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 INTIMATE
GROUND

Essential Practices for Staying with Yourself


A safe & sacred space to slow down and feel—
to honor what is real—
where life’s initiations are met with presence,
integrated in the body,
and become wisdom in the heart.


Spring Series: April 14 - May 19 2026

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WELCOME to INTIMATE GROUND

The Invitation

Something is being asked of us in these times.

Not more effort.
Not more understanding or strategy.
But a different quality of presence—

A capacity to stay with ourselves as life intensifies,
rather than bracing against it or leaving our center.

There comes a point—often more than once—when the ways we’ve learned to navigate life begin to feel insufficient. Not because we haven’t grown,
but because something deeper is asking to be met.

Most of us were never taught how to meet ourselves, purely, innocently, directly as we are.

We learned instead, to manage, analyze, push through, bypass or shut down.
And eventually, these strategies reach their limit.

What begins to reveal itself is something simpler:

The capacity to be with our direct, immediate, most intimate experience—
in the body,
through the heart,
in real time.

The difficult feelings, the hard seasons, the moments of intensity—these are not obstacles.

They are the path.

When we learn to meet what is arising with presence, something shifts.
What once overwhelmed us, begins to open us.

And in that opening, we become more steady,
more connected,
more alive.

It is about learning to stay with ourselves
long enough for what is already here to reveal itself.

That is what this series offers:

A space to slow down,
to settle,
and return to a more honest, intimate relationship with your inner life.

This coherence is not something we earn.
It is something we remember.
It is our birthright.


How this work is different
 

There’s a lot of focus on improving yourself—becoming more healed, more regulated, more evolved.

This isn’t that.

This work isn’t about becoming someone else or creating a better version of you.

It’s about learning how to stay with yourself—intimately, honestly, as you are.

 In this space, you’ll begin to discover:
☀️ That your reactions are not the problem—they’re intelligent responses to learn and grow from.

☀️ That overwhelm often comes from habitually choosing too much for your attention to metabolize.
☀️ That regulation emerges naturally when the body feels 'safe enough.'
☀️ That you can experience your inner world without taking it so personally.
☀️ That intimacy with yourself changes how you relate to everything and everyone.

 Interestingly, when we discover these inroads, we do heal, regulate and evolve, naturally.

What makes this work different?
 
☀️ Safety comes first - Nothing is forced. We create conditions where change can happen naturally.
☀️ It happens in real time - This is about what shifts in your body and your hearts capacity for intimacy—  not just what you understand conceptually.
☀️ We work with your system, not against it -Your patterns are included, not overridden.
☀️ Relational support matters - The group becomes a space where your system can settle and reorganize.
☀️ Integration over intensity - This is about sustainable change—growing at the speed of love.

This work draws from somatic integration practices, psycho-biology, embodied non-dual awareness, parts work and more — but at its core, it’s not about methods.

It’s about relationship.

This Series Is For You If…


You sense that the ways you’ve learned to cope through efforting, insight, or even spiritual practice—
aren’t truly nourishing you.

You may feel a quiet (or not-so-quiet) exhaustion from trying to work on yourself… without experiencing the depth of change you long for.

Learning how to be with your inner world without immediately trying to fix it, change it, or escape it…is a profound shift.

This is not about self-improvement.
And it’s not about becoming more “spiritual.”

It’s about learning how to stay— with what’s true, what’s tender and what’s alive, asking to be met within you.

You might recognize this in yourself:

 
☀️ Persistent Anxiety or Hyper-vigilance: Feeling constantly on edge or in a state of fear, even when there is no immediate threat. Difficulty relaxing or unwinding.

☀️ Exhaustion and Fatigue: Chronic tiredness or feeling drained despite adequate rest, often due to the nervous system being stuck in fight, flight, fawn or freeze mode.

☀️ Emotional Dysregulation: Frequent outbursts of anger, sadness, or frustration, or feeling numb and detached from emotions. 

☀️ Disconnection and Difficulty Focusing: Feeling foggy, detached, or dissociated, with challenges concentrating or staying present.

☀️ Physical Symptoms:
Chronic tension headaches, digestive issues, muscle tightness, immune disorders or persistent pain linked to unprocessed stress or trauma. 


These are not signs that something is wrong with you. And they don’t mean that the work you’ve done hasn’t mattered.

Often, they are signals that you’ve arrived at a threshold— a place where something deeper is asking for your attention.

There may be places within you that didn’t have the conditions they needed to fully develop.
Places that learned to adapt, protect, or freeze in time.

Not because they are broken— but because they were never fully met.

These places don’t need to be fixed.

They need the right conditions to soften… to thaw… to come back into breath, into movement and simultaneously into a stillness that you can truly rest in.

