Restore nervous system health & expand your capacity

SOMA RISING

This six-week course will give you a transformative understanding of how to cultivate calm, restore resilience, and increase aliveness.

Next cohort: Oct 16th - Nov 27th, 2025

Why I created this course

A combination of physical health issues and emotional dysregulation plagued my 20s. This course is a culmination of everything I have learnt, first exploring and then reclaiming both my physical and emotional health—all shared through a nervous system lens. Really, it’s everything I wish I had known now over a decade ago. If I had, then, damn, the last 10 years would have been a lot more easy.

The teachings and explorations mapped out in this course have had a profound impact on me—I’m sharing them because I believe they can be for other people, too.

Is this course for you?

I expect the people who are most willing to commit to this course will fall into one of three categories:

  • People who are in (or are embarking on) a healing journey and need support with their physical and/or emotional health through a nervous system lens.

  • Practitioners with an existing practice who want to better understand and integrate evidence-backed nervous system tools to working with their client base.

  • People fascinated by all things psyche and soma who are looking to deepen their depth of understanding and practice.

What you will learn

( 01 ) Restore a felt sense of safety back into your body and gain access to higher brain structures that enable you to be creative and generative.

( 02 ) Rewire maladaptive stress responses and old patterns of fight, flight, freeze using research-backed protocols for restoring nervous system health.

( 03 ) Explore how to surf challenging emotions and work with the edges of your window of capacity.

( 04 ) Increase your psychobiological capacity to handle greater complexity and challenge with growing ease.

( 05 ) Develop the capacity for a healthy fight response so you can step into a life of agency and courage.

( 06 ) Design your environments so that the spaces you spend time in are conducive to your desired nervous system state.

The Soma Rising Curriculum

    • Polyvagal lens: understand your nervous system through neuroscience.

    • Window of capacity: develop a framework for holding activated states.

    • Healthy development: nurture children through co-regulation practices.

    • Map your state: explore how different branches of your nervous system feel.

    • Safety & stabilisation: restore a felt sense of safety back into your body.

    • Shift your state: top-down vs. bottom-up vs outside-in strategies.

    • Down-regulate: neuroscience-backed techniques to cultivate calm.

    • Thaw-out shutdown: how to safely bring energy back into a collapsed state.

    • Predicting brain: learn how the brain works so you know what to do that helps.

    • What’s wrong attention: overcome any in-built negativity bias.

    • Dual awareness: balance intra- & extra-psychic energy.

    • Let in the good: re-orient to pleasure to enjoy oases of organisation.

    • Learn how to surf challenging emotions and increase your window of capacity.

    • Emotional containment: stop trying to "release" your trauma.

    • Interoceptive sensitivity: to anchor yourself in a vital connection to your body.

    • Titrating emotion: build affect tolerance by oscillating between states.

    • Appeasement is a nervous system survival strategy.

    • Define limits & boundaries: set boundaries to feel safe & at ease.

    • Transform anger: anger is not an event, action, or behaviour—it’s an emotion (with power).

    • Call to courage: where you reclaim your anger, you will find your courage.

    • Create the conditions that allow for regulation to arise.

    • Co-regulation: your nervous system is a social structure.

    • NS interior design: how to re-design your environment.

    • Sleep sanctuary: create the conditions that allow for good sleep to arise.

    • App: free access to the Breathe With James app throughout the course.

    • Bookshelf: curated reading & literature for those wishing to dive deeper and broaden their knowledge.

    • One-One practitioners: a curated list of practitioners with nervous system health as a central tenet of their work.

    • Masterclass vault: access to masterclass sessions from previous cohorts.

So, how does the course take shape?

  • In Depth Theoretical Explanations

    The course is a combination of pre-recorded lessons and live sessions. Each week, you will have a suite of content written and recorded by me to engage with in your own time.

  • Guided Protocols & Exercises

    The course intends to give you an embodied understanding of nervous system health, so it includes guided protocols and exercises throughout. The protocols and exercises are completely safe and backed by quality peer-reviewed research.

  • Weekly Live Sessions

    Live Zoom sessions with me will consist of a combination of teaching, interactive exercises and time for a Q&A on the material covered that week.

  • Masterclass Sessions with Guest Teachers

    I have carefully selected a few excellent teachers to expand your understanding of nervous system health. They are Alex Manos, Dana Doswell and Jenn Mann. They will run masterclass sessions on their relevant topic of speciality.

