Bodies of Power is a 9-month intensive program for leaders, organisers, facilitators, coaches, and community members who are ready to undertake a deep inner journey: to authentically and non-judgmentally explore the dynamics of power they create within themselves and enact within their groups, and to learn to practice power differently by stepping into a more attuned, embodied way of being.
Why this program exists
Our collective relationship to power holds some of the greatest challenges and opportunities of our time. Yet even those of us who work directly with power, whether leading, changing systems and institutions, or exploring empowerment at a personal level, often struggle to say what power actually is.
Bodies of Power offers a new way of understanding, feeling and relating to power: as a flow of aliveness inherent in everything that exists. Participants learn to contact this flow directly and to understand, through their own experience, how they organise it in their bodies, minds and relationships. From there, they can release dynamics of inequality at the deepest level, in themselves and in their group cultures, and bring new energy and insight to the work of changing power at every level of scale.
Bodies of Power is unique in its embodied and highly practical approach, offering core tools and frameworks you can apply wherever you focus your work. And, it provides a high degree of individual support, as well as self-and-group inquiry. Madelanne offers personal mentorship and contact throughout, held within a wider systemic approach.
What You'll Gain
By the end of this 9-month journey, you will:
Know your own patterns of power — recognise, in your body and not just your mind, how you personally organise dominance/submission as well as power-with, and where those patterns come from.
Build a somatic toolkit — concrete somatic skills you can use every day to more consciously steward power in yourself and the groups you lead.
Integrate a theoretical understanding — learn frameworks from interpersonal neurobiology, attachment, and trauma research which reveal the embodied substrates for dominance and power-with.
Shift your relationship to conflict and dysregulation — recognise Drama Triangle and trauma patterns as they arise, in your body and in your teams, and know how to work with them rather than be run by them.
Practice power-with — embodied relational stances you can bring into your leadership, facilitation or organising work.
Gain a support structure — a small cohort of peers for ongoing co-mentorship, and a direct mentoring relationship with Madelanne.
Leave with a living blueprint — not a theory of power, but a felt, practised way of being with it that you can keep embedding in your work and relationships after the program ends.
Program structure and timeline
The program consists of:
3 modules of approximately 3 months each
Assigned readings, activities and other resources for each module
One in-person retreat per module (3 retreats in total; retreats are 3 full days with a half day on either side)
A monthly online whole-group call of 3 hours, to engage with resources and collective sensemaking
A monthly online small-group meeting for practice and co-mentorship
A monthly individual mentoring session (online) with Madelanne
Timeline:
Module 1: February – April, 2027
Group welcome and orientation Zoom call: Early February, 2027
Readings & Resources Module 1: Assigned early February, 2027
In-person retreat #1: March 11 - 15, 2027 (Totnes, Devon)
Module 2: May – July, 2027
Readings & Resources Module 2: Assigned early May, 2027
In-person retreat #2: June 17 - 21, 2027 (Totnes, Devon)
Module 3: August – October, 2027
Readings & Resources Module 3: Assigned early August, 2027
In-person retreat #3: October 21 - 25, 2027 (Totnes, Devon)
Monthly whole-group calls, small-group calls, and 1-1 mentoring to be scheduled together, once the group has formed.
Curriculum Breakdown
Module 1: Making Contact
This module lays a critical, embodied foundation: the ability to feel, stay with and communicate from the body, and to experientially understand the self as an interconnected phenomenon.
Somatic safety: Cultivate somatic safety in yourself and in the group by learning how the nervous system works, practising self- and co-regulation, and recognising patterns of dysregulation, including trauma, and how they show up non-verbally.
Working with sensation: Practise settling, staying with, titration and pendulation, as core skills for meeting and integrating embodied experience.
Embodied communication: Practise speaking from, and listening to, the embodied dimension of individual and group experience.
Attunement and the group field: Develop the capacity for non-verbal attunement, and explore how it creates and expresses the embodied, relational "field" of a group.
Attachment: Understand what attachment really means and how its dynamics shape both individual and group bodies.
Self and relationship: Explore how our sense of self forms in, and through, relationship.
Movement in Relationship: Explore personal and collective themes through embodied relational improvisation.
Module 2: Emptying Out
This module looks at how the mind builds on an embodied substrate to organise experience into concepts and stories, and what becomes possible when we loosen these. It explores what becomes possible when we invoke emptiness as a guidepost within ourselves and our groups.
The Witness: Develop the capacity to observe your experience with spaciousness, without being swept up in it.
The mind and its concepts: Understand the role of the mind, the concepts it creates, and how these relate to embodied experience.
The Drama Triangle in the body: Explore the Drama Triangle (Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer) as an interlocking set of embodied, relational, and mind-based dynamics. Understand how these dynamics create and embed the pattern of inequality.
Loosening the story: Practise loosening the stories we carry about ourselves and others, and the unequal power dynamics they sustain.
Emptiness and receiving: Explore emptiness – and what it enables us to receive – as a guidepost within ourselves and our groups.
Movement in Relationship: Explore personal and collective themes through embodied relational improvisation.
Module 3: Being Together
The final module brings the learning together into a new framework for being together as an empowered, co-creating, interconnected whole. It enables a new understanding of power in daily life, teams and communities.
New relational stances: Embody and practise ways of relating that express and arise from power-with.
Embedding the practice: Build these stances into a working blueprint within the group's own culture, and into participants' lives beyond the program.
Movement in Relationship: Explore personal and collective themes through embodied relational improvisation.
Who this is for
Bodies of Power is for leaders, organisers, facilitators, coaches and community members who:
Are engaged with or curious about power – in themselves or in the groups and organisations they work with – and want to learn how to work with it at the embodied level, alongside and as a complement to structural and systemic approaches.
Are ready for an inner, embodied journey, not just a conceptual or strategic one, and are willing to be deeply seen and engaged with in a group over 9 months.
Already have some experience with, or genuine openness to, somatic or body-based practice — no expertise required, but a willingness to work through the body rather than only the mind.
Can commit to the full arc: three 5-day retreats, monthly group and individual sessions, and the reading and practice between them.
This program is probably not the right fit if you:
Are looking for a purely theoretical or strategic course on power and systems change, without personal or somatic work.
Cannot commit to the full 9-month structure, including all three retreats.
Are in an acute mental health or trauma crisis that needs individual clinical support first — this program can complement that kind of work, but isn't a substitute for it.
Inclusion
Body-Informed Leadership celebrates and welcomes people of all genders, identities, neurotypes, racialisations, and ethnicities. All material is held with an intersectional awareness and an active invitation for multiple perspectives to be expressed.
Madelanne is a white-bodied cisgender neurotypical person, and understands that her perspectives — however intersectionally-aware — will be shaped by her life experience as such. She is committed to an ongoing practice of self-reflection and self-accountability, and is open to feedback so that she can be as trustworthy a companion and ally as possible to the people she works with.
Please contact Madelanne if you have questions about whether the program will be the right fit for you.
Investment & Logistics
The fee for the course is £3,200. Payment plans are available. Madelanne is currently investigating additional funding options for this course.
This includes 3 fully-catered residentials. There may be an additional fee for special dietary requirements. Travel to and from residentials is not included.
2 Assistant positions are available. Assistants will be asked to contribute the base accommodation cost for residential retreats, but will not pay for other course costs. Contact Madelanne for more information.
How to apply:
Please fill in this application form. Madelanne will be in touch within two weeks to schedule a Zoom conversation.
The deadline for applications is December 25, 2026.