Turning Toward, this Friday in Gardiner NY

Hello Sweet Humans,

It’s me again. I’ve been writing more often than usual. Partly because I’m inspired to share this offering, and partly because the world feels heavy to witness alone. Naming the weight we each carry in some way feels coherent. Uncertainty, fear, disconnection, discomfort, grief…they ripple through us all. It’s part of the human condition. If things feel hard, remember, there’s nothing wrong with you.

Humaning is hard. Being inside the overwhelm and the stuck is hard. And in turning toward what feels hard together, we begin to rehumanize what feels worn down: our ability to choose, connection, joy, vitality. There are ways of relating to what feels hard that can offer support, clarity, and orientation inside the hard. We can practice reclaiming that space in-between, between stimulus and response.

This Friday, September 26th, from 4:30-8p at The Living Room at Full Circle in Gardiner NY, we will gather for the first session of our Relationally Rooted workshop series. There is space for you to join us . Whether you drop in for one session or move through the full series.

Our first session is all about Turning Towards what is hard without abandoning yourself. We’ll play with presence and craft practices to carry you long beyond our time together.

If you want to plan ahead, here’s the rest of the series:
Boundaries and Edges on Friday October 24
Rupture and Repair on Friday November 21

Learn more and register at connectfulness.com/relationally-rooted-series

With warmth,
Rebecca

PS: I am still collecting names of those interested in a future virtual series. Simply reply to this email if you’d like me to keep you in the loop.

And if you haven’t yet listened to my recent conversation on The Going Inside podcast, I invite you to. While it’s geared a bit toward therapists, it’s meaningful for all. We talk about how grief itself can offer a gentle portal into deep healing. You can listen here.

We begin a week from Friday: The Relationally Rooted Series

Hello sweet humans,

A gentle reminder: next Friday, September 26th, kicks off the Relationally Rooted Series. We’ve got space for you!

I admit, I’ve been a bit distracted of late (who hasn’t—there’s so much in the world right now) and I haven’t gotten the word out as widely as I hoped. Would you help me spread the word?

We begin with presence.

Session 1: Turning Toward invites you to reconnect with your Self in a way that feels steady and true. When things become murky, overwhelming, or unclear, it’s easy to lose contact with yourself. Here, we practice returning.

Through experiential, brain-informed somatic practices, you’ll build micro-practices that support staying with your internal experience, holding complexity, and remaining open without abandoning yourself. These practices help you stay connected in the moments that matter most.

Relationally Rooted Series Schedule:
Session 1: Turning Toward on 9.26.25
Session 2: Boundaries and Edges on 10.24.25
Session 3: Rupture and Repair on 11.21.25

You’re welcome to join us for one session or for the full series.

We gather from 4:30-8p at The Living Room at Full Circle in Gardiner NY. A meal will be incorporated into our time together as an intentional, tending practice in community space. Bring a meal that feeds you or plan to place an order with Benton (onsite) when we gather.

Learn more and register at connectfulness.com/relationally-rooted-series

With warmth,
Rebecca

PS: I know not everyone can join us in person in Gardiner, NY. I’m gathering names for a possible virtual series, simply reply to this email if you’d like me to keep you in the loop.

And if you’re curious about what I mean by Turning Toward and would like to dive a little deeper into my approach, I recently joined John Clarke on his Going Inside podcast for a conversation on this very theme. It’s geared a bit toward therapists, but may be meaningful for all. We talk about how grief itself can offer a gentle portal into deep healing. You can listen to our conversation here: johnclarketherapy.com/podcast/hidden-power-of-grief-rebecca-wong

When healing is held in relationship space

a gentle invitation to explore the patterns that shape how we connect

 

Hello beautiful human,


I've been thinking about a theme that's been showing up in my work with folks over these past 20 years: there is a profound difference between healing in isolation and healing in the container of relationship.


So often, we embark on inner work as if we exist in a vacuum. It's true that we were wounded, and cause wounding, in relationship. And it's also true that healing is held in relationship.

Introducing the Relationally Rooted Series

This season, I'm offering a workshop series I've been dreaming up for years, honoring the relational nature of who we are. Somatically. In our bodies. In our nervous systems. In the spaces between us.

We'll explore…
…how early relational patterns live in your body and show up in your adult connections
…the wisdom of your nervous system and how it's been protecting you all along
…practices for developing relational presence, the capacity to be authentically you while staying connected to others
…tools for turning toward tender places where you've experienced aloneness and misunderstanding



This is about coming home to the relational being you've always been, underneath all the protective patterns that made sense once upon a time.

We're living through a time of unprecedented disconnection. We're carrying historical imprints of familial and social systems and cultural patterns that taught us to prioritize productivity over presence, performance over authenticity.

And still, your nervous system remembers how to be in healthy relationship. We just need to create the right conditions for that remembering to emerge.

This series weaves together everything I've learned from decades of sitting with people in their most vulnerable moments. It's:
▹ more than cognitive, it’s somatic, relational, and experiential
▹ trauma-informed, honoring your wise protective knowings
▹ shared power-with, acknowledging the impacts of how systemic oppression shapes our capacity for connection
▹ designed with different nervous system needs in mind

We'll work with the body, and practice being in relationship. Between you and you, with me, and with the others who join us on this journey.

If you're interested in relational healing, you belong in this space.


The Relationally Rooted Series, offers building blocks to stack and grow, centering experiential practices that support presence, connection, and repair. It's an in-person 3 workshop series, held on Fridays from 4:30p-8p at The Living Room at Full Circle in Gardiner, NY.
You're welcome to join a single session or move through the full series.

▹▹ Turning Toward | 9.26.25 Practices for presence, inner connection, and staying with what matters without abandoning yourself inside hard moments.

▹▹ Boundaries and Edges | 10.24.25 Practices for clarity, congruence, and relational integrity to help you sense, honor, hold and trust your internal boundaries.

▹▹ Rupture and Repair | 11.21.25 Practices for holding complexity inside moments of disconnection to help you return to a felt sense of okayness, presence and repair, within yourself and your relationships.


If you've made it this far, perhaps something in your system is saying yes. I'd be deeply honored to walk with you on this relational healing journey.

With warmth and presence,
Rebecca

 

P.S. - I offer an equitable fee scale and trust you to choose the pricing tier that genuinely reflects your financial capacity while contributing to the sustainability of this work. Plus $25 off when you register for all three workshops in the series together.

 

About Rebecca Wong, LCSW

Rebecca has been walking alongside people in their relational healing journeys for over 20 years. Her work weaves together somatic practices, relational presence, and trust in the wisdom of your nervous system. She's trained in The STAIR Method, Somatic Experiencing, Relational Life Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Intimacy From The Inside Out, and Deep Brain Reorienting, among other modalities. Rebecca lives in New York's Hudson Valley on Lenape land with her partner, teens, and handful of four-legged mischief makers.

🍂 This Fall, Turning Inward

Hello Sweet Humans,

As I write you, the world feels especially heavy. Many of us are carrying grief that reaches far…encompassing personal loss, the sorrows of the world, unmet needs, shifting expectations, and what we carry in our bones. It makes sense that our nervous systems remain on alert, caught in near-constant activation.

As stress and shock increase, the skills of maintaining and caring for our boundaries are essential. The personal and collective need for repair, for presence and holding, becomes clearer. Relational healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

With the inward directionality of the fall, I'm opening containers for grief and growth. The offerings below come from a belief that, in times of crisis, the soul-work of tending to our capacity to be with ourselves and each other crystalizes.

If you’re seeking ways to be less overwhelmed, to be held by community, or to explore what you’re ready to turn toward, there’s space for you here.

