🌕 Experience the Core Strokes® Spiral
Four Gateways to Embodied Transformation
A Somatic Psychotherapy Training in Breath, Fascia, and Relational Presence
Core Strokes® is an integrative approach within somatic psychotherapy, exploring how human experience organizes itself through breath, fascia, movement, contact, and relational participation.
Developed by Dirk Marivoet through more than four decades of clinical, developmental, and experiential work, the approach emerges from a living dialogue between Reichian body psychotherapy, Postural Integration®, Core Energetics, developmental psychology, and contemporary relational and phenomenological perspectives.
At the heart of Core Strokes® lies a dynamic spiral of four immersive gateways:
🌱 Rooting Core
🌬️ Flowing Core
🔥 Radiant Core
✨ Luminous Core
Each gateway explores a different organization of embodied participation through breath, fascia, emotional process, energetic regulation, and therapeutic contact.
Rather than fixed stages, the modules form an unfolding ecology of embodied learning. Each can be entered independently, while together they create a coherent and progressively deepening professional training path.
The work integrates:
- breath and autonomic regulation
- fascial organization and tissue responsiveness
- developmental and attachment dynamics
- character structure and emotional process
- relational presence and therapeutic touch
- energetic expression and embodied coherence
Whether you are a psychotherapist, somatic practitioner, bodyworker, movement facilitator, or someone engaged in deep embodied self-development, Core Strokes® offers a grounded and clinically refined approach to working with the living intelligence of the body.
It is an invitation:
to perceive more precisely,
to touch more consciously,
and to recognize how experience shapes—and transforms—the organism through relationship, breath, and embodied participation.
🌱 Core Strokes® Module 1: Rooting Core
Awakening Ground, Safety, and Embodied Contact
Rooting Core is the foundational gateway within the Core Strokes® training spiral.
This immersive module explores how safety, contact, and regulation become organized within the body through breath, fascia, movement, and relational experience.
Working primarily with the superficial fascial layers and the first developmental movements of embodied participation, the module supports the emergence of grounding, differentiation, trust, and energetic coherence.
The emphasis is not only on technique, but on learning to perceive the body as a living relational process.
Participants gradually develop greater sensitivity to:
- breath rhythm and energetic organization
- fascial tone and tissue responsiveness
- emotional holding patterns
- transferential and attachment dynamics
- the body’s movement between contraction, expansion, withdrawal, and contact
🌿 Exploring the First Movements of the Breath Spiral
This module introduces the first four phases of the Energetic Breath Cycle™:
- Secure Breath
- Nurturing Breath
- Exploring Breath
- Free Breath
along with their interrupted expressions:
- Fragmented Breath
- Needy Breath
- Inflated Breath
- Conflicted Breath
These patterns are explored not as abstract typologies, but as living organizational processes expressed through breathing, posture, movement, fascia, emotional regulation, and relational participation.
🌾 Fascia as Living Organization
Through the Fascia Texture Typology™, participants learn to recognize how tissue reflects different states of regulation, adaptation, defense, and integration.
Special attention is given to the superficial fascial layer and to foundational textures such as:
- Wet Earth
- Warm Honey
- Springy Moss
These textures are approached as expressions of embodied organization rather than merely structural qualities.
Hands-on work focuses on cultivating sensitivity, presence, differentiation, and therapeutic timing through touch.
🌀 The Neurofascial Transformation Process™
The module also introduces the Neurofascial Transformation Process™ — an integrative framework for working with the relationship between breath, fascia, emotion, developmental history, and relational process.
Participants learn to:
- perceive patterns of armoring and energetic disruption
- support transitions from defensive organization toward greater coherence
- work with nervous system regulation through touch and breath
- facilitate embodied safety and relational grounding
- remain present within transferential and countertransferential dynamics
The approach combines precise body-oriented work with relational attunement and developmental understanding.
💠 Relational Presence and Clinical Sensitivity
Throughout the training, increasing attention is given to the relational field emerging through somatic contact.
Participants explore how early attachment patterns may appear through:
- longings for contact
- fears of abandonment
- idealization
- collapse
- push–pull dynamics around closeness and autonomy
Rather than attempting to “fix” these patterns, the work emphasizes developing the capacity to remain grounded, differentiated, and responsive within the therapeutic relationship itself.
✨ Foundations of Embodied Regulation
Rooting Core lays the foundation for:
- nervous system regulation
- embodied grounding
- relational trust
- energetic continuity
- therapeutic presence
- fascial responsiveness
- emotional differentiation
Whether attended as personal development or as part of a professional path, this module offers a deep experiential entry into the Core Strokes® approach and into the wider field of somatic psychotherapy.
🔗 Foundational Explorations
🌿 A Living Learning Environment
Domaine des 7 Vallons — Villers-en-Prayères, France
Rooting Core takes place at Domaine des 7 Vallons, a retreat center situated within the forests, lakes, and open landscapes of the Champagne region, approximately two hours from Paris.
Surrounded by nature and spacious silence, the environment supports the rhythm of the work itself: grounding, slowing down, listening, and reconnecting with embodied presence.
The setting offers an atmosphere conducive to deep somatic exploration while remaining accessible by public transportation and welcoming to both new and experienced participants.
The residential format allows participants to remain immersed in the experiential field of the training throughout the week — integrating learning not only through study and practice, but through shared presence, rest, movement, and relational contact.
For more details about the venue:
Facilitated with care by…
Dirk Marivoet, MSc.
Founder and Director of the International Institute for Bodymind Integration (IBI)
Dirk Marivoet is founder and director of the International Institute for Bodymind Integration (IBI), integrative body psychotherapist, physiotherapist, psychomotor therapist, and developer of the Core Strokes® approach.
Originally trained at the University of Leuven, he worked for many years within psychiatric and psychoanalytic clinical settings before developing an international practice integrating somatic psychotherapy, developmental process work, energetic approaches, and deep body-oriented therapeutic methods.
His work has been shaped through extensive training and supervision within Postural Integration®, Energetic Integration®, Reichian Bodywork, Pelvic-Heart Integration®, Core Energetics, developmental and relational psychotherapy traditions.
Across more than forty years of clinical practice and teaching, Dirk has developed Core Strokes® as an evolving somatic psychotherapy framework integrating: breath and energetic regulation, fascial organization, developmental dynamics, character structure, relational process, therapeutic touch, embodied transformation
Today he teaches internationally through trainings, workshops, supervision, and writing.
Practical information
Date and Location:
30 November – 6 December 2026
Arrival: 30 November at 16:00
Closing: 6 December at 16:00
Venue:
Domaine des 7 Vallons
Residential training in the Champagne region, approximately two hours from Paris.
🛏️ Accommodation & Meals
Accommodation and meals range between approximately €49 and €128 per day, depending on the selected room option.
Participants reserve accommodation directly with the venue.
Reserve your accommodation directly via the online form:
💳 Training Fees
- Early Bird: €890 (before 15 September 2026)
- Standard Fee: €950 (after 15 September 2026)
🌍 Languages :
The training is taught in English, with possible support in French and Dutch when needed.
✉️ QUESTIONS?
For organizational questions or practical support, please contact Solène: