Char (she/we/love/sister/mama) works with nervous system resilience, conflict transformation, and stress/trauma healing with the goal of increasing individual agency and collective liberation. 
As a practitioner, facilitator, cook, and neighbor, Char orbits around vision & practice of beloved community.
Currently based between the river and the creek on Mahican land in Upstate New York, Char lives with the mugwort, roses and nettles. She works with individuals and groups around the world with a Somatic approach to conflict and chronic stress as positioned within cultural beliefs, cycles of harm, systems of oppression, generational and epigenetic lines, and spiritual practices.
Char is a white-bodied practitioner living with chronic dis/ability, deeply shaped by a childhood in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. We honor Tajik post-soviet resilience as one of our teachers, along with the STAR model, the SE model, Emergent Strategy, the Mawignack preserve, Nkem Ndefo, Shilpa Jain, Sage Hayes, Meenadchi, Devika Shankar and many others along with every client that’s trusted us with their stories and bodies.
Char is a graduate of Cohort 8 living in upstate New York. We chatted with Char about the incredible work she has done and continues to do with the Toolkit internationally, cross-culturally, and around conflict.
Describe your experience of facilitating The Resilience Toolkit in 1-2 words.
Freeing, expansive
Who are you working with?
I’m based in upstate New York, and most of the in person work I do is here – my regular circuit here is upstate New York, Brooklyn, and Philly. I was teaching Toolkit in a program in Amsterdam in the Netherlands for two years, and those students came from all over the world. Now several of them are back in their home countries, and some of us have continued working together. And there’s been stints in Afghanistan, and online work all over. I was doing some Toolkit work with folks in Australia, but time zones became challenging so I passed that on. But I would say on a weekly basis, I’m mostly working in Europe, New York, Philly, the West Coast (Berkeley area, LA), Colombia in South America, Egypt. I think that’s it!
How are you working with The Resilience Toolkit?
One of my careers before Toolkit was as a cross cultural communication trainer, so organizations would hire me to train their individuals or groups that were going into a new context on communication norms, things like that. And so I think because of already working that way, it’s been easy to then bring Toolkit into all of those different connections. Living in a lot of places has helped too. But one of the big pivots I made when I started working with Toolkit is I let go of all the intercultural training work. And it feels like it kind of became a one to one in some ways.
I do some pure Toolkit work. For me, I’m always doing Toolkit work with the same stress model – the circle model that we built when we were in the cohort with you. So I guess that’s a way that it’s slightly different – everybody who does Toolkit with me does that stress model. Which I love, because now everybody has that shared language, and people are really using it, which is the best!
I do some pure toolkit work in my private practice and in my community workshops – I do a good number of community workshops through the Resilience Fund, which I’ll tell you more about in a minute. These are three hour Toolkit workshops where they learn the stress model, they learn several tools and how to use them, and they learn to tremor. And then there’s practice space, and then Q&A. We call that workshop “Remembering Resilience.” That one recycles in the city, in Philly, and up here all the time. And it’s a pure Toolkit offering in the sense that there’s no therapy as a part of it. There’s no conflict work as a part of it. It’s just: learn how to track your own stress states, learn the tools, practice tremor. And then we do “Tremor Club” (one of my clients came up with that name and I love it). So anybody who’s participated in Remembering Resilience can come to a Tremor Club and get updated support around their tremor practice. And a lot of people bring their questions about other tools as well.
