Creating Communicators

🍃🪶🪶 Learning and Growing Together 🪶🪶🍃

This week, I’m honored to be participating in Indigenous Focusing-Oriented Therapy (IFOT) training.

IFOT is a somatic, land-based therapeutic approach that draws on Indigenous knowledge and traditions to support healing from complex, intergenerational, and vicarious trauma. Through body-centered awareness, or “felt senses,” and a focus on collective healing, this approach recognizes the deep connection between mind, body, spirit, community, and land.

As someone who works closely with children, families, and communities, I believe it’s important to continually expand my understanding of trauma-informed and culturally responsive practices. This training is providing valuable insights into supporting healing while also promoting wellness and preventing burnout for those in helping professions.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from Indigenous knowledge keepers, clinicians, and educators, and I look forward to carrying these teachings forward in my work.

🧡 Learning with humility.
🌿 Honouring Culture
✨ Supporting

Quick classroom regulation supports that actually help

Love daycare and Headstarts

Come and join in for a great day in the Park

Leigh Sheldon the Founder, recently had the opportunity to speak with CTV about our agency, Indigenous Psychological Services, and why it was created.

Our agency was founded to create meaningful change in how Indigenous peoples experience mental health support. We were built on the understanding that many Indigenous clients do not return after the first session due to being grounded solely in Western clinical models. Some research states between (%40-%60).When care does not feel culturally safe, relational, or reflective of lived experience, it can create further disconnection.

Indigenous Psychological Services was developed using a Two-Eyed Seeing approach honoring the strengths of both Indigenous ways of knowing and Western clinical practices. We believe healing must move beyond a purely pathology-focused lens and instead embrace relational, community-centered, and holistic care.
Healing needs to recognize:
• The intergenerational impacts of residential schools and colonial systems and the ongoing racial and oppressive systems
• The importance of Elders and Knowledge Keepers when it comes to healing
• The central role of spirituality in healing and healing soul wound. The need for holistic counselling is very important.
• The need for representation of Indigenous clinicians in the field
• Trauma-informed modalities that address genocide and intergenerational trauma. Such as Somatic Experiencing, Somatic Attachment Therapy, EMDR and IFOT Indigenous Focused Oriented Therapy
• The importance of land-based healing, language revitalization, and connection to ancestors.

Healing for Indigenous communities is holistic. It is relational. It is rooted in culture, identity, and land.

Indigenous Psychological Services was created to help shift the system to ensure Indigenous peoples can access care that feels safe, informed, and grounded in both clinical excellence and Indigenous knowledge systems. We help reduce barriers by creating a low-cost counselling with our internship program. Our internship program supports new Indigenous counsellors in the field. TO WATCH THE VIDEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV2U1x8m13s