 

The Relationally Rooted Series

An experiential series of three practice-based workshops to meet and tend to your nervous system, sense into your boundaries, and expand your capacity for repair. Join any single session or move through the full series:

Turning Toward · Friday, September 26 · 4:30–8p
Boundaries & Edges · Friday, October 24 · 4:30–8p
Rupture & Repair · Friday, November 21 · 4:30–8p
In Person at The Living Room at Full Circle in Gardiner, NY

Each gathering integrates micro-practices you can carry into daily life.

 

Consultation Groups for Therapists

Two small-group cohorts beginning September

An invitation to build community while exploring the sticky patterns in your work. Increase self-trust, deepen resilience for you and your clients, and shift your relational presence. Feel more supported in therapeutic challenges, welcome both your therapist and human selves, and lessen the aloneness common in this work. As your guide, I’ll lean into principles from The STAIR Method to inform our process, weaving in neurobiology and experiential learning.

Mondays · 1–3p ET · September 8 to December 15 (8 sessions)
Thursdays · 2-4p ET · September 11 to December 4 (6 sessions)
Zoom

Groups are limited to 6–8 clinicians each.

 

Experiential Relationship Intensives

A 20-hour immersive journey into embodied relational healing

Intensives offer a concentrated, personalized, guided experience to slow down and attend to the patterns that shaped how you relate to yourself and others. Whether you come alone, with a partner, or as part of a relationship system...this is a private space just for you. We'll move at the pace of trust, gently exploring protective strategies your system negotiated over time. Listening through a neurobiological lens for what's ready to change and imagine into new ways of being that support the growth of connection, coherence, and self-trust within your system and relationships.

4 core sessions (3.5 hours each) + 3 integration sessions (2 hours each) = 20 hours over 7 sessions
in New Paltz, NY, online, or a hybrid of both based on what works best for you.

 

The Geography of Grief

A free virtual gathering to explore grief together

A space to move beyond overwhelm and shutdown, to simply be with whatever is alive inside right now, in real time and in community. No agenda. No performance. Just an open, supportive space to feel into, experience, and be with what is emerging within and between us. After the success of our August gathering, I'm hoping to gather us for the Geography of Grief every other month. Free.

Monday, October 13 · 12:30-1:30pm EST
Zoom link provided after registration

 

When systems of oppression are present, our capacity to be with, our presence, is called upon in the choices we make about what we turn toward, and what we turn away from. After all, we humans have experienced both harm and healing in relationship: with ourselves, with others, with community, and our planet.

Each of the offerings above provides a way to tend overwhelm. Orient within yourself. And to strengthen your capacity to choose what to turn toward, or away from.

I hope to help us resource ourselves so we can be with what is, while imagining into what's possible. To meet grief with witness. To hold heartbreak and hope. To notice the next emerging moment. And to respond with care and clarity.

If you feel called to any of these offerings and have questions, please reach out. And if you know someone who might benefit, please share.

In care and courage,

Rebecca

 

Being with Gravity, Complexity, and Presence

Hello Sweet Humans,

You know this. In this moment, the ground beneath us is shifting in ways that challenge us to witness, hold, and move forward differently. These shifts stir old patterns of separation, fear, and longing that shape how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the world. Our power and voice are stronger collectively, in community. Yet after a season of isolation, the urgency to gather and meet what is alive within us and between us can feel overwhelming and uncertain. I hope to cultivate spaces for practice and complexity, to tend and root ourselves well in this moment, and to deepen the work of turning toward what’s hard with care.

 

The Geography of Grief — FREE Gathering

🗓️ This Tuesday, August 12 · 7–8:30pm ET
📍 Zoom (register to receive the link)

A gentle virtual gathering to explore the geography of grief together. This space invites us to move beyond overwhelm and shutdown to simply be with whatever is alive inside right now, in real time and in community. No agenda. No performance. Just an open, supportive space to feel into, experience, and be with what is emerging within and between us.

