Embodying Safety
Integrating Yoga, Qigong & Polyvagal Theory. Starting March 12, 2026.
Learn with Amelia
This experiential course uniquely weaves ancient embodied wisdom with modern polyvagal insights, showing how Polyvagal Theory maps onto understandings of the body, mind, and spirit refined over more than 3,000 years through Classical Yoga and Qigong. Drawing from a life long study with advanced master teachers, Dr. Barili brings practices once shared in small teaching circles into an accessible, trauma-informed framework—offering practical tools to support nervous system regulation, resilience, and authentic connection in both personal and professional life. You'll receive embodied practices you can integrate into your daily routine immediately.
Pricing options
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$899.00
Regular price
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3 x $299.66
3 Month Payment Plan
Course Timing
Now enrolling our next cohort starting March 12, 2026.
Cohort schedule:
This course alternates between live and self paced modules. Live sessions will be held on Thursdays from 2:30-4:30 pm ET (US & Canada)(time zone converter). Live participation on Zoom is strongly recommended, as these sessions create space for guided practice, connection, and shared learning. Joining live offers the opportunity to experience Dr. Amelia Barili’s guidance in real time and to deepen safety, embodiment, and integration. Course materials remain available for one full year, with extensions available upon request.
To help you get oriented, we’re offering an optional 45-minute welcome session on Thursday, March 12 at 2:30 ET. We’ll use this time to get to know one another and review the course materials and expectations.
Recordings of previous live sessions will be available on our learning platform. Convert class time to your time zone here.
Course Description
Embodying Safety: Integrating Yoga, Qigong, and Polyvagal Theory invites you into a practical and compassionate exploration of how your nervous system shapes your experience of life. In this course, Dr. Barili shows how Polyvagal Theory offers a clear, modern map that beautifully aligns with ancient wisdom traditions that have understood the body, mind, and spirit for thousands of years. Together, these approaches offer a shared language you can use to meet everyday challenges with greater clarity, steadiness, and choice, in your personal and professional life.
You’ll discover how the complementary maps of Classical Yoga, Qigong, and Polyvagal Theory illuminate your own unique nervous system—its patterns, sensitivities, and strengths. Through this understanding, you’ll learn how to restore balance, access deeper layers of awareness, and work with the body’s natural intelligence using practices drawn from ancient teachings and informed by polyvagal insights.
Dr. Barili guides you in engaging your nervous system’s innate pathways for regulation and connection, helping you gently reshape habitual responses to stress. You’ll learn to recognize when you feel overwhelmed, shut down, or reactive—and how to return to a sense of safety and ease using simple, embodied practices. These include breathwork, gentle movement, contemplative awareness, sound, touch, mudras, and brief guided meditations.
Designed for daily life and professional settings alike, this course supports anyone seeking greater resilience, creativity, and presence. Whether you are a clinician, educator, caregiver, parent, artist, or simply curious about living with more balance, you’ll gain accessible tools to support regulation, foster connection, and help yourself and others return to states of safety, flow, and co-regulation. The practices are gentle, easy to learn, and safe to share—with clients, students, loved ones, and communities.
What else should I know?
A gentle, evidence-informed integration of Polyvagal Theory with ancient embodied practices, this course offers practical tools you can use immediately to support regulation, resilience, and connection in daily life, clinical work, education, and caregiving.
You will receive a Certificate upon completion of this course.
We invite you to watch the introductory webinar recording here.
There are no pre-requisites for this course, and no prior experience with Yoga, Qigong, or Polyvagal Theory required. These practices are accessible regardless of age, physical ability, or flexibility. What matters is your commitment to show up and practice.
Learners will have access to the course for 365 days from the date of the first live session.
Who is this course for?
This course is designed for anyone seeking to understand their nervous system, heal from trauma, and build resilience—whether for personal transformation or professional practice.
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Health Professionals & Practitioners: Therapists and counselors wanting trauma-informed, body-based tools; somatic practitioners integrating Polyvagal Theory into their work; healthcare providers seeking holistic approaches to stress and healing; yoga and movement teachers expanding their nervous system knowledge.
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Personal Growth & Caregiving: Parents and caregivers managing their own regulation to support others; anyone healing from trauma, anxiety, or chronic stress; people seeking to understand why their body responds the way it does; those looking for daily practices that create lasting change.
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Educators & Leaders: Teachers and coaches working with stressed populations; HR professionals and workplace wellness leaders; community organizers and activists preventing burnout; anyone in a helping role who needs to tend their own nervous system first.
