Lectures

22 Of May

Somatic Pathways into the Earliest Wounds: from the Womb to Early Life

A talk that explores early wounds from the baby’s perspective, focusing on physiological imprints from the prenatal period onward. Through somatic practice and neuroscience, it shows how presence, attunement, and co-regulation become pathways for repair in therapy, parenting, and caregiving.

From Biological Birth to Emotional and Spiritual Rebirth

Explore how our birth leaves lasting imprints on our psychic structure and discover Dr. Stanislav Grof's groundbreaking work on accessing these formative experiences. Learn about the transformative path of emotional and spiritual "re-birth" that frees us from deeply rooted unconscious patterns.

Early Trauma – How Early Life Experiences Can Be Traumatizing

Explores how overwhelming experiences before birth, during birth, and in early life may lead to trauma, highlighting the heightened vulnerability of the developing human organism.

23 Of May

Transpersonal Dimensions of Embodiment and the State of Love

Explores embodiment, consciousness, healing, and the state of Love through an integrative transpersonal perspective linking psychology, science, and the material and non-material dimensions of life.

The Womb as First Environment: Exploring Prenatal Experience Through Embodied Inquiry

An experiential lecture exploring the womb as our first environment, and how prenatal experience may shape early belonging, relational patterns and the sense of self.

Round Table Discussion/Panel: Peace, Birth, Balance — The Womb as the First Ecology of Leadership

Explores how prenatal and birth experience may shape peacebuilding, relational balance, embodied leadership, and the capacities for empathy, resilience, and attunement.

Regression and Pre- and Perinatal Imprints: From Shadow to Essence Through the Integrative Transformation Model

Explores how pre- and perinatal imprints shape the psyche, and how regression work may transform early wounds into greater integration, authenticity, and Fundamental Peace.

Pre and Perinatal Foundations of Relational Transpersonal Leadership and Responsible Agency

Trauma-informed transpersonal relationality links personal healing with ethical leadership, collective responsibility, and regenerative futures rooted in respect, reciprocity, and wholeness.

Multidimensional transformation of transgenerational prenatal and birth imprints into awakened incarnations

A transpersonal and transgenerational perspective on pre- and perinatal imprints, integrating body, mind, spirit, and culture. The talk proposes trauma-informed practices—including meditation, bodywork, dance, and music, as well as psychedelic-assisted ceremonies when appropriate—to transform transgenerational patterns into embodied resources and restore relationality.

Integrating Compassionate Inquiry Into Our Perinatal Professions

Explores how Compassionate Inquiry can be integrated into perinatal practice, addressing birth trauma repair and prevention through safety, attunement, and professional experience.

Immersive Dialogue: Designing Experience for Whole-Person Learning and Transformation

An experiential lecture exploring the womb as our first environment, and how prenatal experience may shape early belonging, relational patterns and the sense of self.

How Babies Help Us Remember Who We Really Are

Explores how babies’ pre- and perinatal experiences shape connection, attachment, and wholeness, showing how the story of our beginnings continues to influence life and relationships.

Before Words: Embodied Communication with Infants Through Signs

An experiential workshop on embodied communication with infants, using signs, presence and attunement to support regulation, connection and early relational development beyond words.

24 Of MAy

Tradition and prenatal psychology

Explores how African traditional maternal wisdom can inform prenatal and postnatal psychology, enriching maternal care through culturally grounded and relational approaches.

Soul Obstetrics : Becoming a Mother in an Unmotherly Society – A transpersonal view of motherhood, nurturing and caring

A transpersonal reflection on motherhood, care and protection, exploring how women, babies and community need a more mother-centred cultural and relational model.

Infant Observation (Esther Bick): The Primary Bond and the Awakening of the Numinous at the Beginning of Life

An immersion into the Infant Observation method as both a clinical and contemplative path, exploring the birth of the psyche within the baby–caregiver relationship. Integrating Jungian and transpersonal perspectives, the talk offers new lenses on early bonding, symbolization, and the spiritual dimension from the very beginning of life.

Embodied Eros: Conscious Sexuality and the Deconstruction of the Self at the Origin of Human Development

Explores conscious sexuality, conception, and gestation as embodied and relational dimensions that may shape the earliest stages of human development and subjectivity.