This work is about learning how to meet these places differently:

With compassion.
With patience.
With a willingness to stay.

What Begins to Grow From Here

 As you learn to stay with yourself, new capacities begin to emerge:

☀️ The ability to remain present with intensity without shutting down

☀️ A wider, more resilient emotional range

☀️ A deeper attunement to your own needs and truth

☀️ Clearer boundaries without losing connection

☀️ The capacity to be in relationship without abandoning yourself 

☀️ Greater ease in navigating conflict and repair

☀️ The ability to receive support without collapsing or defending

☀️ A growing sense of inner stability and ground

These capacities aren’t something you force. They develop naturally when the conditions for growth are present.


The Series


Intimate Ground is a 6-week experiential journey designed to help you build these capacities—gently, steadily, and in real time.

Each session is 2 hours and includes:

 *Guided somatic and awareness-based practices
 *Nervous system education you can actually apply
 *Relational space for integration and reflection
 *Practical tools for meeting your daily experience differently
 *This is not about intensity. It’s about integration.

Six Sessions. One Living Arc

A descent from inner division into embodied wholeness. A return to the quiet, living intimacy of being fully met—from within.

Session One~: Staying

Arriving at the Threshold We're Standing In

This session establishes our ground of safety: the physiological foundation without which nothing else is possible. We work with breath, belly- hara intelligence and the felt sense of support beneath us; beginning the return to a more natural support of being with ourselves. For many of us, the body has not felt like a safe place to land. The work here is simply to begin — with great gentleness — to shift that.

We explore:
-Why slowing down is often the most radical act available
-Orienting to the body as home — breath, belly, ground
-The nervous system's need for safety before anything else can open
-Beginning exactly where you are

Core Resources:
Ground  ·  Breath  ·  Belly (Hara)  ·  Orientation to Safety  ·  Slowing Down

Core Capacity:
The capacity to arrive — to inhabit the body as a place of safety rather than a place to escape from.

Developmental Core Needs: will be introduced 

Session Two~: Discovering & Allowing

Meeting yourself where you are

As we begin to turn toward our inner world, we encounter the many voices, feelings, and patterns that shape our experience. Here, we learn to meet what arises with less subconscious resistance—creating space for something new to emerge. The key movement is from turning away to facing toward.
Nothing transforms in a climate of inner violence. Everything becomes possible in a climate of honest, gentle attention.

We explore:
-The many inner voices and patterns that shape our experience
-Learning to stay with what's uncomfortable without needing to change it
-The difference between observing a part and being identified with it
-What it feels like to stop abandoning yourself


Core Resources: Awareness of Parts • Allowing whats here • Curiosity  Permission to Feel • Inner Space

Core CapacityNon-abandonment (the capacity to stop leaving yourself)

Developmental Core Needs: will be introduced 

Module Three~: Feeling Sentience

The intelligence of the heart

We shift from analyzing our experience to relating to it. In this session, the heart is revealed as the living center of our core intelligence—capable of holding, revealing, and transforming what we’ve carried. We practice the descent from 'knowing' into actually feeling.

We explore:
-The heart as primary conductor of the whole system — not the brain.
-The difference between analyzing emotion and actually feeling it
-Self-compassion as a somatic practice, not just a concept
-Emotional honesty — meeting what is true without dramatizing or collapsing
-The alchemy of being with difficulty through the heart rather than the head

Core Resources: Heart Awareness • Self-Compassion • Emotional Honesty • Trust & Truth • Attuned Presence

Core Capacity: Staying present without needing to know—metabolizing experience through feeling, rather than seeking resolutions from the past.

Developmental Core Needs: will be introduced 

Module Four~: Opening

Opening beyond the  known  self

As we deepen into the body, a new kind of awareness begins to open — one that is not bound by our usual narratives, our habitual sense of who we are, or the familiar contours of our suffering.

We explore what it means to loosen the grip of the known: to let the body sense beyond the story, and to discover that there is a spaciousness available that was never actually lost, only temporarily obscured.
This is not transcendence. It is not going above experience. It is going so deeply into it that the walls begin to dissolve.

