Alchemical Alignment 101
An introduction with Varia Erochina
Six Week Virtual Small Group Course
Mondays, January 13th - February 17th, 2025
12:30 - 2:30pm EST, live and recorded
Alchemical Alignment is a somatic modality that combines the science of nervous system healing with the magic of nature and mystery of spirit.
In this 6 week course, you will be introduced to the foundational principles and practices that make up Alchemical Alignment. You will learn how to track and map nervous systems responses in a nuanced way and be invited to practice both foundational and more advanced somatic skills. Classes combine experiential learning, small group discussion and somatic sitting and movement practices.
This course is for anyone with some somatic experience interested in learning from a more spiritual, intuitive perspective as well as for practitioners curious about the modality but not yet ready to apply for our training program.
In this course you will learn:
How to use The Map of 7 Realms to develop a more robust and health-oriented understanding of the nervous system.
Somatic practices including the alignment movement sequence, stabilization, orienting, containment, pendulation, feeling for tides, attuning to the blueprint of health and more.
How an approach rooted in Alchemical Alignment principles holds one of the keys when working with early, chronic and ancestral trauma, double binds and freeze.
Course Curriculum
Week One: Safety
Being within our Range of Reguation is a dynamic state of safety. Explore what slow, medium and fast regulation feel like while learning how to resource for stabilization.
Week Two: Stress
Our body’s security system uses stress as a healthy response to help us avoid, mitigate and avoid danger. Learn how to track your stress physiology, and re-orient to safety.
Week Three: Trauma
Unmet traumatic experiences imprint onto our inherent blueprint of health. Learn about how to pendulate between safety and threat when navigating triggering subjects.
Week Four: Layers of Support to Stabilize, Soothe and Distract
In order to repair our nervous systems, we must learn how to meet and match the activation in our bodies with appropriate support and containment.
Week Five: Epic Imprints and Tidal Health
When trauma is early, chronic or ancestral, it requires early, consistent and ancestral resources in order to be met. Learn how to access larger fields of support, starting with tidal health.
Week Six: Creating Conditions for Health
Life force offers an inherent treatment plan that lies within each organism. As we learn to listen to this blueprint of health, we create conditions to heal and thrive.
Tuition and Registration:
Alchemical Alignment 101 tuition is on sliding scale pricing which offers financial accessibility to those who need it and a chance for those with financial stability to practice redistribution. A great big thanks to Alexis J. Cunningfolk for their writing on sliding scale pricing .
Scholarship Tuition
$350 USD upfront
*$117 USD X 3 months
The Scholarship Tuition is for you if meeting basic needs takes up your budget and paying for this class would be significant or stressful. BIPOC, queer & trans, working class, disabled, neurodivergent and immigrant folks to the front please.
Standard Tuition
$500 USD upfront
*$167 USD X 3 months
The Standard Tuition is the actual cost of the course. It’s for you if you have some financial stability and limited expendable income. Paying for this class will likely mean prioritizing this above other non-essential spending.
Redistribution Tuition
$750 USD upfront
$250 USD x 3 months
The Redistribution Tuition is for those with financial security who can afford to help cover the tuition costs of your peers who have less. Home-owners, white, cis, able-bodied, settler, university educated folks - this is your price.
Course Details
Format: Classes will combine experiential lessons, drawn maps of nervous system function (including the map of 7 realms), guided somatic practice and whole/small group discussions.
Class Size and Instructors: 22 - 24 students total, with small groups of 4 - 6 people. The course will be supported by 4 assistants who will be available for live support during each class, and lead small groups.
Recordings: A recording of each class will be made available within 24 hours after class, so you can catch up if you miss a week.
CE’s: 12 from NCBTMB pending.
Meet Your Instructor:
Varia Erochina
Varia Erochina (they/them) is a somatic teacher and practitioner dedicated to personal and collective healing. Queerness, immigration, class struggle, and lived experience of healing complex trauma orient their work towards healing and justice for all. Varia takes an integrated approach to long term healing combining their training in Alchemical Alignment trauma resolution, Gestalt psychotherapy, spiritual care and somatic parts work. Their popular course How to Feel offers practical education and embodied practice for feeling your feelings. They are the creator of Cards for Self-Care, offers 1-1 and group support, leads workshops, retreats, classes and more. Varia lives with their wife and their cat as a settler on Dish With One Spoon treaty territory, and spends their free time making ceramics, taking road trips, walking in nature, and pulling tarot cards. Learn more at their website.
