We are excited to announce the launch of our LLRS Cascadia Holistic Peer Counseling 2025 Beginner Class, and a reinvigoration of our graduate peer counseling network.
If you’d like to:
- take the free introduction class on Tuesday Jan 21st from 6:30 – 9:30pm (Pacific Time),
- participate in the entire course, or
- be added to our list of peer-counselors to renew your peer counseling relationships:
(If you register using the button above these words here, we will be able to send one email to everyone with the Free Class Zoom link which will greatly improve our administrative experience)
Free intro class online January 21, 2025 6:30-9:30pm PST
12 classes, meeting on Tuesdays, January 28th to March 18th 6:30-9:30pm Pacific time,
with 1 weekend intensive (March 1-2 10am-6pm)
Looking for a way to create a sense of belonging that is secure and stable? Wanting to have a regular reliable support network for your feelings? Needing a way to distinguish between when you are “attacked” and when you are triggered from past trauma? This is a radical peer counseling system that involves magick, brain science, grassroots psychology and embodiment practices that heal and promote community.
CHPC is a system of holistic healing that allows you to learn when you need to have attention on your inner experience, in order to stay healthy. CHPC teaches you to do self-care and consensually request help in order to self-regulate your mood, and meet your needs for companionship. CHPC gives you the skills to be able to witness other people when they are in emotional distress, and create space and care. CHPC teaches how to become a resource of time and attention for yourself and others, by restoring yourself and others to your body’s own inherent healing processes. This system integrates current research in psychology, neurobiology, and somatic therapies. Co-creating a peer counseling community helps each member of the community build resonance and provides foundational support for all of the community’s activities. We will share frameworks for approaching self-care and peer counseling, as well as practical instructions and concrete skills for daily life.
Cascadia Holistic Peer Counseling can function as an “emotional yoga” giving you the ability to know when your internal state needs loving attention and training you in communication skills that help you “BE with” emotions and dis-spell trance traumas from the past.
In Cascadia Holistic Peer Counseling training you will learn all of the following safe and effective peer counseling skills from Holistic Peer Counseling:
- Exquisite Listening: how to listen to & connect with yourself & others
- Holding Outer Spaciousness: develop the skill of neutral witnessing
- Foundational energetic boundary work: experience where you end & begin & be able to set intentional boundaries
- Creating inner spaciousness: become a resource for self-reflection & understanding
- Understand what emotions are: learn how they function and how to feel them fully
- Learn how to “be with” feeling states without either self-repression or the repression of others
- Identify patterns: of stuck energy & old emotional trauma & Learn to free yourself from their trance
You will also learn the foundational principles of Dan Siegel’s Interpersonal Neurobiology teachings, which will enable you to:
- Apply cutting edge science from recent research in neurobiology to your own self-care
- Create a meta plan for your recovery from the dominant culture and its programming
- Become able to distinguish personal trauma from social oppression & deal with both
- Commit to ending horizontal hostility by becoming a resource of love for your communities
- Co-create a community of peers committed to living in Cascadia and evolving with the planet toward a more loving way of being a human.
This course is excellent for people doing psychedelic integration work.
A message from Teri
While we deal with the ‘polycrisis” which includes the deep wounds of systemic racism, the rise of authoritarianism and actual FACISM and the economic fallout of the destruction of the middle class and many of our former professional wage incomes, it is more important than ever that we get ahold of ourselves and work with each other to remain holistically well. We have entered the era of “The Long Emergency” and the “The Long Descent”.
I’d like to remind all of us who have access to white privilege (whether or not we consider ourselves to be white, according to our chosen identities or blood ancestry or immigration status we are “read” and perceived as white based on the appearance of our skin) that we have a responsibility to attend to our own emotional needs so that we can have enough free attention in our internal space (zone zero) to not only function, but to provide healing and well-being to others. Regularly giving and receiving loving attention in pairs and small groups, with clear boundaries, allows us to be available to dismantle social oppressions such as racism, sexism, and transphobia. It is the individual responsibility of each one of us to do this self-maintenance. CHPC gives us the tools to liberate ourselves so that we can be accomplices in the liberation of all others. Let’s lean in, roll up our sleeves, and go to work.
A word about our inherited and chosen identities and how they influence our teaching paradigms: I am delighted to share that Megan Pedone has agreed to co-teach the 2025 LLRS CHPC course with me. We will be receiving regular tech support from other members of our LLRS community and ocassionally may have guest teachers as well.
