You may not need to try harder. You may need a different place to begin.
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We respond to prolonged stress and trauma by doing what has always helped us survive: pushing through, taking care of others, staying vigilant, working harder, or trying to think our way through overwhelming situations.
Those responses most often make sense because they were shaped by what we’ve lived through and what our lives continue to ask of us. But over time they can narrow our awareness, limit our choices, and distance us from ourselves and one another, making it harder to respond in the ways we most want to
The first move toward change isn’t becoming someone different. It’s learning to recognize what your bodymind has been doing to help you survive, and discovering that there are other possibilities.
From Survival to Stability is your introduction to The Resilience Toolkit
Why this approach? If we want to respond differently, we first need to recognize what is shaping our responses. Stress and trauma don’t just affect how we feel. They influence how we perceive ourselves, the people around us, and the situations we encounter every day. They shape what feels possible, what feels threatening, and how much choice we experience in the moment.
You cannot consistently choose differently if you cannot accurately perceive what is happening.
The Resilience Toolkit begins here. Rather than asking you to push through, override, or ignore your body’s responses, it invites you to become curious about them. Through guided practice, you’ll learn to recognize nuanced patterns of stress, trauma, and relaxation, to identify the edges of comfort and capacity, and to discern congruence with your needs and coherence with your environment.
From that growing discernment, you’ll respond with real-time practices that help you navigate toward greater internal safety, stability, choice, and possibility. But the Toolkit isn’t primarily a collection of somatic practices. The practices aren’t the point.
The Toolkit is a developmental process designed to work as an integrated whole that strengthens trust in your own experience so your perception becomes more accurate, discernment becomes more reliable, and choice becomes more available.
This is the foundation of stabilization, an essential capacity for navigating a world that asks so much of us. Stabilization is also an essential precondition for deeper trauma healing.
A pathway for continued practice and healing
From Survival to Stability is the foundational Resilience Toolkit course. It introduces the recognition, discernment, and real-time practices that support stabilization and prepare you for continued practice, deeper trauma healing, and applying the Toolkit within your relationships, responsibilities, work, and collective commitments.
The pathway below shows how you can continue learning and practicing with Lumos Transforms. You may return to foundational practices as your life changes, deepen your practice through community, or pursue advanced learning and application as your capacity and interests develop.
Our free class, Roadmap to Trauma Healing, offers a broader introduction to the stages of trauma healing and can help you understand where you are on the healing path. It is not a prerequisite for From Survival to Stability.
What you’ll experience
Across three live, two-hour Survival to Stability sessions, you’ll move between teaching, guided practice, personal reflection, and group discussion. Each session builds on the one before it, with time between classes to experiment with brief practices in your daily life and return with new observations and questions.
You can expect:
- Clear, accessible teaching that connects what happens within the bodymind to our relationships, histories, environments, and social conditions
- Guided practices followed by time to notice what happened and what your response is telling you
- A responsive pace, with room for questions, curiosity, and the experiences emerging within the group
- Opportunities for individual reflection, optional small-group discussion, and practice with more intimate facilitation
- Freedom to choose what you share and how you engage. All forms of engagement are welcome
- Repeated invitations to adapt, stop, or choose a different practice as you learn to honor your bodymind’s responses
- Between-session practice within the real contexts of your life, including work, caregiving, relationships, organizing, and rest
Choose your session here!
Meet your Facilitation Team!
Each From Survival to Stability series is led by an experienced, certified Resilience Toolkit facilitator. Every facilitator teaches the shared foundational curriculum while bringing their own identities, lived experience, professional expertise, community commitments, and distinctive facilitation presence to the course.
Nkem Ndefo, MSN, CNM, RN (she/they) is the founder of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit. A clinician, educator, and community strategist, she brings more than three decades of experience across community health, clinical care, trauma healing, and systems change. She is known for making complex material accessible and creating rigorous, responsive learning environments grounded in care and liberation. Read more . . .
Devika Shankar (she/her) is a transnational feminist, organizer, and educator whose work connects personal trauma healing with collective liberation. Her experience spans domestic violence advocacy, leadership development, organizational change, and capacity building with communities and institutions. She brings clear, patient, justice-oriented facilitation grounded in years of organizing and community practice. Read more . . .
Gia Hasan, MS, PCC (she/they) is a cultural worker, ICF-credentialed leadership coach, and systems practitioner with more than a decade of experience in leadership development. Her work brings together systems thinking, creative practice, and collective liberation. Gia supports individuals, teams, and organizations in leading through uncertainty, embracing complexity, and building cultures rooted in trust, care, and transformation. Read more . . .