Meet Your Course Assistants:
Nancy Turnquist
Nancy (she/her) is a mother, poet, teacher, energy and body worker with over 23 years of experience. Her somatic training includes, Yoga therapy (C-IAYT), Biodynamic Craniosacral therapy (RCST) and Somatic therapy and education with a focus on Somatic Practice, Touch Skills for Trauma, Blueprint Resonance and Alchemical Alignment. She also has training as a birth and postpartum doula and has worked with families and babies with a focus on Pre and Perinatal Psychology.
Kevin Platt
Kevin (he/him) is a bodyworker, movement teacher and human experience enthusiast. He weaves his years of experience in somatic practices and time spent in movement/healing communities to bring loving curiosity and conciousness to individuals and groups. In the last 5 years, he has deepened his learning within breathwork, dance therapy, and trauma informed somatic inquiry. He began studying with the Alchemical Alignment community in January 2020 and has been assisting in the teach team since September 2022.
Mina Aidoo
Mina (she/her) is a Somatic Soul Guide and Dance Artist. For the past 25+ years she has been on a journey exploring dance, choreography, sacred sexuality, somatic movement, trauma integration, art and Spirit. She began studying with the Alchemical Alignment community community since October 2020 and has been assisting in the teaching team since March 2022.
Alice Wikström
Alice Wikström (she/her) is an emotional resilience coach, mindfulness and meditation teacher who works with ambitious women to help them understand and regulate their emotions to combat stress and overwhelm.
Drawing from her own deep practice and extensive study of mindfulness and Buddhist psychology she offers a wide range of skills and tools to enhance awareness and transform the way we relate to stress and overwhelm. She works internationally and in 2022 Alice moved back to her homeland Sweden where she now lives in Stockholm together with her husband, two teenage daughters and a dog named Gracie. Alice has been studying Alchemical Alignment since 2022.
Student feedback:
"This class is the planting of seeds that have the potential to change your life."
"This course gave me the language to understand my nervous system in a whole new way. I cannot recommend it enough."
“What I most liked was to experience real space and freedom to come as I am, to be me without having to do or be something else. This felt vulnerable, but with space to give myself what I need for that vulnerability. It made a learning environment where authentic / natural learning is possible. This is something that personally moved me deeply, and that I since the classes am more consciously taking into my work as a practitioner and my being a mom for my toddler. I also loved how everything seemed to come together in the last class. This felt like a full circle. Having Varia as a teacher was a great experience as well, she brought many helpful an relatable examples for the theory, and it was really nice to feel her humanity, not a teacher on a pedestal somewhere above, but a equal human being sharing knowledge and space.”
“Having spent a few years immersed in the Polyvagal Theory, and learning about trauma resolution through various teachers, there seemed to be something missing in how to support myself with a Hypoarousal response that limited me from being able to fully express my potential. From the 6 weeks in Alchemical Alignment 101, I reconnected with my health blueprint through the teachings. I remembered my deep connection with the natural world, my environment and my intuition. Much of what I was trying to move beyond has transformed into an entirely new experience for me, one I am embracing and actually enjoying rather than resisting against. I have felt so more embodied, more spiritually alive and more connected to present moment awareness than I have in a long time. I feel as though I am dancing with life now, which feels so much more me than who I'd been trying to be.”
“I loved this class and what I internalized about right timing, choicefullness, and allowing myself to be slow. Something I learned from AA that has had a transformative impact on my life. Varia is an incredibly skilled teacher. They were able to explain the content clearly and in ways that made sense for different learners. But they also were able to show us, and guide us towards experiencing the content ourselves. I don't think I've ever done a training that had a more direct impact on my system, my day-to-day life (both personally and in my practice as a therapist with clients). I especially loved how Varia took the time to explain what we could expect each day, and with the course as a whole. I always felt oriented, which was very grounding and helped me to be more fully present. I appreciated the space that Varia and the assistants created for vulnerability, while also containing it enough that it was still professional and focused. The balance of theory and practice worked very well for me. What a meaningful six weeks. I am so grateful to have been part of it.”