An advanced practitioner training to develop your skills in somatic attunement and understand how therapeutic holding deepens the healing process. 

Join us for
The Art of Holding

Apply to Attend
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3 weekends of experiential intensives to deepen your skills in therapeutic touch, somatic capacity as a practitioner, and holding clients in altered states.

Deepen your practice with somatic tools for transformative outcomes

Explore the nuanced, intimate domain of physical touch and holding clients in altered states.

You’ll learn:

  • How to recognize the conditions that support safety and learning

  • Techniques to decipher nonverbal cues and implicit processes

  • Various approaches to using touch and holding with your clients, and when to use them

  • Ways to attune to your client’s state so they feel supported and as safe as possible

  • Tools to build environments that support regulation, agency, and integration, especially as clients process the unconscious

Strengthen your own capacity, self-awareness, and ethical grounding as a practitioner. 

You’ll learn:

  • How to work with activation without rushing toward resolution

  • Co-regulation and nervous system tracking as essential therapeutic skills 

  • A deep understanding of the ethics of touch and how to apply it in clinical and ceremonial settings 

  • Ways to clarify and communicate your own boundaries as a practitioner

  • A map of how attachment works, rooted in ethics and safety

The potency of transformation stems from the quality of the container it began in.

The Art of Holding trains practitioners to create the conditions for transformation & healing through embodied presence, relational skill, and ethical care.

View Training Details

  • “This is, without question, the best medicine training I have ever attended. Love, Forty, Dylan, and Pierre are, in my opinion, the best in the business. I truly felt like I was learning from masters.”

    — BONNIE MCDONALD

  • “My training in ‘talk therapy’ did not include a shred of education in how to properly touch or hold someone in a therapeutic context…This training demonstrated how to navigate the beautifully complex ‘art of holding’ in a safe, ethically impeccable and super-fun seminar. Highly recommended!”

    — BLAKE BAILY MA, LPC

  • “This training gave me a lived experience of what safety really means and how to create it. I left with a much deeper understanding that medicine alone is not the answer. Medicine, combined with genuine neurobiological safety and love, is where the real magic happens.”

    — BONNIE MCDONALD

Therapeutic tools for diverse disciplines

Those who attend The Art of Holding share a common intention amidst diverse approaches: to cultivate greater presence, precision, and maturity in facilitating human transformation.

  • Psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, social workers, nurses, healthcare professionals

  • Coaches, psychedelic facilitators, retreat leaders, educators, movement teachers

  • Bodyworkers, massage therapists, holistic health practitioners, healers, energy workers, somatic practitioners

  • Spiritual directors, retreat leaders, organizers, advisors

What you need to know: The Art of Holding

3 Experiential Weekend Intensives: Fri-Sun

Weekend 1: Jan. 15-17, 2027

Weekend 2: Feb. 12-14, 2027

Weekend 3: Mar. 12-14, 2027

Schedule

Friday: 9:30am-5pm
Saturday: 9:30am-8pm
Sunday: 9:30am-1pm

Training Format

  • Live facilitation and seminar learning

  • Experiential, embodied exercises to practice what you learn

  • Medicine-assisted practices

  • Reflective inquiry, integration and refinement

Location

In-person on-site training in Boulder, Colorado

Cost

Sliding scale: $3,500 – $7,500 

Apply by Nov. 1, 2026!

Limited spots available to keep the group intimate and facilitate personalized support.

Apply to Join

How to Apply

  • Prerequisite: Completion of a physical / psychological / somatic / psychedelic training program*

    *Not all programs are equivalent; admission is based on quality of training and additional factors 

  • Online Application: Submit a short online application form

  • Interview: Qualifying applicants will be invited to an interview prior to admission

  • Scheduling: Applicants will be invited for interviews on a rolling basis

Black and white close-up of two men embracing tightly, one resting their face on the other's shoulder.

All life is awake
All life is breathing with us
Life is here and available
Suffering tells us we are separate,
That we are an island; apart
We were always included anyways
We were always a part

To weave back into life
Let us cross the threshold 
Back into our belonging
That is all we are asking
Remembering ourselves back into life.