Kiara Lee-Benton, MSW (any pronouns with respect) is a holistic trauma healing coach, speaker, facilitator, and organizational consultant with more than 15 years of experience supporting survivors of trauma. Their work centers underrepresented communities and blends heart-centered care, traditional healing, and pragmatic change. Kiara brings warmth, insight, and a grounded ability to connect across diverse lived experiences. Read more . . .
Mikaela Lynn, MFA (she/they) is an educator, community advocate, perinatal care specialist, and mentor. Their work spans reproductive and perinatal health, disability justice, anti-racism, healthcare equity, and birthworker leadership. Mikaela brings warmth, clarity, humor, and accessible facilitation shaped by a strong commitment to Black, trans, nonbinary, disabled, and other communities marginalized in healthcare. Read more . . .
Rebecca Sumner Burgos, MPhil (she/her) is a Spanish/English bilingual organizational facilitator and community-engagement practitioner. Her experience spans community health, healing justice, public policy, environmental work, and culturally responsive trauma education. Her facilitation connects experience with community context, bringing curiosity, care, and practical grounding to complex conversations. Read more . . .
What begins to change
Across course evaluations, participants consistently report meaningful shifts over the three-week course. By the end of From Survival to Stability, participants are better able to:
- Notice and make sense of their responses as they are happening
- Understand what their responses are communicating about their needs, capacity, and environment
- Access greater internal safety
- Respond with greater self-trust, clearer boundaries, and greater choice in their relationships, responsibilities, work, and collective commitments
From Survival to Stability is a complete foundational course that prepares you to continue practicing The Resilience Toolkit independently.
Choose your contribution
Lumos’ sliding-scale pricing model is class solidarity in practice, a commitment to redistributing resources based on ability and need. Paying at the Actual Cost rate helps sustain the program and makes Partially Supported and Fully Supported places possible.
When you select a course date, you can register immediately at the Actual Cost rate or request one of the limited Partially Supported or Fully Supported places. No financial documentation or explanation of your circumstances is required.
ACTUAL COST: $160
This reflects the actual cost of offering this program, including fair wages for facilitators and staff. Choose this rate if you have stable income, access to savings or family wealth, or if your registration is covered by your employer, organization, or personal network.
PARTIALLY SUPPORTED: $80
Choose this rate if paying the full cost would cause financial strain, if you have limited disposable income or irregular work, or you are not sponsored by an employer or organization. Your contribution supports partial cost recovery while preserving access to the course.
FULLY SUPPORTED: FREE
Choose this rate if paying for the course would make it harder to meet basic needs such as housing, food, or healthcare. Fully Supported participants are essential to the integrity of our learning community. Your presence helps ensure that the course reflects the realities of the wider world.
As you choose your contribution
Consider your income alongside your broader access to resources and economic security, including racialized and generational wealth, immigration status and work authorization, disability and access to healthcare, education, gender and sexuality, and inherited or family wealth.
Choose your session here!
Registration includes:
- Three live, two-hour sessions facilitated on Zoom
- Access to session recordings and practice audio
- A digital copy of The Resilience Toolkit Workbook
- Eligibility to join the Alchemical Resilience Collective practice community
Accessibility and participation
The Resilience Toolkit is designed to support a wide range of bodies, capacities, and ways of participating. Live closed captioning is available during each session, and you’ll be invited to share any accommodation needs during registration.
Throughout the course, you are encouraged to adapt, pause, or stop in response to your bodymind’s needs.
The framework used at:
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is "Survival to Stability"?
A: From Survival to Stability is Lumos’ foundational course introducing The Resilience Toolkit and the role of stabilization in trauma healing. Across three sessions, you’ll learn to recognize stress, trauma, and relaxation responses, understand what those responses are communicating, discern whether they are useful and coherent with what is happening around you, and respond with brief, real-time practices that support greater internal safety, stability, and choice. is Lumos’ foundational course introducing The Resilience Toolkit and the role of stabilization in trauma healing. Across three sessions, you’ll learn to recognize stress, trauma, and relaxation responses, understand what those responses are communicating, and begin responding in ways that support greater internal safety, discernment, and choice.
Q: Is this an introduction to The Resilience Toolkit?
