Gesine has been active in grassroots organizing for the last 20 years. In 2004, as a consequence of her own experience of trauma, she co-founded Activist Trauma Support in the UK with the aim to offer education and support to activists who suffered trauma through police brutality and state oppression. Aware of the need for healing and transformation within activists’ communities she spent over a decade in Oakland, California, in order to develop competency and to heal. She is now part of the teaching body of generative somatics and co-organizes and co-teaches somatics courses in Central Eastern Europe with inourbodies_onthestreets. Gesine holds the rank of black belt in Traditional Japanese Jujitsu, a Psychotherapy License in California, and an MA in Somatic Psychotherapy from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Among other modalities Gesine studied Generative Somatics, Hakomi, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Bodywork and Dramatherapy, and maintained for a decade a full-time practice as a somatic therapist and coach for social and environmental justice organizers. She is led by a commitment to support individuals, collectives and movements toward greater connection, healing, resilience, coordination and power through the body.

Dr. Louise Hemmerman studied sociology at the Universities of Durham and Leeds and in 2006 she received her doctorate, for a thesis exploring the health impact of intensive caring responsibilities on women in mid -life. Upon completing her post- doctoral fellowship, in 2009, she left academia to pursue her growing commitment to climate activism.  From 2009 to 2015 Louise joined the Ecodharma training collective, and drawing on her first-hand experience of emotional fatigue from her involvement in direct action and its legal consequences, she began developing the Sustaining Resistance, Empowering Renewal programme of work and collaboration, as an organiser, fundraiser and facilitator.  In recent years, her studies have centred more towards healing oriented and somatic topics, including the complex interface between trauma, body disconnection and burnout. In 2016, she left the Ecodharma resident team to write up her research and studies, train as a TRE practitioner and pursue further training in healing the energetic and embodied repercussions of experiencing trauma.

Ilaj is an experienced trainer, mostly holding space for collective exploration of the topics of burnout, weathering repression, navigating trauma and cultivating solidarity in social movements. Ilaj is project lead for Ulex’s LGBTQI+ psycho-social resilience and holistic security programme. Before committing full time to Ulex, Ilaj was involved in various grassroots social movements, mostly in Eastern and Southern Europe. Ilaj is also a feminist self defence and assertiveness trainer and they are passionate about working with body awareness as a radical means of deconstructing internalized systems of oppression. Ilaj is a member of the Ulex core team.