Arielle Schwartz – Vagal Toning for Resilience
Unlock your body’s innate healing power with leading-edge embodied psychology and daily therapeutic yoga practices.
Regulate your nervous system, release stored trauma, and cultivate resilience through breath, movement, and awareness.
What You’ll Discover in Vagal Toning for Resilience
In this 7-week transformational course, Arielle Schwartz will guide you to strengthen your nervous system, awaken your true nature, and cultivate clarity, vitality, and emotional balance.
Module 1: June 18, 2025
Body-Centered Psychotherapies to Awaken to Your True Nature & Embodied Wisdom
Embodied psychology provides the tools to address your emotional and physical health with breath, movement, and awareness practices.
While stress and traumatic life events disrupt the communications between your body and brain, you can learn body-based tools to help you find a greater sense of balance and resilience in a changing world.
Arielle Schwartz will explain how body-centered psychotherapies have mapped a path that not only releases the impact of these challenging events, but ultimately returns you to your own embodied wisdom.
Learn how to navigate challenges with resilience and utilize the awareness of your nervous system to realize where you’re holding tension, and how to care for and attune to your nervous system.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- An overview of brain-body connections in healing
- An introduction to the core principles of embodied psychology
- How stress and trauma disrupt brain-body communications
- Guided sensory integration practices to enhance your resilience and tap into your somatic intelligence
Module 2: June 25, 2025
Vagal Toning to Regulate Your Nervous System for a Balanced Body & Mind
Emotional or physical symptoms aren’t a sign that your body and mind are failing you — they’re signs that your nervous system is working hard to find your way to resolution and balance.
Through the lens of the nervous system, better understand these symptoms and learn vagal toning tools to enhance a felt sense of balance in body and mind.
Rooted in neuroscience and applied polyvagal theory, learn how to access the healing power of your vagus nerve, known as the body-mind superhighway of communication.
In this module, you’ll:
- Navigate the inevitable stressors of life with greater equanimity
- Learn the power of positive neuroplasticity
- Experience practical exercises to optimize vagal toning for balance and connection to yourself — including self-applied touch to stimulate the vagus nerve and enhance the mind-body connection
- Gain techniques for regulating your stress responses
Module 3: July 2, 2025
Postural Resets & Therapeutic Yoga for More Restorative Sleep and Reduced Pain & Inflammation
Alignment and flexibility of your spine is a cornerstone of physical, emotional, and spiritual health.
Yogis have long espoused that a “flexible spine creates a flexible mind.” Dr. Schwartz’s unique approach applies polyvagal theory into therapeutic yoga for trauma recovery.
Her approach offers simple practices to enhance your wellbeing. She’ll guide you through postural awareness practices that allow you to refine your alignment from the inside out.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- How posture affects emotional wellbeing
- The relationship between spinal health and nervous system resilience
- How to enhance your vagal efficiency with a postural reset
- How therapeutic yoga aligns and balances the nervous system
- Chair-based and mat yoga practices to release cervical spine and pelvis for better posture
- How to come out of postural inefficiencies so you’re not stuck in hyperarousal states — like a racing mind, irritability, poor sleep, and more
Module 4: July 9, 2025
Access Your Internal Compass to Guide Your Decision-Making Through Somatic Awareness
Working metaphorically, focus on the digestive system as a beautiful boundary system that helps navigate stimuli you’re taking in from the world all day.
Learn to eliminate experiences that aren’t good for you by using your digestion system as a discernment mechanism.
As Arielle will explain, the deepest source of intuition lives within your body. Taking time to sense and feel your body helps you ground yourself in an inner knowing.
This bodily felt sense allows you to listen to your own internal compass, which guides your decisions in personal, relational, and professional spaces. Through the development and self-ownership of your boundaries, feel equipped to own your power and claim your worth.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- Somatic movement practices for personal empowerment
- An exercise to find an embodied sense of “yes” and “no” in the body
- Embodying your self-worth
- An exercise to cultivate a felt sense of boundaries and your inner voice
- How to reclaim your being so you’re not engaging in performative behavior
Module 5: July 16, 2025
Energy Alignment & Spiritual Practices to Create a Felt Sense of Freedom in Your Body, Mind & Spirit
When you feel out of balance energetically, you might notice that you feel spacey and ungrounded — or heavy and lethargic.
Arielle Schwartz will explain the connection between the vagus nerve, nervous system plexus, endocrine system glands, and how they correspond to the chakra system.
Working with the vagus nerve helps you reclaim an energetic alignment, bringing you into greater clarity and equanimity. As you align your energy body, notice the places that are stuck in expansion and retraction to find balance.
Focus on the highly concentrated areas of nerve endings in the vagus nerve that align with the chakra system.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- How the vagus nerve relates to energy centers
- The energetics of the chakra system with an understanding of yogic philosophy
- Subtle body practices for spiritual grounding
- Powerful breath and vocalization techniques to balance and align your energy centers
Module 6: July 23, 2025
Release Unwanted Tension & Defensive Postures With Polyvagal Theory – “The Science of Safety”
Work with the lower vagus nerve to move out of defensive states and find deep relaxation without going into collapse — what Arielle Schwartz calls the “sweet spot.”
When you don’t feel safe, it’s difficult to create meaningful change in your life. Defensive physiology often maintains limiting beliefs and unwanted behaviors. So, how do you release unwanted tension?
Polyvagal theory — the science of safety — offers a path to soften out of unnecessary protective states. Arielle Schwartz will safely guide you toward your relaxation response, helping you access your deepest source of restorative, embodied healing.
Rest in stillness and embrace vulnerability. With mindful rest, have more time to care for yourself.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- Yoga Nidra and non-sleep deep rest for healing
- Mind-body practices for rewiring limiting patterns
- Releasing defensiveness and embracing vulnerability
- Humility as spiritual ground
- A 20-minute resting practice that includes a full-body scan to anchor your body and min
Module 7: July 30, 2025
Create Your Action Plan to Bring Resilience & Alignment Into Your Daily Life
What does resilience look like on a daily basis? Build resilience by cultivating beliefs and behaviors that support your physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual wellbeing — so you can flexibly adapt to life’s curveballs.
Arielle Schwartz will share her resilience recipe, helping you discern how you want to spend your time and what gives you purpose, so you can recognize your own rhythms and maximize your core connection to living a life of purpose.
Day by day, each small positive action accumulates to strengthen your spirit.
As Arielle Schwartz will explain, to actualize change, it’s important to bring your insights into action. Living in alignment with your values is a profound source of meaning and purpose.
In this module, you’ll:
- Enhance awareness with values-based living practices
- Reflect upon your golden nuggets of insight
- Develop your personalized resilience action plan
- Set intentions for continued growth and transformation
- Create a values-identification practice to develop an action plan to bring your values into daily living
About Dr. Arielle Schwartz
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, CCTP-II, E-RYT, is a licensed clinical psychologist, certified complex trauma professional, EMDR consultant, and Kripalu yoga teacher. She’s an internationally sought-out speaker, a leading voice in the field of trauma recovery, and the author of seven books, including The Complex PTSD Workbook… EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology… The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook… and her latest, Applied Polyvagal Theory in Yoga.
As the founder of the Center for Resilience Informed Therapy, she offers an integrative, mind-body approach to therapy that includes relational therapy, somatic psychology, EMDR Therapy, parts-work therapy, and therapeutic yoga for trauma. She specializes in applied polyvagal theory, which focuses on addressing imbalances within the autonomic nervous system that underlie most mental and physical health conditions.
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