Dr Bessel van der Kolk Live in Melbourne – The Body Keeps the Score – Full Day Workshop (Additional Show)
With Dr Bessel Van der Kolk (USA), Licia Sky (USA), Tania de Jong AM and Holloway
Date: Sat 25 April 2026 @ 10:00am (AEST)
Location: St Kilda Town Hall
MELBOURNE WORKSHOP DATES NOW SOLD OUT
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Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide & Melbourne – April 12th, 16th, 19th, 25th, and 26th, 2026
THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE
Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma in Turbulent Times
Dr Bessel van der Kolk supported by Licia Sky, Tania de Jong AM, and Holloway
A healing, educational workshop for therapists, practitioners and the general public.
In his best-selling work THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE, Bessel van der Kolk explains how trauma literally reshapes the brain and body, causing lasting effects on mental and physical health.
Trauma is not a story of what has happened in the past: trauma that started outside shapes the filters and perceptions that determine how we currently experience our lives – trauma keeps being replayed inside the theatre of the body.
THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE
Overwhelming experiences continue to be lived out in heartbreak and gut-wrenching sensations. This leaves survivors feeling unsafe, frazzled, on edge, ashamed, overwhelmed and shut down. The bottom line is that they no longer feel safe inside their own skin. Recovery from trauma involves learning how to restore a sense of visceral safety and reclaiming a loving relationship with oneself — one’s entire organism. Awareness of physical sensations forms the very foundation of human consciousness. Healing can only occur if survivors can befriend themselves and be in charge of their feelings and sensations.
The toll trauma takes is immeasurable. It can destroy our ability to focus, engage, and calm down. Treating people who’ve experienced trauma can be some of the most challenging work for practitioners, and all the more so because of the varying causes and types of traumas.
This unique workshop will explore how trauma affects people’s rhythms within themselves and with their surroundings. Trauma changes the way the brain processes information and how the human organism engages with the world. In addition to our individual and ancestral traumas, most of us feel collectively traumatised by what is happening in this tumultuous and rapidly changing world.
Because of biological systems that are altered, traumatized people continue to react in myriad ways, constantly bringing the past into the present. This means that they can never be truly present and design a more positive, healthy and grounded future. When we understand how to integrate the body and brain in the treatment of trauma, we can reduce symptoms and reclaim lives.
Most experiences are automatically processed on subcortical, i.e. unconscious levels in the brain. Therefore, insight and understanding have only a limited influence on people’s control over these processes.
This workshop may be eligible for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points through your relevant professional college or association (5 hours per event). A Certificate of Attendance is available upon request to Mind Medicine Australia. Please confirm the applicable category and number of points with your professional membership body.
What you can expect:
This special event will explore the neurobiology of self-regulation and examine ways of befriending one’s body, voice and nervous system. These are essential for the integration of traumatic memories: feelings, action patterns and physical sensations derived from the past.
Bessel will explore how the brain is shaped by experience and how our relationship to our sense of self is the product of our synchronicity with those around us. Healing may involve a variety of different approaches. He will share clinical experiences and world-leading research with psychedelic-assisted therapies, EMDR, yoga, meditation and bodywork, music and theatre, and neurofeedback. He will outline the efficacy of these various techniques in helping people overcome a traumatic past and regain the capacity to be fully alive in the present.
Bessel and Licia will demonstrate the cultivation of an embodied orientation: We cannot teach or guide someone else in attuned self-awareness if we are not able to get into that state ourselves. This experiential workshop will help to activate the brain’s neuroplasticity to help restore the emotional part of the brain and repair the limbic and nervous system. Body awareness has a major impact on how we process sensations and memories and, thus, how we heal from traumatic experiences. As healers, our own body awareness is an important barometer to track the states of both patient and therapist.
Based on the (upcoming) The Body Keeps the Score Workbook, this program offers an array of non-verbal, experiential exercises drawn from theatre, guided focusing, dance, meditation, yoga, bodywork, and embodied voice.
Tania de Jong AM will share her magnificent, angelic voice and healing energies to warm your heart and connect you to more of your creative self.
Holloway is an Australian-based sonic alchemist, weaving purely expressive music for the soul, and medicinal soundscapes of deep listening, emotion, and re:membrance.
This workshop will explore:
- What neuroscience teaches about self-awareness and trauma
- The nature and essence of human attachment
- New psychotherapeutic treatments that help integrate traumatic memories, including psychedelic-assisted therapies
- Body-centered approaches for dealing with trauma, including EMDR, yoga, play, voice, dance, theatre work and tai chi.
These techniques help people come into the present moment and shift out of fear, numbing and hyperarousal. This allows them to resolve traumatic memories, promote mastery over the post-traumatic legacy of constriction, disconnection, and loss, and reclaim authority over their lives.
Running times:
- 10:00am – 11:00am: VIP
- 12:00pm – 2:00pm: 1st workshop session
- 2:00pm – 3:00pm: Interval
- 3:00pm – 5:00pm: 2nd workshop session
This event is presented by Activate Media Events and charity Mind Medicine Australia.