Course Framework
This course offers experiential instruction in integrating Yoga, Qigong and Polyvagal Theory to support healing, achieve your highest human potential and bring forth personal, professional and community transformation:
- 6 two-hour live Zoom classes every other week
- 8 hours of self-paced lectures by Dr. Amelia Barili
- Recorded conversations between Dr. Amelia Barili and Dr. Stephen Porges
- Additional self-paced content including videos, articles, and self-reflection
Course Outline
Module 1: Framework for integrating Yoga, Qigong and Polyvagal Theory
(Self Paced - Course Materials Released March 12, 2026)
Module 2: How to befriend your nervous system with Polyvagal Theory
(Live - Thursday, March 19, 2026)
Module 3 Yoga’s continuum of Body, Mind and Spirit:
(Self Paced - Course Materials Released March 26, 2026)
Module 4 How to befriend your nervous system with Qigong
(Live - Thursday, April 2, 2026)
Module 5 How to monitor and regulate dorsal states with Yoga and Qigong
(Self Paced - Course Materials Released April 9, 2026)
Module 6: How to monitor and regulate sympathetic dysregulation with Yoga and Qigong
(Live - Thursday, April 16, 2026)
Module 7: Experiencing and sustaining a ventral state with Yoga and Qigong
(Self Paced - Course Materials Released April 23, 2026)
Module 8: Ancient Techniques to Consciously Activate the Social Engagement System
(Live - Thursday, April 30, 2026)
Module 9: Going deeper and bringing it all together
(Live - Thursday, May 14, 2026)
Module 10: Practice and Testimonials of Integrating Yoga, Qigong and Polyvagal Theory in daily life and work.
(Live - Thursday, May 28, 2026)
Learn with Amelia Barili
Amelia Barili
Amelia Barili, PhD, is an award-winning UC Berkeley educator whose work integrates ancient embodied practices with Polyvagal Theory to support nervous system regulation, safety, and connection. Amelia studied with old teachers of the healing traditions of India and China and has taught Yoga, Qigong and Meditation for over 40 years. A survivor of deep trauma herself, in this course, Amelia shares with us a distillation of her lifelong dedication to learn from ancient sources of healing knowledge. Dr. Barili is a pioneer at integrating the ancient wisdom healing traditions of Classical Yoga and Qigong, which she knows deeply not only from her passionate dedication to learn them and teach them, but also from her own journey of discovering healing and inner guidance.
In the 1970s, Amelia graduated from Kaivalyadhama Yoga School in India. Founded in 1924, Kaivalyadhama is the first ever to research with scientific methods the application of yoga therapy to manage chronic diseases. Inspired by those teachings and discoveries about the transformational power of working with the energy body, Dr. Barili set out to learn what the other great pillar of ancient wisdom, China, taught about healing with the energy body. She apprenticed with Qigong masters and healers, among them several from the lineage of Grandmaster Yang, Mei Jun, the 27th generation inheritor of the Taoist Medical Qigong system developed in the sacred Kunlun Mountains in China. Drawing from the deep knowledge about the continuum of body, mind and spirit in ancient wisdom healing traditions, Amelia developed a unique way of integrating the teachings and practices of Classical Yoga, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Qigong.
Dr Barili is the founder of “Integrating Yoga and Qigong” ™ approach which now has extended to “Integrating Yoga, Qigong and Polyvagal Theory,” ™ a practical transformative approach to integral health and transformation at an individual, community and global level. To find out more about Dr. Barili’s work, visit her website ameliabarili.com and her YouTube Channel: "thenewparadigms".
Testimonials
Shift from states of defense into states of safety and interconnection
"Amelia provides practical tools to help us monitor and regulate our biobehavioral states to optimize navigating through the challenges of life. Together we gain a greater appreciation of humanity, both who we are and whom we may become. By drawing from her knowledge of ancient healing traditions and her lifelong practice of meditation, she shares with us powerful
and transformative practices for regulating health, growth and restoration. These practices help our nervous system shift from states of defense into states of safety and interconnection."
Deeply healing
"Amelia Barili is an embodiment of the healing power of love. She has an amazing ability to weave together healing practices developed over thousands of years and scientific insights while guiding us into connecting with our deep source of inner peace and of love for ourselves and for each other. Being in Amelia’s presence and following her wise and kind guidance is deeply healing."
Student reviews
Immediate tools for my clients
"Amelia's proficiency in mapping the science of polyvagal theory onto and through the frameworks and practices of qigong and yoga has given me new capabilities to support profound and holistic safety and growth with my clients as well as for myself. Because the course was practical and intended for use while strongly anchored in knowledge, I have been able to give clients immediately useful tools to build their balance, presence and leadership skills while also being able to offer data to help them understand the 'why' of these practices."
Highly Recommend!
"As a Registered Nurse and Qigong Teacher, I wanted to find a way to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western medicine. This course was the perfect bridge between that gap! Dr. Barili and Dr. Porges do an excellent job sharing both the Western and Eastern perspectives of nervous system healing, and offer a
wonderful way for me to teach healthcare workers and patients about how to regulate their nervous system from this accessible perspective. The exercises we learn in the class are so simple and easy, and very effective! I highly recommend this course to anyone wanting to have a deep understanding of Polyvagal
Theory, and how to apply it (especially in the healthcare field)!"
