Join Sage Hayes and local organizer Anne Walzak in healing community and practice.
Deepening Restorative Touchwork with Sage Hayes
October 24-26, 2025 in Ottawa, Canada
Potluck Friday night in Ottawa & Saturday/Sunday workshop at Willow Wellness
As requested by last years participants, this year’s Ottawa workshop will do a deeper dive into restorative and attuned touch work.
This is a weekend where we will learn about and go deeper into themes of allowing, attunement, slowing down and conscious contact with supporting restoration in the body and the nervous system. We’ll explore a variety of ways to make contact with the body through our hands and energetic presence - supporting, holding, listening, nurturing, resting and the art of gentle accompaniment. The weekend will be a series of invitations and practices in small groups. Alongside your colleagues, Sage will be available to offer mentoring towards deepening your particular touch work skills.
Whether we are working with a client who is burnt out, running highly sympathetic or is simply in need of some gentle contact you will learn how to tend to the what’s showing up in someone’s system and be able to meet it with authenticity, attunement and therapeutic care. Being able to facilitate deeper nervous system rest in a client’s system through touch work can be both invaluable and a more direct route to parasympathetic states of restoration.
Through practice all weekend you will deepen your touch skills practice and also receive restorative touch and support. So come ready to receive and unwind!
Themes for the weekend:
Attuning to organic and emergent treatment plan of the body
Utilizing embodied presence
Exploring your unique healing sight and capabilities with touch work
Clean touch contact versus merging / fixing
Tending to relational coherence and consent at every step
Creating relational dynamic conditions for healing
Working with touch, the nervous system and adaptive patterns
Exploring types of touch/contact
Tracking and tending attachment styles through touch
Deep invitations and holds towards rest & restoration
This workshop is for healing practitioners of all types including therapists, body workers and movement teachers. If you have more questions about whether this workshop is for you, please feel to be in contact with Sage at sage@embodiedliberation with questions, etc.
About Sage Hayes:
Since 1999, Sage Hayes (she/he/they) has been building capacity and sight towards emergent somatic practice since beginning their work facilitating anti-oppression work in schools, churches and communities. Sage began studying healing arts in 2000 including somatic experiencing, biodynamic craniosacral therapy, therapeutic touch, developmental trauma work, family and systemic constellations and embodied anti-oppression work of all sorts. Sage was a lead assistant with the Somatic Experiencing Institute for many years and mentors somatic students from all types of modalities.
Sage opened their touch work practice in 2006 and has since offered massage, biodynamic craniosacral touch, energy work and integrative somatic experiencing touch work.
Sage hails from Peaks Island off the coast of Maine and enjoys a vibrant local life while having the great honor to travel facilitating and teaching with somatic students around the world. Most recently Sage has been offering embodied movement classes and somatic mentoring support with individuals and groups. Locally, Sage is a member practitioner at The Good Medicine Collective in Portland, Maine.
Sage is thrilled and honored to be returning to Ottawa to connect with local somatics practitioners.
Click here for more info about Sage’s background.
Here is an article Sage wrote for Massage Therapy magazine about trauma informed bodywork.
LOGISTICS
Location:
Willow Wellness, 5944 Perth St, Ottawa, ON K0A 2Z0, Canada. Willow Wellness has an onsite cafe where lunch can be purchased.
Schedule:
Friday Oct 24, 530-730pm: Potluck dinner gathering at Anne Walzak’s in Hintonburg, Ottawa
Saturday Oct 25th, 10-5pm at Willow Wellness
Sunday Oct 26th, 9:30am-430pm at Willow Wellness
In the spirit of access, cost for workshop is offered at a sliding scale:
$450 CAD
$350 CAD
$275 CAD
PAY WORKSHOP FEE HERE.
Or to save your spot, you can make a $175 CAD deposit here. Payment in full due by October 20th, 2025 you can make payment via paypal, venmo or will receive an invoice for your total due.
To discover where your price access point is on the sliding scale, please take the time to refer to this amazing resource by Alexis Cunningfolk, The Sliding Scale: A Tool of Economic Justice..
Payment plans available, contact sage@embodiedliberation.com. If you need other financial assistance, please contact sage@embodiedliberation.com.
If you are traveling from outside Ottawa, on-site sleeping arrangements are possible at Willow Wellness. There are 3 bedroom options with shared living space and private backyard. Contact Chris at Willow, chrisclapp17@gmail.com.