As instructors who are predominately white* we recognize that our lived experiences and perspectives are shaped by the privileges and biases of a systemically racist society. This means that we have blind spots that could impact the experience of our BIPOC students. We are committed to ongoing learning and unlearning around these issues, and to creating a safer/braver space for all students to explore these issues. We recognize that BIPOC students might feel less comfortable sharing, or experience micro aggressions in predominately white spaces. We will actively work together to challenge our own biases and support all students in developing awareness of systemic racism and their role in it.
As Instructors who are all cis gendered, (people who agree with the sex they were assigned at birth), we are all aware that we are very likely to have shadow material that includes unconscious biases of transphobia and we are openly declaring our intention to address any upsets or interpersonal conflicts that occur due to these biases.
All of our Living Love Revolution Sanctuary; (LLRS) offerings are open to anyone interested in participating fully in them. The intention of Reverend Teri D. Ciacchi MSW, and all other LLRS event facilitators and program leaders is to co-create a queer, gynocentric and poly normative pagan culture.
LLRS has the intention to be generating a safer/braver space that is inclusive and sensitive to the needs and experiences of both BIPOC and trans and non-binary peoples. We strive to only have teachers who have investigated, explored and are aware of their own shadow material and intersectional biases regarding race, class, sexual identity, sex, and gender. However, we recognize that our offerings will not meet everyone’s needs. We feel that it is responsible to name that our capacity to provide a safe and supportive learning experience for transgendered and non-binary attendees is limited by our experiences as cis gendered peoples with AFAB or AMAB social status. Our LLRS services may be facilitated by white-conditioned, white-privileged and ciis gendered AFAB or AMAB instructors and the demographics of the ritual participants are biased toward those same identities. We have intentionally researched our own ancestral blood lineages in an attempt to recover/invent pre-colonial, pre-christian liturgy based on the historic remnants of the agricultural festivals and celebrations of our European, Asian and Middle Eastern ancestry.
As facilitators and as humans, we are committed to unlearning and becoming aware of the ways in which we are unconscious of our own racism, transphobia, classism (and other oppressive isms). We are committed to becoming aware of and ending behaviors which reinforce racism and its patterns so that we may better serve our communities. We are committed to educating ourselves and changing our behaviors’ in meaningful observable measurable ways. We are open to being called in and educated about how best to serve those who attend our educational offerings and sanctuary services. We are open to and appreciate feedback regarding our limitations. Please see the LLR Communications Agreement and our Ombudsman Policy for how to provide this feedback.
About our CHPC graduates network
The need to come together in the spirit of mutual-aid as co-counselors is as great as ever before and we’ve decided to put together a contact list of peer-counselors in conjunction with the start of the new CHPC class beginning on Tuesday Jan 21st. We’d love to have you, or anyone you know who might be interested, join us in taking the course. We also wish to build a solid network of CHPC graduates to commit to ongoing counseling trades. Our intent is to build and maintain a contact list of counselors who have taken at least one fundamentals course (CHPC or a comparable co-counseling class). You will have access to the list of contacts, and be a part of our movement to create a vibrant community of peer-counselors. Please fill out our registration form if you wish to be part of our graduate peer counseling network.
* A bit about your teachers’ identities
Teri Dianne Ciacchi identifies as an Italian-American because she is 50% 3rd & 4th generation Italian immigrant. This means that her grandfather John Noel Ciacchi and his parents came to the USA on a boat from Italy in the early 1940’s. Teri’s Grandmother Rose Mariani Ciacchi, was born in Medina Ohio and was the fourth child of 12. Teri’s maternal side also involves 3rd generation immigrants in this case German and Bohemian. Teri’s maternal grandfather William Winterfield whose last name “Vinterfeld” was changed during his lifetime was the child of a German Jewish Father and a Bohemian woman named Rose who ran a boarding house in North Ridgeville, Ohio. Both Her mother Lois Winterfields’s matrifocal line includes French, English and Irish bloodlines. Beaumont in France, meaning beautiful mountain became Bement here in the USA. Teri is a ciis female who describes her sexual identity as “I am a pansexual genderfluid person who primarily identifies as queer”.
Megan Dawn Pedone (nee’ McPherson) identifies as a person of NorthWestern European lineage with a blood lineage of 70.5% German and French and 27% British and Irish according to 23 and me. She remembers her great grandparents speaking german and being unfamiliar with English as a 1st language. She has spent her adult life thinking she was white and receiving white privilege. The German family names of Von Feldt, Steinmeier and Horn as well as the English family name Bryant inform her lineages. Megan identifies as a ciis female who is a Queer, pansexual, ecosexual relationship anarchist.