In the Carpathians: our somatic summer program begins

As you know, we are advocating self-care as a base of working with others – just as in the plain, you put on the mask on yourself first, and then support others in putting it on. This summer, in the beautiful Carpathians, our somatic summer program kicked off with a focus on team retreat and deepening our capacity for resilience and care.

Somatic Experiencing Ukraine Team Retreat — Building Safety and Trust

Our first week was dedicated to a team retreat with three main goals:

1. Evaluating our work, learning lessons, and planning future directions

2. Strengthening team bonds

3. Creating a safe space for honest reflection

Teambuilding isn’t just about fun or games — it’s about creating a sense of safety. This safety is the foundation for cooperation and quality work, especially now, when exhaustion, stress, and challenges are everywhere. Feeling safe comes not just from the environment, but from connection — to yourself, to others, and to nature.

During the retreat, we spent time talking honestly in groups and pairs, faced challenges like hiking and cold mountain river swims, and gradually opened up about moments when we felt unsafe or unsupported. This created the trust needed for a meaningful evaluation — a process often dreaded in NGOs but essential for growth. Sharing openly about mistakes clears the air and builds enthusiasm for the future.

My personal highlight was my birthday, celebrated by exploring our strengths and “superpowers” through playful activities like dressing as magical creatures and games in nature. Gathering around the campfire that evening, it was clear: we are a team ready to face whatever comes — through laughter, tears, dreams, and practical work — even amid the ongoing storm in Ukraine.

Supporting Returned POWs and Veterans — Building Strong Foundations

Our second retreat was truly transformative. We worked with people from Vilnyy Step, a network supporting those returning from Russian captivity, injured veterans, and families of the missing and fallen. All of them are working hard currently. All of them have been under a lot of stress lately – with limited resources due to US-donors vanishing and EU-based donors repurposing their aid, with growing demand due to  a lot of exchanged prisoners who need medical care and other forms of support right now, and a lot of casualties at the frontlines, and with the general level of exhaustion of NGO staff after 11 years of war and 3,5 years of full-scale invasion.

We new that these people first of all need to sleep, to rest and to recover – and we wanted to provide them with the best possible conditions for that. Still, we know that a retreat that does not change the way a person lives and acts will have a limited effect. The participants will get back to work, and after one or two stressful days, after another three nights of no sleep due to shelling, the regeneration of the retreat will not be felt anymore. So we knew, we have to let them rest and at the same time, we want to stimulate their development in the best possible way. 

So we developed an ambitious plan. We decided to work with them on the fundaments of good work with vulnerable groups – those capacities and competences you need to withstand any storm, to be able to listen to any story, no matter how heart-breaking it is, and to react appropriately and effectively in any situation. 

These fundament, you can call it the roots that provide the resources and the energy that form the base of our work. It is the base of your natural flow, your actions, your way of life. The fundament has a lot to do with the body and the nervous system. It includes your instincts, your level of feeling safe, your level of feeling connected with nature. 

All the people at the retreat are professionals. They know their works well, they went through a lot of trainings and they have a lot of tools in their tool box – there is just one problem: often, it is difficult to use the tools and to implement all the stuff you have learned – because you are tired, because everything is too much, because you get stuck in conflicts be it your own or conflicts of your colleagues, because the demand is too high and you want to help so much that it hurts. 

To be able to work in the field where these people work, and under the conditions that are currently a reality, you need a solid fundament. A good fundament allows you to use all the knowledge, all the techniques and tools you have acquired over time.

What did we do to improve people’s fundaments?

We worked with them on how they can adopt a somatic approach to be more stable and elastic at the same time, to have better access to inner and external resources, to avoid wasting energy and work in the morst effective and at the same time energy-saving way, and to acquire a presence that has an instantly calming and regulating effect on others. 

How did we do that? We dived deeply into practices that awaken curiosity and improve orientation, so it will become possible to listen to the body´s signals and understand when to stop and rest. We suggested to integrate rhythm and intention, to make all the tools they have more effective. And last but not least, we invited them to be authentic, to rediscover themselves after years of being determined by shoulds and musts, by being tough and rigorous one oneself, by reacting and responding instead of creating.