Eurotas 2026 | Symposium
Somatic Pathways into the Earliest Wounds: from the Womb to Early Life

Facilitator: Dana Biechonski Fernandes


What to Expect:
A talk that invites us to view early wounds from the baby’s perspective. Rather than “cognitive memories,” we explore physiological imprints recorded in the nervous system and tissues — from the prenatal period through the first eight months of life. Dana weaves somatic practice and neuroscience to illuminate the essential questions of early life: Am I welcome? May I have needs? Will someone come to meet me? She shows how presence, attunement, and co-regulation become concrete pathways of repair — in therapy, parenting, and caregiving.

Mini-bio: Dana is a somatic psychotherapist and certified supervisor with Bodynamic International, practicing internationally since 2014. She integrates somatic developmental psychology, nervous system and fascia research, and a warm, embodied approach to trauma.


*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

From Biological Birth to Emotional and Spiritual Rebirth

Facilitator: Bernadette Blin

What to Expect:

In this lecture, you’ll explore how our birth leaves deep and lasting imprints that shape our psychic structure and the way we engage with life.

You’ll discover the groundbreaking work of Dr. Stanislav Grof, which has shed new light on the profound mystery of our arrival into the world. Through his research, the formative experiences of birth have become accessible to consciousness, opening a transformative path of “re-birth.”

Learn how this approach allows individuals to free themselves from deeply rooted unconscious suffering and conditioning, offering new possibilities for emotional and spiritual healing.


Mini-bio: Bernadette Blin is a psychologist and transpersonal psychotherapist, trainer, and author. She is Director of IRETT (EUROTAS Institute for Transpersonal Training) and a long-standing member of the EUROTAS Board..

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Early Trauma – How Early Life Experiences Can Be Traumatizing

Facilitator: Franz Ruppert

What to Expect:
Already before birth, during the birth process and in the first years of life a human being can be traumatized by experiences that are overwhelming and bring the organism in a state of helplessness. As the resources to resist are limited the risk to suffer a trauma is high. In this lecture the different possibilitis for early trauma are discussed.

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Transpersonal Dimensions of Embodiment and the State of Love

Body-Feelings-Psyche-Mind and our Participatory Consciousness 

What to Expect:
This lecture explores the transpersonal dimensions of embodiment and participatory consciousness, considering the human being as more than body and brain functions alone. It reflects on the understanding that we live within fields of embodiment, and that while contemporary embryology describes the biological unfolding of life in great detail, it does not fully address the mystery, beauty, and deeper dimensions of personal manifestation.

Drawing on personal experience, including a Near Death Experience in early childhood and further extra-sensory experiences, Siegmar Gerken reflects on how such events, rather than becoming traumatic, can open a lifelong inquiry into the principles of life, consciousness, healing, and the state of Love.

The lecture weaves together the study of body, feelings, psyche, mind, and spirit, as well as the human capacity to sense, feel, participate in the development of personality, and shape the structuring of mind and field. It is informed by encounters with Krishnamurti and David Bohm, by the practice of Western, Eastern, and Shamanic traditions, and by scientific exploration of Human Light, Energy Fields, and Consciousness.

Participants can expect an integrative reflection at the edge of the material and non-material world, bringing together psychology, science, spirituality, embodiment, and healing in a shared movement toward greater understanding, integration, and ultimately, a state of Love.

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

The Womb as First Environment: Exploring Prenatal Experience Through Embodied Inquiry

Facilitator: Amarillis Vázquez Morales and Amanda G. Rizik Mayo

What to Expect:
An experiential exploration of the womb as the first relational and environmental context. Using movement, spatial awareness, and transpersonal reflection, participants will investigate how prenatal experiences influence later patterns of belonging, and self-perception.

Key themes:

  • Prenatal environment
  • Spatial and relational awareness

Early belonging

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Round Table Discussion/Panel: Peace, Birth, Balance — The Womb as the First Ecology of Leadership

Facilitators: Amanda G. Rizik Mayo, Amarillis Vázquez Morales, Dawn Celester McGregor, Dorote Weyers-Lucci, Ilja van de Griend, Pier Luigi Lattuada, Regina U. Hess

What to Expect:
Explore the deeper implications of prenatal and natal experience for peacebuilding, relational balance, and embodied leadership.

The dialogue will consider the womb as humanity’s first ecology—a foundational environment where rhythm, safety, and relational attunement shape the earliest patterns of presence in the world. From this perspective, prenatal and perinatal psychology offers profound insights into how individuals later develop the capacity for balance, empathy, resilience, and leadership.

