Welcome to the Befriending Ourselves Journey
This work begins with a simple but radical premise: that you are not something to be fixed. You are someone to come home to. The Befriending Ourselves journey invites you to turn toward your body, your emotions, and your deeper self with curiosity, care, and presence. It is not about chasing a regulated state but about remembering the intelligence that already lives inside you.
Through somatic practice, movement, mindfulness, inquiry, and connection, we explore what it means to live with more truth, softness, and aliveness. This journey unfolds within The Gathering Stream, our ongoing community space where we learn together, share practices, and tend to the wild beauty of being human, together.
Our Befriending work unfolds in three foundational series
The Befriending Fear Series
Begin here. In this 8-part course, you’ll learn to meet fear with presence and compassion rather than bracing against it or getting stuck in loops of avoidance. Using somatic tracking, inquiry, mindfulness, neuroplasticity, and gentle exposure practices, you’ll build the skills and inner safety to relate to fear in new ways.
This is the missing piece for many people, where healing gets stalled by control, avoidance, and fear of fear itself. We meet the fear together, and in doing so, reclaim your freedom. This is the groundwork for everything that follows: without it, we often stay caught in resistance and miss the deeper messages our body is trying to share.
Befriending Embodied Movement: An Introduction to 5Rhythms®
The next step is learning to move with, express, and metabolize emotion through the body. In this 7-part course, we offer an introduction to 5Rhythms®, a powerful movement practice that supports emotional expression, embodied awareness, and presence. We shift out of the mind and into the body, reconnecting with impulse and instinct.
Through movement, we carve new pathways for being in the present moment, allowing emotion and experience to be felt, processed, and released. We learn new shapes. We find new freedom. We ride the waves of sensation and come home to ourselves.
Befriending Ourselves Series
This final part of the journey takes place within The Gathering Stream, our ongoing community space. Here, we delve deeper into the full emotional landscape through weekly live classes, guest teachers, a rich library of on-demand teachings, and shared seasonal themes.
The Befriending Ourselves series weaves together somatics, neuroscience, mindfulness, movement, deep ecology, and inquiry. Together we turn toward joy, grief, anger, shame, and love, meeting what arises with honesty and care. This is where practice becomes a way of life, supported in community and grounded in connection.
Simona Irwin is a mindfulness teacher, neuroplasticity coach, somatic practitioner, and mother of two boys. She is the creator of the Befriending Fear series and has spent over two decades supporting others in reconnecting with the intelligence of the body and the soft, flowing core of love that resides within, even in the most challenging moments.
Her work is in devotion to genuine belonging and community care, rooted in deep ecology, systemic constellations, and the interconnection of all things. Healing, as she sees it, is not only personal but relational: a repair of the ruptures that separate us from ourselves, from each other, and from the natural world.
Simona supports people living with trauma, complex PTSD, chronic illness, autoimmune conditions, anxiety, OCD, nervous breakdowns, limbic system dysfunction, and nervous system dysregulation. Whether the pattern is new or has been present for decades, there is hope here. She brings lived experience, as well as the insight gained from working with thousands of others, including her years as a mentor and teacher with the Primal Trust community.
Her approach draws from somatics, self-directed neuroplasticity, ancestral and systemic healing, and trauma-informed mindfulness. She has trained in Mindfulness Meditation, Systemic and Family Constellations, Somatic Parts Work, and Plant Medicine Integration. Her work is shaped by a lifelong devotion to seated and moving meditation, inquiry, and love, and grounded in deep ecology and Buddhist eco-dharma.
