About The Training

The Compassion Cultivation Cycle™ Practitioner Program

A Year-Long Immersion

You cannot guide someone through territory you haven't walked yourself.

This year-long immersion is a slow, spiral journey through the Compassion Cultivation Cycle™ — not as intellectual concept alone, but as lived practice. Over three weekend retreats and three virtual integration sessions, you will deepen your relationship with the model from the inside out: as practitioner, as clinician, as a human being who has known disconnection and found your way back.

The Wholeness Perspective is the foundational lens of this entire year. It is a radical reorientation away from deficit-based thinking — away from the question "what is wrong with this person?" — and toward the honest inquiry: "what happened, and how brilliantly did they adapt?" Every phase of the Compassion Cultivation Cycle™ is approached through this lens, and by the end of the year, it will no longer be a concept you hold. It will be a way of seeing you carry into every room.

This program is built on the understanding that healing happens in relationship, in the body, and in contact with the natural world. These are not poetic add-ons. They are the three Evolutionary Protectors at the core of Ellen Slater's model — Embodied Wisdom, Safe Human Relationships, and Earth Kin — woven into every retreat, every practice, and every integration call.

By the end of this year, you will not simply know the Compassion Cultivation Cycle™. You will be able to use it as a compass — to locate where a client is living inside the cycle, to meet them there with precision and compassion, and to guide the journey toward what this model calls Intuitive Authority: a trustworthy, embodied relationship with one's own inner wisdom.

The Arc of the Year:

Healing moves in a spiral, not a straight line. The three retreats follow the arc of the Compassion Cultivation Cycle™ itself — beginning at the origin of disconnection and moving, slowly and experientially, toward Compassion Embodied. The three virtual sessions weave clinical application and peer community through each transition.

Retreat One — Ruptured Connection & Satiating the Fear

We begin at the beginning. Every behavior we have been trained to diagnose has an origin — a fracture in connection from primary sources of life. Attachment wounds, generational trauma, cultural worldview, colonialism: these are the conditions under which Sophisticated Adaptations form. In this retreat, we lay the foundation of the Wholeness Perspective — the clinical and relational commitment to understand every adaptation as intelligent, even when costly. We ask: what was this person reaching for? And we learn to meet that question with genuine curiosity rather than correction.

Participants will be introduced to the Heart Brain as a sensory authority and the neuroscience of attachment as a framework for understanding the origins of disconnection.

Retreat Two — Painful Adaptations & Awareness

This retreat turns toward the Sophisticated Adaptations themselves — the unique hustle for belonging that each person develops when connection feels uncertain. The logic of "when I X, then I am safe" runs deep. Awareness is the first step to freedom, not as a cognitive exercise, but as a somatic one. Here we cultivate the capacity to recognize adaptations in the body before the mind has named them — without judgment, without the urgency to fix.

Participants will work experientially with the Inner Prism™ — Ellen Slater's proprietary framework for understanding the multi-dimensional inner landscape. Like a prism, each person carries various inner aspects shaped by temperament and environment: some driven and protective, others tender and young, some joyful and others that have been waiting a long time to be heard. Learning to relate to the inner world as a prism — rather than a collection of problems — is one of the most clinically powerful shifts this training offers.

Retreat Three — Co-Compassion & Compassion Embodied

In the final retreat, we practice what it means to be held, and to hold. Co-Compassion — the process by which another nervous system's compassionate presence becomes internalized as one's own — is the relational engine of this entire model. We explore the barriers to Compassion Embodied, the ways it has been interrupted, and the conditions under which it grows. We complete the cycle and prepare to carry it into clinical life with skill, depth, and the kind of authority that only comes from having lived the work.

Participants will also learn to work with the Ancient Brain — Ellen Slater's term for the deep, pre-verbal knowing that we are interdependent with our ecosystem. Earth as co-regulator is not metaphor here; it is clinical practice. We will explore how to bring the Ancient Brain into therapeutic work and into community.

Virtual Integration Sessions (3)

Between retreats, the community gathers virtually to practice clinical application of the CCC™ framework, work with real cases, deepen somatic attunement skills, and support the ongoing internalization of the model. These sessions are structured for peer learning and reflection as much as didactic training — because the Compassion Cultivation Cycle™ is built on the truth that we learn to hold others by experiencing being held ourselves.

The Head & Heart Training Experience

Retreats are held at our sunlit retreat center nestled on the river in the North Cascade mountains — a landscape chosen deliberately. The training environment is itself a teaching. Participants will receive a trauma-informed somatic training grounded in current research and anchored in experiential practice throughout each weekend. Every session integrates lecture, experiential practice, and community sharing. The Compassion Cultivation Cycle™ has emerged from clinical and lived experience, they are woven together, it is not a model to be studied. It is a collaborative journey

The Three Pathways:

The Heart Brain | The Inner Prism | The Ancient Brain

The Compassion Cultivation Cycle™ is rooted in three interlocking pathways — not separate modules, but interdependent dimensions of the same territory. Each retreat and integration session weaves all three.

The Heart Brain

The head and the heart are in constant communication through the Vagus nerve — an information superhighway running throughout the body that most clinical training treats as background noise. Ellen Slater's work places the heart-brain at the center. There is robust and growing research revealing our evolutionary reliance on the heart as a source of wisdom and intuition, and the Compassion Cultivation Cycle™ offers concrete, evidence-based practices for awakening these neuropathways.

Clinically, a strengthened heart-brain connection expands the Window of Receptivity — the nervous system's capacity to hold experience without constricting, resisting, or collapsing. Participants will gain tools for guiding themselves and clients from cognitive overdrive into embodied presence, and from the contraction of fear into the spaciousness that genuine change requires.

Learn the language of the heart.

The Inner Prism™

One of the most clinically distinctive elements of the Head & Heart approach is the Inner Prism™ — a proprietary framework developed by Ellen Slater for understanding the multi-dimensional nature of every human being. Rather than mapping inner experience onto diagnostic categories, the Inner Prism™ recognizes that we are each a constellation of inner aspects: dynamic, relational, shaped by temperament and environment, and always oriented — even in their most painful expressions — toward connection and safety.

These aspects are not pathology. They are Sophisticated Adaptations: intelligent responses to the ecosystems that shaped us. Some aspects are highly protective; others are tender and unfinished. Some represent particular ages; others are simply a felt sense in the body. The work of the Inner Prism™ is not to eliminate or override these aspects, but to create the conditions in which they feel seen and heard — so they can settle, integrate, and make room for the wholeness that was always there.

Participants will gain deep skill in listening for and working with inner aspects, both in their own experience and in clinical practice. This approach draws on Interpersonal Neurobiology, Relational Neuroscience, somatic awareness, and earth-based wisdom — creating a framework that is both evidence-grounded and genuinely new in the field.

Learn a new way to listen.

The Ancient Brain

“The land knows you, even when you are lost.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer 

Ellen Slater uses the term Ancient Brain to point to what our nervous systems have always known: we are not separate from the natural world. We were shaped in reciprocal relationship with earth — and our capacity for regulation, attunement, and belonging has always relied on that relationship. The rupture from earth is centuries old and profoundly underacknowledged in the field of psychology.

Co-regulation — the process by which one nervous system offers support and modeling to another in moments of overwhelm — is one of the most essential mechanisms of healing. Earth is one of our most available and under-utilized co-regulators. In this program, participants will explore how to bring the Ancient Brain into clinical practice and into their own lives: not as supplementary nature therapy, but as a core dimension of the Compassion Cultivation Cycle™.

You are breathing with the trees.