We explore:
-Moving from contraction to spaciousness, without bypassing what's real
-Sensing beyond the story: what the body knows that the mind has not yet caught up with
-Loosening identification with content — thoughts, feelings, self-image
-Receptivity and not-knowing as embodied capacities, not passive states
-The natural awareness that is always already present beneath our experience

Core Resources: Spacious Awareness • Sensory Presence • Letting Go of Control • Receptivity • Not-Knowing

Developmental Core Needs: will be introduced 

Module Five~: Trusting

Grief, flow and the allowing aliveness to move through

With greater space and connection established, something that has been held begins to move. What once felt overwhelming — too much to feel, too big to hold — starts to flow, integrate, and reorganize. This session works with the deep body intelligence of completion: the natural capacity of the organism to finish what was interrupted, to discharge what was braced against, and to restore a living sense of flow. Trust here is a somatic discovery. The body already knows how to heal. What we offer is the conditions in which it remembers.
We explore:
-Pendulation — the natural oscillation between activation and resource
-Allowing incomplete experiences to complete themselves in the body
-Grief, flow, and the unlived life  of raw emotions— what has not yet had room to move
-The difference between emotional release and emotional presence
-Trusting the intelligence of the process, even when it is unfamiliar

Core Resources: Trust in the Body • Emotional Flow • Regulation & Stabilization • Allowing Movement • Inner Support

Core Capacity: To trust your process - to surrender without collapse.

Developmental Core Needs: will be introduced 

Module Six~: Creating

Living from Intimate Ground

From this deeper foundation, life is no longer something to manage, but something to participate in. We explore what it means to live, relate, and create from a grounded, responsive, and embodied presence.

We explore:
-I
ntegration as a way of living — not a project to complete
-Relational presence: staying connected to yourself while in contact with others
-Authentic expression arising from within rather than performed for without
-Choice and agency as lived capacities — choices from coherence, not protection
-For practitioners: bringing this ground into the work you offer others


Core Resources: Self-Choosing of Awareness • Relational Presence • Authentic Expression • Choice & Agency • Integration in Action

Core Capacity: Intimate Participation - living from the Inside --Out.

Developmental Core Needs: will be introduced 

Optional Ongoing Mentoring

For those interested in continuing ... to walk together.

The arc does not move in a straight line. Each session builds on the last, and each returns to the beginning — with a little more ground, a little more presence, a little more capacity to stay.

What we are cultivating is not a skill. It is a relationship — with the body, with experience, and ultimately with life itself. This is not a linear path, but a deepening relationship with yourself.  There is always deeper and farther to go...there will be a part two to this series if you are interested in continuing. 

Hello! My name is Ajaya Sommers

Ajaya Sommers, RCST is a somatic practitioner, teacher, author, and founder of Core Embodiment® — a body-centered path of psycho-spiritual integration rooted in thirty years of clinical practice, teaching, and lived inquiry.

Her work lives at the intersection of nervous system science, developmental trauma, and the contemplative dimensions of embodied awakening. She works with the whole person — supporting people in developing the capacity to stay present with their own experience, metabolize what life brings, and live from a more grounded, authentic, and integrated sense of self.

Ajaya is the creator of Core Embodiment® — a somatic discovery process that integrates embodiment practices, perceptual inquiry, and the deeper principles of psycho-spiritual development into a coherent and living path.

She is a certified Biodynamic Craniosacral Integration Teacher, a NARM Practitioner (Neuro-Affective Relational Model), and an Authorized Continuum Teacher. Her work is also deeply informed by Buddhist Psychology and her ongoing study within the Jennifer Welwood Sangha as a path of discovering one's inherent capacity for liberation.

Over the past three decades, Ajaya has facilitated conscious evolution in thousands of people's lives through professional training programs, retreats, and live and online group offerings. She has presented at the SAND Conference, Esalen Institute, IONS, the Purpose Summit, and the Association for Transpersonal Psychology Conference, and has taught throughout the US and Europe since 2012.

This is a space where your nervous system can unwind, your heart can open, and your body becomes the trustworthy compass for creating the life of your conscious desire.

Details 

Over these 6 weeks, we will engage in 6
(2 hour sessions) in which you’ll have the space to:

  • Unwind old patterns of fear, overwhelm, and disconnection.

  • Awaken your body’s wisdom using breath, sound, touch and movement.

  • Reclaim pleasure and vitality as pathways to healing.

  • Discover how to self-regulate in a very empowering and accessible way.

  • Cultivate resilience to navigate the complexities of our modern world.


  • Format: 6 live online sessions (recordings available).

  • Duration: 2 hours (ish)  per session. Tuesday 10am-12pm PST
    April 14,21,28, May 5, 12, 19

INTIMATE GROUND
6 week series

Today's investment: $333
 6 sessions - 2 hours each

~
Reclaim the Wisdom Hidden Within Trauma, Open your Heart, Rekindle your Aliveness and Restore your Capacity for Authentic Connection.

You can also add a private 90 min session to this package at a discounted rate here:

6 weekly Sessions

6 weekly Sessions + Private
90 min Session ($103 discount)

"We are having a crisis of disconnection- humans in western countries report being more lonely, un-tethered, scared than ever before. True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your authentic self with the world."
- Brene Brown

Essential Practices in Intimate Ground

    Breath-work: Unlock stored tension and release emotional patterns, creating space for ease and clarity.