50% of any profits will be donated to Mind Medicine Australia’s Patient Support Fund to support patients in need to access psychedelic-assisted therapy treatments.
This workshop may be eligible for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points through your relevant professional college or association. Please confirm the applicable category and number of points with your professional membership body. A Certificate of Attendance is available upon request.
The Presenters
Dr Bessel Van der Kolk (USA)
MD
Bessel van der Kolk MD, Professor of Psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine and President, Trauma Research Foundation, has spent his career studying how children and adults adapt to traumatic experiences, and have tried to translate emerging findings from pharmacology, neuroscience and attachment research to develop and study potentially effective treatments for traumatic stress in children and adults.
In 1984 he set up one of the first clinical/research centers in the US dedicated to study and treatment of traumatic stress in civilian populations, which has trained numerous researchers and clinicians specializing in the study and treatment of traumatic stress, and which has been continually funded to research the impact of traumatic stress and effective treatment interventions. He conducted the first studies on the effects of SSRIs on PTSD; he was a member of the first neuroimaging team to investigate how trauma changes brain processes, and he did the first research linking BPD and deliberate self-injury to trauma and neglect in early childhood.
Much of his research has focused on how trauma has a different impact at different stages of development, and that disruptions in care-giving systems have additional deleterious effects that need to be addressed for effective intervention. In order to promote a deeper understanding of the impact of childhood trauma and to foster the development and execution of effective treatment interventions he initiated the process that led to the establishment of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), a Congressionally mandated initiative that now funds approximately 150 centers specializing in developing effective treatment interventions, and implementing them in a wide array of settings, from juvenile detention centers to tribal agencies, nationwide. He has focused on studying treatments that stabilize physiology, increase executive functioning and help traumatized individuals to feel fully alert to the present. This has included an NIMH funded study on EMDR and NCCAM funded study of yoga, and, in recent years, the study of neurofeedback to investigate whether attentional and perceptual systems (and the neural tracks responsible for them) can be altered by changing EEG patterns.
Currently he is Principal Investigator of the Boston arm of the MAPS 1 and 2 studies on the effects of MDMA on people with chronic PTSD. His seminal book The Body keeps the Score , has been on the New York Times best seller list for over 230 weeks, and has been translated into 42 different languages.
Licia Sky (USA)
BFA, CMOH
Licia Sky is a co-founder of the Trauma Research Foundation with Dr Bessel van der Kolk.
She is a somatic educator, artist, singer-songwriter, and bodyworker who works with traumatized individuals and trains mental health professionals to explore parts work, mindful meditation, movement, theatre exercises, psychodrama, writing, psychedelic integration, and voice as tools for attunement, healing, and connection. For the past decade, she has been teaching expanded awareness in workshops to clinicians and lay people around the world. She is a regular teacher for the Esalen Institute, Cape Cod Institute, Mind Medicine Australia and the Ketamine Training Centre.
Tania de Jong AM
LL.B (Hons), GradDipMus
Executive Director
Tania de Jong AM is the co-Founder and Executive Director of Mind Medicine Australia. Tania has garnered an international reputation as an award-winning social entrepreneur, acclaimed soprano, inspirational speaker and storyteller, creative alchemist, philanthropist and spiritual journey woman. She is a passionate leader for social change. Her mission is to change the world, one voice at a time!
She regularly presents on creativity, innovation, leadership, purpose, psychedelic-assisted therapies, mental health and wellbeing at major conferences and events around the world across the business, government, creative arts and community sectors. Tania is one of Australia’s most successful female entrepreneurs and innovators developing 6 businesses and 4 charities including Creative Universe, Creativity Australia and the With One Voice programs, Umbrella Foundation, Creative Innovation Global, Pot-Pourri and The Song Room.
Tania was named in the 100 Women of Influence, the 100 Australian Most Influential Entrepreneurs and named as one of the 100 most influential people in psychedelics globally. Her TED Talk has sparked global interest.
Holloway
Medicinal Musician/Sound Healer
Holloway is a sonic alchemist from Byron Bay, Australia, weaving ceremonial music for the heart and spirit. His sound arises through deep listening, crafted intuitively, shaped by emotion, and infused with textures gathered from across the globe, where sacred prayer and ecstatic song have become part of his inner landscape.
Holloway’s music is a journey: deep & light, emotive, and pure expression. For nearly a decade, his voice and guitar have held space in ceremonies, immersions, and intentional gatherings around the world. Often described as medicinal, his sound has borne witness to birth, love, and inner passage… musical pathways of re:membering.
Disclaimer: Mind Medicine Australia does not encourage or facilitate illegal use of psychedelics or plant medicines. MMA focus is focused on clinical and legal use only supported by the emerging science and legislative processes. Mind Medicine Australia reserves the right to record and publish webinars on various social media platforms. You agree that you will not discuss any names, locations or specific details of illegal use of psychedelics both verbally or via any written forms of communication via Mind Medicine Australia social media platforms (for example Facebook, Instagram or Zoom private and public chat forms during a webinar). Breaches of these guidelines may result in not being able to participate in the event. We thank you for support and cooperation on these matters.