  • Supportive Community

    The course has been designed to be as interactive as possible. You are invited to connect, share, and support each other in your joint venture towards greater nervous system health. This course creates a temenos (psychic container in Jungian psychology) for shared exploration. 

Meet the guest teachers

DANA DOSWELL
— NERVOUS SYSTEM Practitioner

Dana is one of a few practitioners who has an in-depth understanding of the difference between the male and female nervous systems—and has developed her own cyclical regulation framework for the female body.

Alex Manos
— Functional Medicine Practitioner

Alex is one of the leading functional medicine practitioners in the UK. Alex will speak on the intersection between functional medicine & nervous system health.

JennIFER Mann
— Co-Founder of Somia interntional

Jennifer is a certified mind-body practitioner and expert in treating psychophysiological disorders. She is co-founder of Somia International and co-author of The Secret Language of The Body.

Course Logistics

    • The cost to enroll is £497 - payment can be made in a variety of instalments.

    • VIP Coaching Package: There are 10 seats available for a nervous system deep dive that includes 1:1 coaching sessions and voice-note access to James throughout the course, priced at £997 - mention this in your application if this is of interest.

      The average takeaway coffee in London costs £3.67. On the six-month payment plan, NSH costs £2.76 per day. You get everything I’ve learned over the last 10+ years distilled through a nervous system lens—for less than a takeaway coffee a day.

    • 45-60 minutes per week for core content, protocols and exercises via pre-recorded audio to engage with in your own time.

    • x7 75-minute live Zoom sessions will be held on Thursdays at 6pm GMT (attendance is encouraged but optional, and all calls are recorded).

    • x3 60-minute live Masterclass sessions held on Tuesdays at 6pm GMT (attendance is encouraged but optional, and all calls are recorded).

  • This will be updated over the Summer.

Free access to my app,
Breathe With James

Throughout the course, you will have free access to my app, Breathe With James. This will enable you to explore how your breath shapes your nervous system, specifically your autonomic arousal levels. You will be invited to use sessions on the app to down-regulate, cultivate calm, and improve sleep quality.

There is also a ‘Learn’ section to geek out on the link between breathwork and nervous system health.

What past students are saying

  • I took this course as I have spent the year tending to a very disorganised nervous system. I knew it was going to be extremely informative but I didn’t realise how life changing it would be. Within five weeks I feel like a different person just from implementing new practices to support my nervous system. I have had some really profound realisations throughout this experience and I’m looking forward to future trainings with James.

    — Rachael Morley

  • This course is truly unique in the way that James manages to fuse together his passion, deep learning and for me, the extra bonus of Jungian philosophy. He offers so much more than just a course, it's an opportunity to immerse in all the things nervous system and beyond. Thank you, James.

    — Nicola Lonsdale

  • Doing this course with James was life-changing. Knowing what I do now about the nervous system I can look back at my life with so much more compassion and understanding for all the ways in which I thought I was falling short when in fact my inner conditioning and outer life circumstances couldn't have lead to any other outcome.  If I had known what I now know and thanks to this course, I could have spared myself a lot of 'being lost in the therapeutic woods' over the years.

    — Christiana Soderberg

VIEW ALL TESTIMONIALS

Answering any questions
that you may have

If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to James directly.

  • You will have access to the course for x3 months after it ends.

    You will also be able to join any future cohort for half price.

  • Yes, if you decide the course isn’t for you within the first week, you can contact me, and I’ll refund your payment.

  • Good idea! Many companies today will reimburse tuition for personal development and training that increases well-being and reduces the chances of burnout. You can use this proposal template to make the cause for your work to invest in this course.

  • The weekly live sessions with me are on Thursdays at 6pm GMT. Although attendance is encouraged, all sessions are recorded and uploaded by 9am GMT the following morning.

    Roughly 10-15% of past students were in a time zone where they couldn’t attend the live sessions, but they shared that they could still gain everything they needed by watching the recordings in their own time.

  • Yes, community is a core aspect of NSH. While most of your learning will be through me, the course platform has been designed to encourage as much peer-to-peer learning as possible. If you choose, there will be plenty of opportunities to learn from and connect with your fellow nervous system health travellers.