DON’T MISS OUT! The Live Online ISP Professional Training starts May 29: Learn more and enroll
Integral Somatic Psychology
ISP Professional Training, Chicago, IL
From: $240.00 / month for 8 months
Dr. Raja Selvam
Full Tuition $2,685 (save $195) or $240/month for 12 months
72 Hours of In-Person Training
In-Person Demonstration Sessions
Daily Supervised Practice Sessions
To know you’re doing it right
Lifetime Access to the Recordings
Certification Program
ISP Professional Training, Chicago, IL
Make Even Your Trauma Work Deeper, Faster, and Safer
Dr. Raja Selvam
TRAINING DATES
Take Module 1 by Video
M2 March 20-23, 2026
M3 September 18-21, 2026
Make Even Your Trauma Work Deeper, Faster, and Safer
Adding Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP™) to your toolkit can help make your trauma work more effective in all therapy modalities you use in your practice.
Imagine taking your clients confidently deeper and quicker into their emotional and somatic processes to resolve their symptoms faster, at higher levels of safety and stability for both clients and therapists. How is that possible?
During the ISP Professional Training, you’ll learn to implement the six unique features of ISP, which will help you become an even more effective trauma therapist:
- Work with all our bodies, not just the physical body
- Work with emotion in the body at the level of emotions, not sensations
- Expand emotional experiences throughout the body
- Use a broad definition of emotions to access them quickly
- Rapidly build emotional capacity through the body
- Work with emotion and physiological dysregulation in the body at the same time.
Who Can Benefit from the ISP Professional Training?
Any therapist working with trauma. ISP is an ideal complementary post-graduate training for practitioners of all body psychotherapy modalities, including Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, etc.
ISP is also an ideal complementary somatic training for therapists in any modality looking for an easy-to-learn somatic approach to harness the power of the body in their work.
By Implementing the 6 Features of ISP, You’ll Become an Even More Effective Trauma Therapist
1. Work with all our bodies, not just the physical body
Using the ISP approach, you will learn to use a wide range of somatic self-touch techniques. With these highly effective somatic techniques, you can quickly:
- undo body defenses to access traumatic experiences,
- release inherent body resources,
- contain, regulate, and transform traumatic experiences,
- and make the process safer and more stable for yourself and your clients.
Techniques from Western Osteopathy will help you to work with the physical body and techniques from Eastern Psychology will assist you in working with the subtle and collective bodies.
Even if you have no prior background in body psychotherapy, you can quickly learn these simple self-touch techniques and teach them to your clients for use during sessions and for self-help when they are on their own.
That is one of the reasons the complete ISP professional training is offered in just three 4-day modules: ISP is an easy-to-learn approach.
2. Work with emotion in the body at the level of emotions, not sensations
Why?
Focusing on body sensations when emotions occur is a widely used sub-optimal strategy born of a common misconception that the experience of emotion in the body is nothing more than physical body sensations.
Working with the body at the level of emotion has three advantages:
- You will be able to distinguish between sensations and emotions in body experience, and therefore be able to focus on emotions
- You will avoid the risk of neutralizing or eliminating important emotional experiences by tracking body sensations
- You will help your clients get in touch with their bodies faster.
3. Expand emotional experiences throughout the body
With the efficient techniques of ISP, you will be able to help your clients quickly expand the experience of their emotions throughout their brain and body so that they can tolerate them better.
Wait! Wouldn’t painful emotions become more intolerable when they are spread to more of the brain and the body?
Quite the opposite!
Emotions become more bearable when they are spread out in the body. You will quickly find that your clients will be able to stay with emotions longer, giving the brain more time to process them optimally.
Research shows that emotion determines cognition and behavior in every moment and in every experience, and that the presence of emotion in as much of the body is essential for the brain to effectively process all aspects of the situation—cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally.
This is how ISP can help you improve cognitive, emotional, and behavioral outcomes in all therapy modalities and in all clinical circumstances, whether you are working with trauma or with difficult life experiences.
4. Use a broad definition of emotions to access them quickly
Isn’t it conventional wisdom that it takes a long time to build a relationship with clients to get to their emotions?
It is a limiting belief based on a narrow definition of emotions and the common lack of attention to the body in therapy in most therapy modalities.
Think about this: Your clients primarily seek help when they cannot tolerate one emotional experience or another. Your client feels bad and therefore seeks your help. Feeling bad is an emotion. We call it a sensorimotor emotion.
ISP works with not only primary and secondary emotions but also with the always-present and often-overlooked sensorimotor emotions, such as simply feeling bad or good. This, in combination with ISP’s multi-body somatic techniques, will make it possible for you as a therapist to access and work with emotions in most of your clients from the very first session.
5. Rapidly build emotional capacity through the body
ISP focuses on building a greater capacity for emotions in your clients—especially difficult ones—as quickly as possible through the body.
Why is that important?
When you learn how to quickly build capacity for emotions in clients, especially difficult ones, and teach them simple self-help self-touch tools for working with their multiple bodies, you can rapidly help your clients to:
- resolve their psychological and psychophysiological (psychosomatic) symptoms that often have unbearable emotional stress as their cause,
- self-soothe, self-regulate, and even do further work on their own between sessions, reducing their dependency on you,
- have more resilience from forming symptoms when they face similar situations or emotions again, and
- maintain greater physical, energetic, psychological, relational, and spiritual well-being, each of which is known to depend on a person’s capacity to tolerate opposites in emotional experiences.
6. Work with emotion and physiological dysregulation in the body at the same time
How is that possible?
In traumatic experiences, more often than not, there is a coupling of high levels of physiological dysregulation and high levels of emotional stress in the brain and in the body.
When we focus more on downregulating physiological dysregulation, emotional experiences can be compromised because difficult emotions in the body are, by definition, generated from dysregulating the body physiology, giving the false impression that the emotions have been processed.