A: Yes. From Survival to Stability is the foundational introduction to The Resilience Toolkit. The course was previously called Introduction to The Resilience Toolkit. The name was updated to better reflect its purpose and place within the trauma-healing pathway.
Q: Who is this course for? Do I need prior experience?
A: The course is designed for adults aged 18 and older who want to better understand and respond to stress and trauma in their lives, relationships, work, caregiving, or collective commitments.
No prior experience with somatics, trauma education, or The Resilience Toolkit is required.
Q: Is this therapy?
A: From Survival to Stability is an educational and experiential course, not psychotherapy or individualized clinical treatment. It teaches foundational somatic stabilization capacities that are frequently absent from conventional mental health training and may not have been addressed in previous therapy.
The course can stand on its own as an introduction to The Resilience Toolkit. The capacities developed through the course can also support and prepare people for deeper work in therapy and other trauma-healing modalities.
People experiencing significant stress or crisis are welcome. The course does not provide immediate or individualized crisis care for active self-harm, suicidal intent, or other urgent safety concerns.
Q: Do I need to attend sessions live?
A: No. You may participate live, use the recordings when you miss a session, or complete the entire series through the recordings.
Live participation offers opportunities to ask questions, join discussions, and practice with the facilitators and other participants. Recordings are usually posted in the private course space within 24–48 hours and remain available for six months.
Q: Will I be expected to share personal experiences or participate in small groups?
A: You will never be required to share personal stories. All sharing is voluntary.
The course includes opportunities for personal reflection, group discussion, and optional small-group engagement. You are encouraged to choose what you share and how you participate. All forms of engagement are welcome.
Q: Can I take this workshop with a friend or someone I’m supporting?
A: Yes. Many people find it meaningful to take the course alongside a friend, family member, colleague, or someone they support. Each participant must register separately and choose the pricing option that reflects their own circumstances.
Q: How do the pricing options work?
A: Actual Cost registrations do not require approval and can be completed immediately.
Partially Supported places are limited and require a ticket request. If your request is accepted, you will have three days to complete payment. These places frequently sell out.
Fully Supported places are also limited and often fill quickly. They are requested through the Lumos Transforms virtual community. Your first month of community membership is free.
No financial documentation or explanation of your circumstances is required.
Q: Does Lumos offer group or community access to From Survival to Stability?
A: Yes. Through the Peer Partner Program, community groups, mutual aid networks, caregiving circles, organizing spaces, and professional communities can offer their members 50% off the Actual Cost rate for From Survival to Stability.
Partner communities receive a unique registration code that members can use for six months, allowing each person to choose the course dates that work best for them. Lumos can also offer a short introductory talk for your community before people register.
Q: What is the refund, cancellation, and transfer policy?
A: You may receive a refund if you cancel at least 48 hours before the series begins.
Cancellations made within 48 hours of the start of the series can be transferred to the next available From Survival to Stability series.
Once the series has begun, registrations cannot be transferred. If you miss a session or are unable to continue attending live, you can complete the course through the recordings.
Q: How long will I have access to the course materials?
A: Session recordings remain available for six months.
You will have ongoing access to the course transcripts, presentation slides, Resilience Toolkit Workbook, and practice audio.
Q: How does the course work on Mighty Networks?
A: Mighty Networks is the online platform that hosts both the Lumos Transforms virtual community and your private From Survival to Stability course space.
Your course space is separate from the wider community. It contains the Zoom links, session recordings, transcripts, presentation slides, The Resilience Toolkit Workbook, practice audio, and a space for course questions and discussion.
The Lumos Community is an optional global gathering space for people engaged in trauma healing, unlearning oppression, and building liberatory relationships. Membership includes community conversations, events, workshops, affinity groups, and opportunities for ongoing connection. The first month is free, and joining requires a separate signup.
Learn more about the Lumos Community
Join at the Actual Cost rate: $5.99/month
Join at the Supported Rate: $2.99/month
Q: Is support available between sessions?
A: The private Mighty Networks course space remains open between sessions for questions and participant discussion. The course does not include one-to-one support between classes.
Q: Is this a Toolkit Facilitator training?
A: No. From Survival to Stability is a foundational course for your own personal learning and practice. It is also a prerequisite for the Resilience Toolkit Facilitator Certification Program. Visit the Facilitator Certification page to learn more about becoming a Certified Resilience Toolkit Facilitator.
Have a question or need help?
We welcome questions about From Survival to Stability. If you need help with registration, payment, accessibility, or accessing the course after registering, send us a message.
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