An original prayer & prose by
THE LIMINAL ARTS INSTITUTE LEADERSHIP TEAM

Meet Your Teachers

A brightly-lit headshot of Dylan smiling against a white backdrop. He is wearing a beige sweater, and has a mustache with a shaved head.

Dylan Rivard

Dylan is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in the state of Colorado, as well as a Certified Hakomi Therapist. He has trained with the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI) and assisted in the Integrative Psychiatry Institute’s Psychedelic Therapy Certification, as well as teaching with the Congregation of Sacred Practices and Elemental Psychedelics. 

LICENSED PROFESSIONAL COUNSELOR | HAKOMI THERAPIST

A brightly-lit headshot of Pierre smiling against a white backdrop. He is wearing a light blue striped button-up, brown glasses, and has short tousled blonde hair parted to one side.

Pierre Bouchard

Pierre Bouchard, LPC LM, is a Lead Facilitator with The Congregation for Sacred Practices. Trained in Hakomi and other somatic modalities, he emphasizes touch, presence, and attunement in trauma healing and psychedelic work, drawing on extensive clinical experience and teaching widely on personal, spiritual, and relational dimensions of healing. 

LICENSED PROFESSIONAL COUNSELOR | LICENSED MINISTER

“Together, they create an environment of connection that paves the way for experiences that simply aren’t possible without that foundation.”

— BONNIE MCDONALD

A brightly-lit headshot of Forty smiling against a white backdrop. He is wearing a blue short-sleeved button-up, round blue glasses, and has a bristled beard and coiffed blonde hair parted to one side.

Fortunato Perkins

Fortunato Perkins is an Interpersonal Neuro-Developmental Practitioner, Licensed Minister, and faculty with the Congregation of Sacred Practices and Elemental Psychedelics. Blending somatic psychotherapy, applied neuroscience, and contemplative practice, he helps clients regulate their nervous systems and engage healing. Based in Boulder, he bridges science, somatics, and wisdom traditions. 

LICENSED MINISTER | INTERPERSONAL NEURO-DEVELOPMENTAL PRACTITIONER

A brightly-lit headshot of Love smiling against a white backdrop. She is wearing a navy blouse and gold necklace, and has dark brown, shoulder-length curly hair.

Love Mercury

HAKOMI PRACTITIONER | LICENSED MINISTER

Love Mercury is a Lead Facilitator and Trainer for The Congregation of Sacred Practices’s Minister in Training program. A Holistic Health Practitioner and Hakomi graduate, her journey weaves women’s health, ancestral wisdom, and sacred plant medicines. With decades of experience, she guides healing spaces that honor both tradition and transformation, embodying integrity and heart.

About
The Liminal Arts Institute

We train diverse practitioners to meet complexity and transformation with clarity, presence, and discernment.

Whether in psychotherapy, somatic practice, leadership, medicine work, education, or group facilitation, meaningful change emerges through relationship, context, timing, and the quality of the environment in which people are invited to grow.

The quality of an intervention is inseparable from the quality of the practitioner offering it. Our work is devoted to developing both equally.

A navy graphic logo of an open doorway with the text The Liminal Arts Institute in all caps.

  • We seek to develop the skills and capacities that help meet the complex needs of the challenging, liminal spaces in life.

    We focus on the spaces between what once was and what is arriving next, from births, deaths, maturation, and breaths, to all the myriad losses and beginnings that cause life to unfold.

  • Our approach integrates developmental psychology, somatic practice, contemporary neuroscience, systems thinking, contemplative traditions, and decades of clinical and facilitation experience.

    At the core of our work is developing an embodied sense of humanity that is felt between practitioner and participant, and a foundation of relationality informed by ritual and beauty.

  • Our teaching draws from an interdisciplinary foundation:

    • Applied neuroscience

    • Developmental trauma theory

    • Polyvagal Theory

    • Interpersonal neurobiology

    • Somatic psychology

    • Thai Massage

    • Conscious Energetic Touch

    • Contemplative practice

    Rather than presenting these as separate disciplines, we integrate them into a coherent framework practitioners can apply in their own work.

Apply by November 1st, 2026 to join us!

Limited spaces are available, and applications are accepted on a rolling basis. Apply now to make sure you can secure a spot if approved.

Apply to The Art of Holding