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When I wrote “Building a Trauma-Responsive Educational Practice: Lessons from a Corrections Classroom” I didn’t know what would happen next. I didn’t realize I would spend the rest of my life teaching the concepts, or the amount of work it would take to move those concepts into practice. Rediscovering joy in learning begins with remembering what profound moments of learning feel like – in our bodies, hearts, and minds.

But so far, most of my work has focused on introductory topics: impacts of trauma on the brain and brief discussions of the Trauma-Responsive Framework. I am discovering that new work requires an enormous amount of effort. Moving the concepts out of the book and into people’s hearts and minds, is the barest beginning. I rarely have an opportunity to go deeper in talking about the Expansive Learning model, the Framework, cultural rebalancing, repurposing education, digging into new language describing a variety of approaches to trauma work, or the role expansive learning might play in our evolution.

This space is where I get to explore a constellation of ideas including somatic abolition, embodied practice, settling and expanding, emergent strategy, joy and imagination, cultural rebalancing, and how they help us co-create experiences of deep, rich, expanded learning – moments when the lightbulb flashes on and our bodies thrum with warmth and connection – the lightbulb moment.