 

The Relationally Rooted Series

An experiential series of three practice-based workshops to meet and tend to your nervous system, sense into your boundaries, and expand your capacity for repair. Join any single session or move through the full series:

🗓️ Turning Toward · Friday, September 26 · 4:30–8p
🗓️ Boundaries & Edges · Friday, October 24 · 4:30–8p
🗓️ Rupture & Repair · Friday, November 21 · 4:30–8p
📍 In Person at The Living Room at Full Circle in Gardiner, NY

Each gathering integrates micro-practices you can carry into daily life.

 

Consultation Groups for Therapists

Two small-group cohorts beginning September

An invitation to build community while exploring the sticky patterns in your work. Increase self-trust, deepen resilience for you and your clients, and shift your relational presence. Feel more supported in therapeutic challenges, welcome both your therapist and human selves, and lessen the aloneness common in this work. As your guide, I’ll lean into principles from The STAIR Method to inform our process, weaving in neurobiology and experiential learning.

🗓️ Mondays · 1–3p ET · September 8 to December 15 (8 meetings)
🗓️ Tuesdays · 11a–1p ET · September 9 to December 16 (8 meetings)
📍 Zoom

Groups are limited to 6–8 clinicians each.

 

From the Archives

If you want to deepen your understanding of how decontextualized trauma lives in our bodies and ripples through our communities, I invite you to check out the work of Resmaa Menakem, somatic abolitionist and author of My Grandmother’s Hands, The Quaking of America, and Monsters in Love. His work remains deeply relevant to the moment we are in, as does this conversation we recorded six years ago.

 

The constellation of these offerings strives to cultivate spaces where we can practice presence.

Presence is a revolutionary and necessary personal action we can all mobilize to witness ourselves, others, and the world around us without turning away. It supports us in staying connected through hard moments, both to ourselves and to one another.

We invite the gravity of this moment to help us feel into what roots us as the ground shakes. Remembering that we belong to ourselves and to one another in ways that recontextualize our humanity, deepen our care, and meet this moment with presence and resilience.

May we hold the hard with kindness, moving together with courage and tenderness.

May the fullness of this week’s Sturgeon Moon energy offer us space to witness, root, and move with what is alive within and between us.

In care and courage,

Rebecca

 

The geography of grief, and a place to land

Staying With.
a free zoom communal gathering space for grief, discomfort, and inner reckoning

I’ve been thinking much lately about the geography of grief. Of hope. Of wanting. Of being. Of acing. And loving.

There’s so much unraveling. So much grief and injustice. So much to witness and metabolize. And the overwhelm of not knowing how to be with any of it, and still needing to keep going.

It’s easy to shut down, to go numb, to lose track of what we feel. Sometimes we can’t tell if we’re protecting ourselves or abandoning something important.

This space is an invitation to come back to yourself. Not to figure things out. To be in relationship with what’s emerging from within. To be present with your emerging noticings.

Being with and meeting discomfort is part of that. Especially discomfort that asks us to look inward. To notice what we’ve taken for granted. To question what we’ve been taught to trust. To feel into what sits okay and what doesn’t.

A reckoning that deeply matters. That’s rooted in healing, inside the messes. That reorients us to the gravity of this moment.

A gravity that needs to be felt and witnessed and experienced.

When we let ourselves feel it, it shows us where we are. And maybe, guides us where to go next.

So this is an invitation to gather.
Without agenda or performance.
Just you and me and other sweet humans, gathering together in community, in real time, bringing what we’re carrying.

Grief. Anger. Tenderness. Uncertainty. A desire to feel less alone.

This space is free. Nothing will be sold or promoted. Just an invitation to be here, fully, as you are.

🗓️ Wednesday, August 12th, from 7-8:30pm EST
📍 Zoom (link after registration)

I’ll share links to vetted organizations doing urgent humanitarian relief, for those who want to offer tangible support.

I hope you’ll join us in taking good care of ourselves, and each other.

