each of us with presence. If you work with people of any age, this can support your work, but you don’t have to be a therapist or practitioner to benefit.

Exploring this territory within the beautiful, elemental surroundings of Dartmoor can enhance a sense of grounded presence, even as we meet potentially challenging history. The course is founded on meeting ourselves and each other with contemplative, heart-centred presence, offering the kind of welcome, warmth, and safety we may not have received in the womb. The environment and the group become a new, different, potentially healing surround in which to rest and grow. There will be time to explore outside in nature, as well as creative exploration in class through journaling, artwork, movement, and somatic presence.

This course is based on an approach Cherionna has developed through years of training and therapy practice. Important aspects of this approach you will be exposed to in this course are:

• Heart-centered, compassionate relational presence for self and others

• Applying the Castellino principles – a set of principles developed by Dr. Ray Castellino that establish and maintain safety in pre- and perinatal therapy, based on what little ones and birthing people need

• Practice identifying prenatal experience from a present day, current age perspective

• Differentiating between the experience/perception of the little one within and the adult self that we are now

• Specific exploration of the possible experience and effects of embryological developmental milestones of conception and implantation (nesting into the wall of the womb) via mindful somatic presence and movement, creative journalling and artwork, and awareness of interpersonal dynamics

• Identifying both trauma and original potential to embody inherent Health and Intelligence which may have been obscured by the trauma

• Practice orienting to restfulness, resource, and Health in relation to prenatal experience

• Introduction to how collective, ancestral, and cultural shadow may affect prenatal development

The course is primarily intended for therapists or practitioners but is open to anyone who has experience with resourcing and/or working with their history, including trauma, in a safe, contained way. 

Cherionna Menzam-Sills

A therapist since 1978, Cherionna worked intensively with founder of Continuum, Emilie Conrad, the final decade of Emilie’s life. Cherionna was authorized in 2007 by Emilie to teach Continuum and has been teaching frequently since then. She is a member of the Continuum Teachers Association and registered with ISMETA as a somatic movement therapist and educator. Her passion for Prenatal and Birth Psychology (PPN) led her to pursue a PhD in this field, where her dissertation addressed prenatal and birth themes in dance and movement. Inspired by her doctoral studies, she has taught embryology through movement since the 1990s and was adjunct faculty for graduate students in Somatic Psychotherapy and PPN, at Naropa University and the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. Trained and experienced as Occupational Therapist, Massage Therapist, Dance/Movement Psychotherapist, Bodymind Psychotherapist, and Prenatal and Birth therapist, her background includes intensive mindfulness meditation practices as well as extensive training with prenatal and birth therapy pioneers, William Emerson and Ray Castellino. Cherionna has been a senior tutor at Karuna and has taught Craniosacral Biodynamics, PPN, and Continuum across North America and Europe, often with her husband, Biodynamics pioneer, the late Franklyn Sills. She is also a published author, with her writings highly influenced by her time with Emilie and Continuum. Cherionna is committed in her life and work to embodied presence.

More on Cherionna and Continuum at www.birthingyourlife.org