    Sound: Use sound resonance to release stress, amplify connection, and increase vagal tone for nervous system regulation.

    Intrinsic Movement: Awaken your primal power, restore fluidity, and activate cellular vitality.

    Self-Inquiry: Dive deep into your internal landscape, shedding limiting narratives and aligning with your authentic self.

    Touch: Rediscover your own touch as a self-healing, oxytocin-releasing practice that softens defenses and builds safety.

    Embodied Presence: Learn to meet yourself where you are, re-associating with your sensory body’s intelligence. Through this growing capacity to feel, you can experience love as a tangible force within your being.

Relational Field Inquiry - Intimacy through sharing in non-performative, real time vulnerable depth space.

"I have worked with Ajaya Sommers for over 15 years. I had the very good fortune of meeting her at a very critical time in my life. She provided me guidance, shamanic & energetic healing that was miraculous. She is very intuitive and has access to many healing modalities.

She provided me a 3 day private retreat in Maui several years ago.
She was able to completely assist me in adjusting my energy matrix and to jettison destructive dark energies. She is skillful, intuitive, present, integrous and very compassionate.

I highly recommend her and I'm planning to utilize her amazing skills later this year with a personal plant based realignment in Maui."

G. Simon

TESTIMONIALS

This course led to an experience of Divine Bliss too ineffable to describe in words. It included a sense of timelessness, and my sense of self dissolved into our divine Source. Ajaya’s gentle guidance led us effortlessly to this magical, rich and nourishing moment. The meditations and knowings have stayed with me and I’ve been inspired to share them with my team at work.

- Doug Wilson, MD

Participating in Ajaya’s course was a gift during a very upside down time. The course began just before I closed the doors to our retreat center of 25 years, due to the pandemic. Having the consistency of the loving invitation back home— to my Hara, my Heart and my Head was so helpful and beautiful.  I have worked with Ajaya at a couple of in person retreats in the past and found her presence and her teaching brought the medicine I needed in times of transition and overwhelm.

 Life always presents challenges and the initiations into suffering. Having others in the group who are willing to be honest about whatever is going on for them in the moment is always supportive.  Ajaya guides with a great deal  of knowledge and experience.  Trusting that she has truly been on her own deep journey provides the safety that I needed to drop into the deeper currents of my own life.
- Gail Warner, MA MFT
After one session with Ajaya, I knew that I had found someone who could guide me into my deepest longing to come home to myself. With incredible tenderness and wisdom, Ajaya creates a space to rediscover and remember the simple and potent beauty of living from the heart, and experiencing the embodied fullness of being. I come away from every session with such immense gratitude for her depth of knowledge and ability to foster such intimacy and truth. As a therapist, I treasure how presence has the capacity to transform, and being in Ajaya’s presence is transformative. She is not only changing my life, but she is also empowering me to a greater vessel of healing for others. I feel so honored to have such an incredible healer, teacher, and companion in my life.

-Kailey Nykai, MA, CAGS, LMHC, LCDP
“Ajaya is one of those rare healers who can see directly into your core, understand your needs (deeper than you know yourself), and offer sacred healing to your most hidden, needy places in the deep psyche. She is filled with kindness and light, so healing comes as naturally as if you were bathed in love by the Goddess herself. Don’t miss the opportunity to be touched and guided by this divine healer — no matter what ails you.”
-Lion Goodman, PCC, creator of the Clear Beliefs Coach Training,

"Fantastic learning and workshop “Taking Refuge”. If you are a therapist, Doctor, healer, transformational educator or health care provider looking to self-improve - the teachings Ajaya has will serve you well. Not only for your professional toolbelt but for your own self-actualization.

A wealth of information and many pieces are laid out throughout the process and all tied together at the end to bring it all home. After decades of sitting across from others in my practice I believe this is what I’ve been looking for. Don’t miss this chance and treat yourself to a wonderful learning and adventure."

Nick Gargala B.S., M.S.S.W., Ed.

Thank you for taking the time to explore joining INTIMATE GROUND.
We meet Tuesday April 14,21,28, May 5,12,19 from
10am-12pm PST.


These are the times we practice for.

If you are needing the nourishment, ground and support of the Field, the embodied, experiential reminder of resilience, connection and coherence then please come to this gathering.

Come dive, breathe, soften, open, metabolize & learn a somatic practice to resource and regulate yourself on all levels.
Let this be the moment where you choose to honor your desires, your needs, and your inherent worth by giving yourself the blessing of slowing down to integrate.

Together, let’s explore what it means to melt below the survival patterns of the default nervous system and into the alchemy of your own presence, the tender embrace of your soulful presence.

Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions.


With Love & Care,
Ajaya

2026 Core Embodiment (R) , all rights reserved.
Questions? www.ajayasommers.com /
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