My favorite way right now that I’m using the Toolkit is in “Loving Conflict,” which is a nine week conflict skills practice group that started here super locally for me, because of several former clients and community members saying, “Hey, we feel like we need practice.” And because I work as a conflict mediator, I was doing a lot of one-off conversations about conflict skills. And then finally realized that this is a need – that we could meet together. In the nine weeks, part of what we do at the beginning is learn the stress model and learn several tools. We don’t teach tremor in that workshop, but people usually also come to Remembering Resilience. If they do just Loving Conflict, they learn several tools. And then throughout the practice group – the nine weeks, people are incorporating Toolkit tools into their practice with each other. The nine week course starts pretty easy with listening skills at the beginning, where you’re just doing reflective listening, and then resonance skills. And even through that, folks are already starting to incorporate their Butterfly Hug, their Settling Breath…as we realize, “Oh, we’re not as good at listening as we thought! It’s really hard to listen when so-and-so is talking!” or that type of thing. So right now, that’s my favorite use, because it’s exciting to see more of us build the nervous system skill for tough conversations and then reach for Toolkit tools to help make that happen. It’s giving people a really clear motivation for practicing tools and integrating them to know that, “Okay, if I want to show up better in the conflict with my coworker or my loved one, I need to get better at remembering to do tools, and I need to get better at tracking when I need them.” It’s given kind of like this focused reason to practice and incorporate. We’ve just started Cohort Five!
And one other thing I want to say about how the Toolkit is getting incorporated is in my Somatic Experiencing (SE) practice. I’m super passionate about that, because I think that SE practitioners really need more tangible ways for our clients to feel into their own agency with their bodies and nervous systems. Something I hope to build in the next few years with some of my colleagues, is a Toolkit training for SE practitioners, specifically because SE gives all these amazing tools and interventions for acute, traumatic moments in PTSD, and doesn’t build a lot of sense of sovereign agency in the client, or the ability to interrupt and redirect PTSD in the moment when you’re outside of session, and I really see the Toolkit being able to do that.
Describe a challenge you have encountered in your work as a Resilience Toolkit Facilitator.
When I’m doing the Remembering Resilience workshop, anybody or everybody can come into these – people who’ve never done any kind of embodiment work, people who’ve done a ton…people will come in just like off the street. Sometimes I’m challenged to support folks to really feel the impact of the tool in their first few times of trying because of how nuanced they are. I’m still here for the subtlety of it, because I’m not in the catharsis camp, but sometimes I’ll see folks who’ve practiced very little embodiment of any kind or somatic work not really feeling the impact. So I’m challenged at this point in myself as a facilitator to figure out what the right recipe of time, repetition, environment, and queuing is needed to “sell” the group as a whole on the tools. When people are just walking in for a one-off, I feel challenged by that. When I’m doing the longer work, like paired with SE or in Loving Conflict, where we’re going to build a relationship over several weeks, no problem. But in those one-offs where I have you for three hours and I’ll maybe never see you again, sometimes I leave feeling like, “oh, yeah, those three people – they didn’t buy.”
How are you seeing alchemical resilience and transformation show up in the work that you’re doing?
We have a mutual aid coordinator in our community (who’s going to be in the next Toolkit Certification cohort!) who I originally met as a client. I just saw her before this and got her consent to share. She came to me with one of the most acute PTSD loads I’ve ever seen on someone – vicious flashbacks that were debilitating. She came to me as an SE client, and we immediately started Toolkit work as well. And three years into her journey, she’s now merged her healing practice, through those two things, with her Mutual Aid training, and has built the Resilience Fund, which is community generated funds for folks who can’t access Toolkit practitioners or workshops that we offer in this area financially. So the Remembering Resilience series, for example, is funded by the Resilience Fund, and people can participate in that three hour workshop for $30 or less, every single workshop. Right now the funds are somewhat limited, just because it takes time to build mutual aid. But what I love that she’s done with the fund is that it’s not dependent on charitable giving. She also used to work in hospitality, so she goes to restaurants and coffee shops and asks them to add five or ten cents onto a few items on their menu that then gets allocated in whatever their pay system works at the end of the month and goes into the Resilience Fund. So it’s not coming out of the pocket of the business, it’s coming out of the pocket of the consumer. So that’s the way Remembering Resilience happens, and it also subsidizes some of Loving Conflict and participation is for the Tremor Club. Our goal by 2026 is that it can also sponsor people in our community to take the Resilience Toolkit Facilitator Certification with Lumos! So we’re hopeful we’ll get there.
If you are interested in connecting with Char, you can find her on her website: Coming Home Practice. To learn more about The Resilience Fund you can visit The Resilience Fund website or check them out on instagram @the_resilience_fund