Rebecca

Finding Words - A Letter From Rebecca

Hello sweet humans,


It’s been a minute.
I was looking back and realized I haven’t sent an email to our community since the end of 2024. It wasn’t my intent to go silent—and, I have.
I’ve been mostly wordless this first half of the year.
Not because there’s been nothing to say, but because I’ve been turning inward. Reorienting. Reorganizing.
The weight of the world landed deeply in my bones, and it’s taken me time to find my way back to writing you.


I invite you to pause and check in.
Have there been times when your world has felt heavy, and your words have been hard to access?
I suspect I’m not alone in this word-finding exploration.


Words are not our first language.
When I listen deeply to what’s emerging in me—through sensation, intuition, and digestion—word-finding becomes a practice of discovery.
The words help me orient toward what’s happening by naming it, and eventually, by sharing it.
And in that sharing, we can find out how those words land with others—whether they move us closer to or further from connection.


In this wordless space, I’ve come to trust my mess—by being with it.
By sitting in discomfort.
By listening for what wants to emerge, instead of pushing through.
By honoring the slower pace of deep reorganization.


And in that process, I’ve been remembering some core truths that feel especially important right now.


If you are feeling the chaos—you aren’t alone.
It’s not a you issue.
It’s the design of systems that maintain control by overwhelming our capacity to stay present.


Systems of power that depend on fear and division work by pulling us out of connection—with ourselves, and with each other.
They seek to hold power by overwhelming and disorienting our nervous systems, making it hard to discern fact from misinformation, danger from disconnection, and what’s ours from what’s systemic.
Power built on subjugation doesn’t just hide in shadows—it often shows up as pressure to push through, shut down, or turn away from what hurts.


But I’m clear: liberation is rooted in our solidarity.
In our nervous systems learning that discomfort isn’t danger.
In our capacity to turn toward what’s hard—together.
In refusing to abandon ourselves or each other, even when it feels like the world demands it.


My hope is rooted in the belief that we can build the capacity to face the world—its beauty and its brutality—with resilience, clarity, and a deep sense of worth and response-ability.


It’s a practice of staying present and bearing witness.
Of remembering that we—together—are not the chaos.
We are the ones capable of meeting it. Together.
Directionality is emerging.
It may not be loud or linear, but it’s real.


As I find my way back to a rhythm of holding space and facilitating connection, I’m grateful to find my words and return to your inbox.


In a workshop I attended yesterday, Linda Thai reminded us:
“Witnessing grief is the ultimate offering of dignity.”
Those words took root in me—and they’re now weaving their way into both what’s emerging and what continues.


I’m gathering these threads into a new offering:
Relationally Rooted—a three-part, in-person workshop series I hope to hold in a space tender enough to meet the depth of this work.
I’m still looking for the right place, one that feels sacred and grounded. If something comes to mind, I’d truly love to hear.

The series includes:
Turning Toward
Boundaries That Root Us
Rupture and Repair

Each one carries the thread of undoing aloneness—by being with grief.
In community. In presence. In slow, steady practice.
We’ll explore small, sustaining movements that help us stay with what hurts, without losing ourselves or each other.

I’ll also be reopening space for what’s most often requested:
– Therapist consult groups (new cohorts begin this fall)
– A limited number of 1:1 or relationship intensives, for those ready to go deep


We each have different ways we’re called to show up in this moment.
My hope is to keep creating spaces where we can return to ourselves—and to each other—without needing to go it alone.
To help us stay rooted in ourselves, so we don’t forget those roots inside the chaos.


The invitation is simple:
What if we practiced turning toward what hurts, together?
What if we remembered that our capacity to witness each other’s grief—and our own—is how we offer dignity in a world that often demands we look away?


You are not alone.

With love and solidarity,

Rebecca

 

If you want to learn more or stay connected, visit connectfulness.com. Or simply reply to this email—I’d love to hear from you.