The Lineage Behind the Work

Inspirations & Influences

The teachers, practitioners, and pioneers whose work shapes the approach Annapurna brings to every session.
No practice exists in isolation. Annapurna’s work is rooted in a living tradition of somatic inquiry, body-based healing, and pre- & perinatal awareness — nourished by the extraordinary thinkers and practitioners who came before.

Thought Leaders

Pioneers of Somatic Healing

Dr Peter Levine

Somatic Experience

Dr Peter Levine

Peter Alan Levine (born 1942)[56] is an American psychotraumatologist and psychologist. As a psychotherapist, he offers lectures, advanced training and seminars on SE he founded worldwide.

He described his understanding of coherence with the acronym SIBAM (sensation, image, behavior, affect and meaning). For Levine, a complete phenomenological experience is only given with the simultaneous activation of those five aspects. In the case of coherence, all five elements of consciousness combine with one another. Trauma creates a fragmentation of the coherence of experience. Separately from the meaning, an image triggers an affect, e.g. black rubber boots trigger the impulse to flee. The here and now becomes there and then. By emphasizing only two of the channels of the SIBAM model, cognition and behavior, cognitive behavioral therapy ignores three very important aspects of coherent experience, sensation, image and affect.[57] In his book Waking the Tiger, Levine estimates that a hundred million Americans experienced childhood sexual and physical abuse.[58]

For more information, visit his website, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_experiencing#Peter_Levine.

Emilie Conrad

Continuum Movement

Emilie Conrad

Emilie Conrad was a movement artist, body researcher, and founder of Continuum Movement — a practice that explores what she called “the fluid body.” Where most therapeutic approaches work with structure, pattern, and form, Conrad asked a more primal question: what happens when we explore the body as a living, fluid, ever-moving process rather than a fixed biological machine?
Continuum is not a technique to be learned but a field of inquiry to be entered. Through breath, sound, and micro-movements that emerge spontaneously from within, practitioners explore the body’s capacity to self-organise, restore, and discover its own intelligence. Conrad believed the human body retains a connection to its primordial, aquatic origins — and that returning to this fluid aliveness is itself a form of healing.
“We are a movement that is experiencing itself. The universe is movement — and so are we.”
— Emilie Conrad

Dr. Raymond Castellino

Pre and Peri Natal Craniosacral Expert

Dr. Raymond Castellino

Ray Castellino was known for his significant and lasting contribution to the field of prenatal and perinatal therapy. He passed away in December of 2020 after actively teaching his work around the world for 50 years, 30 of them focused on pre and perinatal work.
Ray began his growth oriented journey in 1969 and drew on decades of experience as a natural health care practitioner, consultant and teacher. His roots were in Polarity Therapy, taught by Randolph Stone. This core paradigm was formative to how he thought and worked. Starting in 1990, he became a practitioner, a pioneer and a trainer in the field of pre- and perinatal therapy with the use of energetic and somatic approaches to facilitating secure attachment and bonding.
His practice focused on the resolution of prenatal, birth, and other early trauma by efficiently and safely moving into harmonic resonance and co-regulated states while supporting individuation and differentiation at the same time. He did this in two settings: small groups of adults meeting together for several days and weekly family sessions of 1+ hours.
“Every human being deserves to be welcomed into life. When that welcome is incomplete, we can return to that beginning and offer it now.”
— Dr. Raymond Castellino

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