"This course has been phenomenal"
"I have been trying to promote Polyvagal Theory to Arctic regions for several years and the door has opened much wider since the pandemic. Understanding the science is crucial, of course, but people want it to be relatable and they want tools. Amelia has made the connection between traditions, culture, and science in an extremely helpful way for me to bring this forward with indigenous populations. Dr. Barili is helping me to make it very real and accessible to diverse populations - there are elements here I can use that I know will speak beyond the barriers."
"Wonderful to walk the bridge between ancient wisdom and modern science."
"Love the practices specially Three Center Meditation, Morning practices, Contemplative movement with breath, Alignment, Separating the clouds and Putting back to Universe what you cannot carry... I do these practices every day and I also teach them with warm feedback and thankfulness."
"A Modern Wise of Our Days"
"Amelia is a modern wise of our days, offering the mental structure and method of a Professor, being a Master of Yoga and Qigong and having deep knowledge of modern neuroscience. You will re-discover your own inner wisdom and also how modern science validates what ancient wisdom already knew. And complement it on top with new neuroscience insights. Don't expect a quick hack, this is knowledge that needs to be practiced but will accompany you your whole life to aid you in creating a much happier and more regulated life! A super recommendable course!"
"More than expected"
"The course turned out to be very rich in theory but also, and above all, in the practical part. Amelia is a very warm and engaging teacher, and with her smile and her deep comprehension of people, she sets an example to follow on the path traced in this course. It's as if I now have a map and a compass to continue my healing journey alone (even if I hope to stay in touch with Amelia). And speaking of healing, I think I now have a clearer meaning of this word, which is twofold. On one hand, there is the possibility of actually improving health problems by toning and tuning our nervous system. On the other hand, healing can mean having greater inner strength, trust in life and in the possibility of accepting what it brings you and making it an opportunity to grow."
Beautiful healing practices for me and my clients
"As a trauma sensitive practitioner and a teacher of qigong and yoga I was delighted to see this course integrating these modalities with Polyvagal Theory. There is such a huge wealth of information in this course and Dr Barili's genuine warmth and passion for teaching is wonderful. I have learned a lot from taking this course including both ways to support my own nervous system, and to offer these beautiful healing practices to my clients and students so that they can also learn ways to self-regulate and come back into ventral vagal."
Practices to share with the world"
I am so grateful for what I learned. Our family uses the 'practices' daily and I am eager to share them, PVT resources, and information about the social engagement system with the disability world. For me this means inviting my daughter's teachers, doctors, and PTs/OTs, etc. to learn about PVT, its complex beauty,
and what implementing it can do for themselves and the disabled people in their lives. My hope is that when
more teachers, doctors, and therapists learn and use PVT they will focus on creating embodied safe spaces where people with disabilities nervous systems are honored and cared for and that interventions will no longer be behavior based. So many people with disabilities are missing out on these life enriching methods and modalities that will truly allow them to flourish and reach their fullest potential.
Inspired!
"Applying the mini practice for my health and wellbeing helped improve my chronic fatigue through daily practice. I enjoyed choosing from a variety of mini practices available through the course. I enjoyed the breathwork and contemplative movement the most. I see great potential in using the mini practices and other material in this course in mobilizing women in low resourced communities to become advocates in
raising the next generations to be more ventral vagal evolved and communities to be compassion and resilience oriented.
I am inspired to develop personalized toolkits for families consulting with us in communities to inspire them to collaborate with each other in optimizing their health and wellbeing in fun and inspiring ways."
Empowered with Practices
"This course is of great benefit to me personally, on my path to nervous system regulation, and general mental, emotional, & behavioral wellness. The teachings imparted by Dr. Porges and Dr. Carter have been of great benefit particularly Polyvagal Theory, and the theories of oxytocin and co-regulation. The ancient
wisdom teachings imparted by Amelia have been of great benefit to me personally on my spiritual path. I am
now empowered with practices I can build upon for furthering my current wellbeing, and spreading wellbeing like concentric circles of wellbeing."
FAQ
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Do I need prior experience with Yoga or Qigong?
No. These practices are accessible to everyone regardless of physical ability, flexibility, or experience. Dr. Barili teaches foundational techniques that anyone can do.
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I'm not a health professional. Is this course still for me?
Absolutely. While many health professionals take this course, it's designed for anyone seeking to understand and heal their nervous system—including parents, educators, and individuals on their own healing journey.
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How much time should I expect to dedicate?
Plan for 2 hours every other week for live sessions, plus 2-3 hours of self-paced content between sessions. Daily practice (ranging from brief techniques to longer meditations) is encouraged but flexible to fit your life.
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Will I receive a certificate?
Yes. Upon completion, You'll receive a certificate from the Polyvagal Institute.
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Will I get to interact with Dr. Stephen Porges?
While Dr. Porges doesn't appear live in this course, you'll have exclusive access to 5 hours of recorded Q&A sessions between Dr. Porges and Dr. Barili from previous cohorts, where he responds thoughtfully to questions that have arisen from students in this course. You'll also experience recorded conversations exploring the deep connections between ancient wisdom and neuroscience.