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Regression and Pre- and Perinatal Imprints: From Shadow to Essence Through the Integrative Transformation Model

Facilitator: Luis Miguel Gallardo

What to Expect:
What if the earliest wounds — those inscribed before our first breath — hold the key not only to our deepest suffering but also to our most authentic wholeness? This lecture presents a transpersonal framework for understanding how pre-natal and perinatal imprints shape the architecture of the psyche across the lifespan, and how hypnotic age regression and Life Between Lives (LBL) spiritual regression can be used to access, illuminate, and transform those foundational experiences.

Drawing on the Integrative Transformation Model (ITM) and its Shadow–Gift–Essence (SGE) framework, this presentation explores how early imprints — from conception, gestation, and birth — become encoded as protective shadow structures that later manifest as anxiety, relational difficulty, and disconnection from one’s core sense of self. Through clinical case illustrations, the lecture demonstrates how regression to pre- and perinatal states, and beyond into the interlife, enables clients to contact the original wound beneath the defence, resolve fragmented self-states, and recover what the ITM calls Essence: the qualities of peace, clarity, compassion, and authentic self-expression that constitute our deepest identity.

Central to this approach is the concept of Fundamental Peace — not the absence of difficulty, but a sustainable inner coherence characterised by deep self-acceptance, emotional integration, and alignment between one’s inner life and outer expression. The lecture proposes that when early wounds are met with the spaciousness of transpersonal awareness rather than merely re-processed at the biographical level, healing becomes not repair but remembering — a return to the wholeness that was always present beneath the imprint.

This presentation bridges neuroscience and spirituality, offering practitioners and researchers an integrative map for working with the earliest chapters of human experience as gateways to what this symposium calls “whole incarnations.”

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Pre and Perinatal Foundations of Relational Transpersonal Leadership and Responsible Agency

Facilitator: Regina U. Hess, Ph.D., NL/PT & Dawn Celester McGregor, Ph.D., ES/US

What to Expect:
In times of global rupture, prioritizing restorative relationships is vital for healing individuals and communities. Early life experiences and inherited trauma shape our relationships with ourselves and others. Addressing these patterns with a trauma-informed, transpersonal approach supports ethical leadership rooted in Indigenous principles of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility. This integrative approach unites body, mind, spirit, culture, and nature, linking personal growth with broader responsibility. 

This raises an essential question: Are we part of the problem, or are we engaging in mature response-ability to become part of the solution for the greater good and future generations? Relationality emerges as a guiding archetype, reconnecting us with ancestors, communities, and the non-human world. By honoring these connections, we foster collective healing and regenerative futures, reinforcing the need for an integrative approach that bridges personal growth with communal responsibility.

How we carry the imprint of our ancestors, society, and personal experience into the present moment empowers genuine self-recognition. By consciously engaging with our patterns and committing to healing, we deepen the understanding of our authentic selves, clarify our agency, and transform autonomy into truth through intentional action. By honoring ourselves and others, we lead the world in global healing, aligning us fully with transpersonal responsibility. Embracing this relational way of being fosters a fully inclusive sense of wholeness and promotes collective healing.

For more, see:
Podcast Episode 8, February 2026: Birth, Trauma and the Web of Life. Keynote Speaker Dr. Regina U. Hess, 8th EUROTAS Symposium: Happy Babies – Full Incarnations, AlmaSoma School, Lisbon, Portugal. https://youtu.be/3iVQ4dfj-vE?si=TkdJfApY31OjItgv

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Multidimensional transformation of transgenerational prenatal and birth imprints into awakened incarnations

Facilitator: Regina U. Hess, Ph.D.


What to Expect:
A transpersonal and transgenerational perspective on prenatal and birth imprints — often overlooked in clinical practice despite their lifelong impact. This talk integrates body, mind, spirit, culture, and Nature, proposing a trauma-informed methodology that includes non-substance practices (shamanic journeying, meditation, bodywork, dance, music) as well as psychedelic-assisted ceremonies (within appropriate frameworks). The focus is on transforming transgenerational patterns into embodied resources, restoring relationality with ancestors, community, Nature, and future generations.

Mini-bio: Regina U. Hess is a clinical psychologist, shamanic practitioner, and planetary educator with a PhD in Transpersonal Psychology. Founder of Birthing an Ancient Future, she integrates indigenous wisdom, body-centered transformation, ceremony, and psychedelic science. She serves in leadership roles within EUROTAS and the International Transpersonal Association and is Vice President of ETPA.

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Integrating Compassionate Inquiry Into Our Perinatal Professions

Facilitator: Laura Latina & Beth Sanderson

What to Expect:
Integrating Compassionate Inquiry into Our Perinatal Professions presents Laura and Beth’s personal and professional experiences of discovering Compassionate Inquiry and integrating this approach into their work.

The lecture offers a brief overview of global birth trauma statistics and considers how Compassionate Inquiry can contribute to the repair and prevention of perinatal trauma, with a particular focus on safety and attunement.

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.
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Immersive Dialogue: Designing Experience for Whole-Person Learning and Transformation

Facilitators: Jaspr Chang, Ilja van de Griend & Dorote Weyers-Lucci

What to Expect:
Examine immersive learning as an approach to whole-person development within transpersonal and embodied frameworks. The session explores how multi-sensory experiences support deeper awareness and integration across cognitive, somatic, and emotional domains. Through a structured dialogue, it highlights immersive pedagogy as a method for advancing learning, leadership, and human development.

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

How Babies Help Us Remember Who We Really Are

Facilitator: Ilja van de Griend

What to Expect:
How babies help us remember who we really are explores how pre- and perinatal experiences shape lifelong patterns of connection, attachment, and embodiment. Drawing on Ilja van de Griend’s clinical experience in pre- and perinatal therapy with babies, children, and adults, this lecture considers how the earliest imprints influence the development of the brain, nervous system, and attachment system, and how these foundations affect the way we relate to ourselves, others, and the world.

The session brings together clinical insight and relevant scientific research to highlight one of the symposium’s central themes: that human beings are born with an innate longing for connection and a deep impulse toward wholeness. It also reflects on the importance of recognising and integrating the story of our beginnings, not only in early life but across the lifespan, as a pathway towards healing, belonging, and fuller incarnation. 

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.
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Before Words: Embodied Communication with Infants Through Signs

Facilitator: Etel Leit 

What to Expect:
Before language is spoken, it is felt. Before a child says “I need,” “I’m scared,” or “stay with me”… their body is already communicating.

This experiential workshop explores baby sign language as an embodied, relational practice rooted in early development, nervous system regulation, and attunement. Moving beyond communication as vocabulary, we’ll look at signing as a bridge between inner experience and external expression, where connection begins long before speech.

Drawing from transpersonal psychology, early attachment research, and lived practice, participants will discover how intentional, body-based communication with infants supports emotional regulation, reduces frustration, and strengthens the relational field between caregiver and child. We will explore how these early exchanges shape a child’s sense of safety, agency, and connection to self and others.

Participants will learn foundational signs, but more importantly, they will experience how presence, rhythm, eye contact, and gesture co-create meaning. This is about communication as a relationship, not performance.

You’ll leave with practical tools you can apply immediately in your work with children, families, or educational settings, alongside a deeper understanding of how early embodied communication becomes the blueprint for connection across a lifetime.

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Tradition and prenatal psychology

Facilitator: Temu Loveth IGHO

What to expect:
This 25-minute lecture explores African traditional maternal knowledge as a psychological framework for prenatal and postnatal care. It is intended for birth workers and professionals seeking culturally grounded, evidence-informed approaches to maternal and infant mental health.

The session examines how African traditional practices and belief systems have long supported emotional regulation, early bonding, maternal well-being, and the relational environment surrounding pregnancy and birth. It proposes that many contemporary challenges in maternity care—including prenatal anxiety, birth trauma, and postnatal psychological distress—are not only clinical, but also cultural and relational, linked to the erosion of communal, ritualised, and emotionally protective structures.

Drawing on more than 20 years of global experience in nursing and midwifery, together with academic training in nursing science, biology, midwifery, and maternal health, this lecture connects African ancestral wisdom with contemporary perspectives from prenatal psychology, attachment theory, and stress physiology. Practices such as communal holding, symbolic protection, intentional storytelling, and extended postpartum care are presented as meaningful psychosocial systems rather than folklore.

Participants can expect a culturally grounded reflection on maternal and infant mental health, with particular attention to how integrative and culturally responsive care may strengthen psychological safety and enrich contemporary maternity models.


