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Pilot:Valle del Cauca, Colombia
Touch of Peace
Healing Arts School
An experience-first somatic education model integrating healing, workforce development, and community transformation
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An experience-first somatic education model integrating healing, workforce development, and community transformation △
Many communities in Latin America have endured generations of conflict, poverty, and violence. Women bear the heaviest burden—facing displacement, trauma, and violence while serving as primary caregivers and economic providers.
In Colombia, over fifty years of conflict created deep trauma. While economic resources help, there's an urgent need for pathways that support both income generation and personal healing.
The Case
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Globally, women are disproportionately affected by war, domestic violence, displacement, and systemic neglect. As primary caregivers and economic providers, they bear the weight of both financial survival and emotional resilience. Many have faced displacement, sexual violence, physical harm, and the grief of losing loved ones. In these regions, healing is still an ongoing process, even as families and communities work to rebuild their social fabric and restore economic prosperity.
Touch-based professions like massage therapy and bodywork offer a powerful path forward—combining economic flexibility with emotional healing.
Self-employment opportunities in growing wellness tourism markets
Flexible schedules ideal for caregivers and single mothers
Higher earning potential with fewer hours
A restored culture of healthy, consensual touch
In regions affected by violence, touch has often become distorted—feared, taboo, or sexualized. By reintroducing healthy touch as a cultural norm, we open the door to healing trauma, reducing stigma, and establishing new relational patterns rooted in consent and safety.
A Solution
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At the same time, conscious touch education provides something these communities rarely receive but deeply need: embodied healing. Our curriculum is intentionally designed as a "live-in" somatic experience, where participants first receive bodywork. This allows them to understand, in their own bodies, how tissue manipulation, guided movement, and energetic alignment influence structural, emotional, and nervous system well-being. Only then do they learn to offer these skills to others, ensuring a grounded, trauma-informed, and experientially rooted practice.
Our hypothesis is that a community-wide shift in the understanding and experience of touch can contribute to long-term reductions in sexual violence, while simultaneously offering sustainable economic pathways and embodied healing for women and their families.
This work is about rebuilding agency, restoring dignity, and cultivating a culture of safety, healing, and prosperity.
Why Bodywork?
Bodywork is far more than massage—it's somatic healing that recognizes the body as an active participant in psychological and spiritual recovery.
The body holds trauma, stress, and survival patterns that talk therapy alone cannot reach. Through bodywork, you reconnect with your body's innate wisdom—the inner compass that daily life often silences.
Our approach is nervous-system-first: aligning your physical, emotional, and energetic systems with your most balanced, open self. This is the essence of the body-mind connection.
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Bodywork has long been used to address physical tension, structural imbalance, and stress—often through modalities like Swedish massage, deep tissue work, and sports massage. These practices form the foundation of modern massage therapy in the United States. Yet bodywork is far older and far more expansive than these traditions suggest.
My approach to bodywork is rooted in its full mind-body-spirit potential. While I absolutely support the structural and physical layers of the body, I also work with bodywork as a form of somatic healing, a complementary modality that supports mental and emotional health.
This is what we call somatic bodywork—an approach that acknowledges the body as an active participant in psychological and spiritual healing.
Bodywork creates a space where the mind and body can reorganize, rewire, and remember. By guiding the body into the parasympathetic state—our natural mode of rest, repair, and openness—bodywork helps people feel safe and at home in their bodies again. From this place of safety, self-awareness naturally grows.
Somatic disconnection can manifest as physical pain, emotional tension, anxiety, or a sense of numbness or dissociation. Through bodywork, the body relearns shapes and ways of being it may not have accessed since childhood—states of flexibility, fluidity, ease, and presence.
As the body opens, new neural pathways form. Creativity expands. Possibilities emerge. Old patterns soften. The mind becomes more spacious and receptive to change. Bodywork supports healing at a deep psychosomatic level—bridging the physical and the emotional, the structural and the spiritual.
Ultimately, bodywork is far more than a "feel-good" massage. It is a holistic modality that invites you into a relationship with yourself. It teaches you to remember that your body is not merely a tool of survival or labor—it is a sacred vessel, an ally, a source of wisdom, and a friend waiting for connection. Through bodywork, you begin the journey of returning home to your body and reclaiming your fullest, most embodied self.