On the other hand, when we focus more on processing difficult emotions, the level of dysregulation in the body can increase because that is how difficult emotions are generated in the body.
Is there a way around this dilemma?
Yes, using ISP, you will be able to work more effectively with both physiological dysregulation and emotional experience simultaneously through its integrative body techniques.
Therefore, you will have more success working with emotions in traumatic experiences in general.
In particular, you will improve your outcomes in working with developmental traumas, complex traumas, psychophysiological (psychosomatic) symptoms, and syndromes, instances where high levels of physiological dysregulation and emotional stress typically occur together.
How to Become a Certified ISP Practitioner
How to get your certificate: Complete the in-person or live online ISP Professional Training, 6 hours of personal sessions, and 6 hours of case consultations from approved ISP providers.
About Faculty
Raja Selvam, PhD
Dr. Raja Selvam, a licensed clinical psychologist from the United States, is the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology™ (ISP™) and the author of the bestselling book The practice of embodying emotions: A method for improving cognitive, emotional, and behavioral outcomes in 13 languages. Dr. Selvam teaches his approach in the ISP Professional Training.
Read more
Dr. Selvam is also a senior trainer in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing® (SE™) professional trauma training program. He has taught in over two dozen countries on six continents for nearly thirty years. His work is inspired by Jungian and archetypal psychologies, Kleinian and intersubjective schools of psychoanalysis, Reichan and Neo-Reichian body psychotherapy approaches such as Bioenergetics, Bodynamic Somatic Developmental Psychology from Denmark, and Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), affective neuroscience, quantum physics, yoga, Polarity Therapy, and Advaita Vedanta (a spiritual psychology from India).
Training Information
Integral Somatic Psychology™ is unique among existing somatic psychology or body psychotherapy approaches in two important ways.
One is that it offers a neuroscience-backed, body-based, and emotion-focused method for improving treatment times and diverse outcomes (somatic, energetic, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, relational, and spiritual outcomes) in all therapy modalities, including all body psychotherapy and somatic psychology approaches.
ISP accomplishes this through the practice of embodying emotions.
The practice of embodying emotions is the conscious expansion of emotional experience to as much of the brain and physical body as possible, giving the brain the time required to process the situation cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally.
This is predicted by the research paradigm of embodied emotions in cognitive and affective neurosciences, and by a number of other recent scientific research findings in what can collectively be called the science of embodied cognition, emotion, and behavior.
Two, ISP has a unique advantage over most if not all, somatic psychology and body psychotherapy approaches that suffer from what can be termed as the one-body error and problem that limits their effectiveness.
Psychotherapy approaches that do not work with the body suffer from the no-body problem because they overlook the overwhelming modern evidence that cognition, emotion, and behavior depend not only on the brain but also on the body and the environment.
On the other hand, Somatic psychology approaches err in assuming that we have only one body: The one that gets conceived in a womb and is laid to rest in a tomb. This follows from science limiting reality only to things that can be perceived or measured despite the obvious fact that our ability to measure reality is quite limited.
Eastern Psychology, based on refined Eastern phenomenology, has long established that our body consists of four levels: Two at the individual level and two at the collective level. They are the individual gross body, the individual subtle body, the changing collective body of the universe, and its paradoxical basis of the unchanging collective body of pure awareness.
Each of these four levels contributes to all of our experiences and to their regulation. Each of these levels is, therefore, crucial for our clients’ profound transformation.
To access, expand and regulate emotion in the physical body, ISP uses Western Osteopathic techniques for working with the physical body as well as Eastern subtle body techniques for working with our multiple bodies, individual and collective.
Day 1-3: 10 am to 1 pm and 3 pm to 7 pm
Day 4: 10 am to 1:30 pm
Staybridge Suites Chicago O’Hare – Rosemont.
6600 Mannheim Rd
Rosemont, IL 60018
Use this link to the hotel website to book your room for Module 2 and get a discount.
Use this link to the hotel website to book your room for Module 3 and get a discount.
Free continental breakfast, rooms have a private kitchenette, and restaurants are within walking distance.
The hotel charges a parking fee of $18/day. The fee may be subject to change.
The hotel is ADA-compliant.
A limited number of partial scholarships may be available for this ISP Professional Training location. Please contact your training coordinator if you’d like to apply for a scholarship.
All students will receive access to the recordings. Students who need to miss a module can catch up by video.
If you have questions about the training or the training location, please get in touch with Donna Amstutz by email.
1. If an applicant is denied access to the training for any reason, a full refund will be issued.
2. If the training is canceled by Integral Somatic Psychology, a full refund will be issued.
3. If a training module is rescheduled, tuition will be transferred to the rescheduled training
or another location. No refund will be issued.
4. If a student cancels a training at least 21 days prior to a training module, a full refund will be issued, less a $75 nonrefundable cancellation fee.
5. If a student cancels a training within 20 days of the start date of a training module, a 50% refund will be issued for the tuition for that module; if the student paid in advance tuition for additional future training modules, a full refund will be issued for tuition for those additional future training modules.
6. No refunds will be issued for no-shows.
Invaluable
“The emphasis on the bodily experience of emotions and how to work with them—recognize, experience deeply, and manage/regulate—was invaluable for my professional and personal growth.”
— Kenneth Talan, MD, SEP, Child and Adult Psychiatrist
Dr. Selvam is a licensed clinical psychologist, the author of The Practice of Embodying Emotions: A Guide for Improving Cognitive, Emotional, and Behavioral Outcomes, and the developer of Integral Somatic Psychology (ISP), an effective somatic therapy that helps clients achieve optimal mental health by fully embodying their emotions. He has taught for twenty-five years in over twenty countries.
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