* This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Soul Obstetrics : Becoming a Mother in an Unmotherly Society – A transpersonal view of motherhood, nurturing and caring

Facilitator: Marion O. Meisser

What to expect:
This talk explores why the psyche and soul of mothers-to-be need a cultural model that places mothers and children at the center of society – and emphasizes the community’s role in protecting them. The discussion will also address the advantages of a cyclical model of life, death, and rebirth, as opposed to linear and spiral models of human development.

Beyond candles, beyond music, beyond the bathtub and rose oil: If the pregnant woman is not empowered on the soul level – or in other words, if she has not been guided through her psycho-spiritual cycle of transformation from being a child into becoming an adult – then opening the sacred space of pregnancy, birth-giving and mothering can be difficult and frightening for her. Before pregnant women are able to recognise and communicate their deepest needs, they go trough a normal process of loosing control, which can lead to great vulnerability.

As a professional, it is my duty to develop a profound understanding and intimate vocabulary for what occurs in the invisible world during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period. If I am not embodied and empowered myself, I risk to feel helpless. This unconscious feeling of helplessness can lead to aggressive paternalistic behaviour towards patients. In my opinion, obstetrical violence contributes to the feeling of powerlessness in mothers. Dismissal of women’s reality leads to a feeling of humiliation, which is an unrecognised and undiscussed stress factor for the unborn and newborn children in our modern society.

A systemic and transpersonal view of human existence can be a compass both for pregnant women stepping into the unknown and for health care professionals who accompany them. In matriarchal societies, women are representing the archetype of giving life, of death, and of rebirth, while men symbolize the archetype of protecting life. In the center of that social paradigm built on balance and equity is the notion of « motherly behaviour » – nurturing and caring – which are caracteristics of all humanity, women and men alike. 


* This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Infant Observation (Esther Bick): The Primary Bond and the Awakening of the Numinous at the Beginning of Life

Facilitator: Rita Ribeiro

What to Expect: An immersion into the Infant Observation method (Esther Bick, Tavistock Clinic) as both a clinical and contemplative path of knowledge. Through sustained observation, we witness the birth of the psyche within the baby–caregiver relationship, as a numinous field where body and spirit begin to intertwine. Integrating Jungian and transpersonal perspectives, this talk opens new lenses on early bonding, symbolization, and the spiritual dimension present from the very first breath.

Mini-bio: Rita Ribeiro is a Clinical Psychologist (since 1999), holds a PhD in Psychology, and is a Jungian Analyst. She teaches in higher education and is President of the Portuguese Society of Analytical Psychology (SPPA) and the C. G. Jung Institute (IJP).

*This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Embodied Eros: Conscious Sexuality and the Deconstruction of the Self at the Origin of Human Development

Facilitator: Mavi Marín

What to Expect:
This presentation proposes a reframing of early life experience, suggesting that human development may begin not at birth, but within the embodied and experiential conditions of conception and gestation. While clinical sexology and obstetrics often operate within a functional and medicalised framework—where practices such as mindfulness are mainly used for regulation and symptom reduction—this perspective may overlook the transformative and transpersonal dimensions of human sexuality.

Drawing on the biopsychosocial-spiritual model, 4E cognitive science, and phenomenological approaches to alterity, the presentation explores conscious sexuality as a potential threshold of transformation. When engaged with awareness, the sensory intensity of sexual experience may exceed ordinary cognitive control, opening access to bottom-up processes that can destabilise the narrative self. In such states, individuals may experience forms of ego attenuation or dissolution, sometimes described as the “minimal self” or minimal phenomenal experience, characterised by non-dual awareness, reduced self-referential processing, and a sense of connection to a larger whole.

From this perspective, the encounter with the Other in sexuality can be understood as a confrontation with radical alterity, capable of transforming the structure of subjectivity. Extending this framework, the presentation considers gestation as a unique form of embodied intersubjectivity, in which the distinction between self and other is not yet fully differentiated. Pregnancy may thus be approached phenomenologically as the experience of “being touched from the inside,” involving a dynamic interplay between fusion and differentiation.

The paper explores the hypothesis that the conditions of consciousness present at conception may shape the experiential and relational field in which gestation unfolds. Without making biological or ethical claims about the beginning of life, it invites reflection on how conscious sexuality might influence the earliest stages of human development, not only at a physiological level, but also at the level of lived experience and relational embodiment.


* This program is subject to change due to scheduling or organizational reasons.

Eurotas Symposium in Portugal 2026

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