Our Strategy
We deliver conscious somatic services and education that support healing, agency, and economic stability simultaneously.
Our experience-first approach: Every participant begins by receiving bodywork and nervous system practices before learning to offer them. This ensures teaching is grounded in lived experience, not just technique.
The curriculum integrates three dimensions:
Structural practices: Physical alignment, function, and pain relief
Somatic practices: Nervous system regulation and emotional awareness
Energetic practices: Presence, attunement, and relational sensitivity
A tiered system meets people where they are—from community members to emerging professionals—expanding depth, responsibility, and earning potential at a sustainable pace.
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Every service, class, or training we offer generates a parallel investment in Colombia. When a program is delivered in one context, the same curriculum becomes accessible to women in regions affected by conflict, displacement, and economic exclusion. This model links personal wellbeing with community reinvestment, rather than treating them as separate goals.
Education sits at the center of this strategy. Our curriculum follows an experience-first approach. Every practitioner, student, and facilitator begins by reconnecting with their own body. Participants first receive somatic bodywork, nervous system regulation practices, and guided awareness. Only after this embodied understanding is established do they learn to offer these skills to others. This ensures that what is taught is grounded, trauma-informed, and rooted in lived experience rather than technique alone.
Together, these elements build more than technical skill. They cultivate emotional intelligence, consent-based touch, and the capacity to create safety in the body and in relationship. These capacities are essential in communities where touch has been associated with harm, fear, or survival.
To ensure accessibility and scale, our programs are organized into five tiers. These tiers are designed to meet people where they are, from community members and families to health professionals and emerging bodyworkers. Each tier expands depth, responsibility, and earning potential, allowing participants to grow at a sustainable pace.
Through this strategy, education becomes a vehicle for cultural repair. Skills learned by one woman extend to her family, her clients, and her community. Economic opportunity and embodied healing grow together. This is how we translate somatic practice into long-term resilience, safety, and shared prosperity.
Touch of Peace
Healing Arts School
Our pilot certification program in Colombia trains women who have endured conflict, poverty, and displacement to become certified massage therapists and bodywork practitioners.
This comprehensive program combines somatic education, trauma-informed care, business skills, and financial literacy—creating sustainable pathways to healing and economic independence for them, their families, and community.
Program Impact
Economic opportunities in growing regions
Embodied healing for trauma survivors
Cultural transformation around healthy touch
Flexible work schedules for caregivers & single mothers
Curriculum Outline
The Touch of Peace Healing Arts School offers a comprehensive, experience-first education designed to support both personal healing and professional development. Our curriculum integrates somatic bodywork, trauma-informed care, community healing, and business skills—preparing graduates for sustainable careers rooted in ethics, embodiment, and social impact.
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Anatomy & physiology
Pathology and contraindications
Somatic awareness and practitioner self-care
Nervous system literacy and embodied safety
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Full-body massage protocols
(Swedish, Thai, Myofascial Release, Craniosacral, Integrative)Energy work
Sports massage fundamentals
Therapeutic add-ons: aromatherapy, cupping, herbalism, Gua Sha
The Touch of Peace™ Technique
Trauma-informed bodywork applications
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Community-based healing practices and traditional knowledge
Healing justice frameworks and cultural competence
Group facilitation and holding safe healing spaces
Touch as a tool for collective care and community wellbeing
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Ethics, consent, and client-centered communication
Intake processes and SOAP note documentation
Business skills: entrepreneurship, marketing, and financial literacy
Career pathways in clinics, spas, wellness centers, and community health settings
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Supervised hands-on practice in school clinics or approved settings
Opportunities to work with peers, community members, and clients
Integration of real-world experience with mentorship and feedback
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Receiving bodywork and movement classes as part of the curriculum
Peer practice and supervised sessions
Case studies and applied learning
Reflective journaling and embodied integration
Continued mentorship
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Final practical examination and theory assessment
Business or community-based capstone project
Certification upon successful completion
Access to continuing education opportunities
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In-person classes and hands-on practical training
Internship hours may be completed in the school clinic, through peer exchange, or approved home practice
Final certification includes a practical exam evaluated by instructors
Program formats available as:
Intensive track: 3 months
Extended track: 6 months
Includes 6 months of business and career coaching following graduation