The Human Experience
Spring Speakers Series
A four-part exploration of the human experience through the body, emotion, psychology, and joy.
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Gillian has explored the human form through gross dissection, forensic medicine, movement exploration, and real-world application for over 25 years. Her passion for translating that knowledge into practices and education that support how people move, teach, and feel in their bodies is what Gillian is best known for.
As a Registered Psychologist, Michele encourages a compassionate curiosity about past experiences (and the stories we tell ourselves about them), present challenges, and future possibilities. As a respected Yoga facilitator, Michele has an embodied understanding of an interconnected, integrated, and more expansive self that can find ease in current moods, fears, and limiting narratives. Through studies in exercise sciences, neuroscience, and psychology Michele understands the brilliant capacity, adaptability, intelligence, and resilience of the human body and experience.
Jillian Schecher is a Joy Educator, Speaker and author of The Daily Joy Journals and the founder of The Academy of Joyful Living. She helps individuals, leaders, and teams reconnect with themselves and create more aligned, Joy-led lives. Trusted by organizations including ATB Financial, Lululemon, Fairmont Hotels, Saje Wellness and Google, Jillian brings Joy-based leadership and practical tools for well-being into workplaces, communities, and beyond. She also leads the Joy Facilitator Certification, training others to share this work and lead with Joy in their own lives, families, communities, and organizations.
Trista Davis is the founder of Above Average Wellness, an inclusive wellness studio/retreat company in Edmonton. For over a decade, she has supported people through yoga, somatic practices, women’s circles, workshops, and retreats designed to foster healing, self-trust, and connection. Known for her grounded wisdom and deeply human approach, Trista blends professional training with lived experience to create spaces that are accessible, honest, and transformational. As a speaker, teacher, and entrepreneur, she is passionate about helping people reconnect with themselves and build lives that feel more aligned, meaningful, and true.
This four-part series brings together 4 distinct voices to explore the human experience from multiple angles, offering both understanding and practical tools to support how we feel, respond, and relate to ourselves and others.
Through the lens of the body, emotion, joy, and psychology, each session stands on its own while contributing to a larger, integrated conversation that deepens awareness of our internal states and the patterns that shape our lives.
The series supports a more informed and compassionate relationship with ourselves, expanding our capacity for awareness, responsiveness, and meaningful connection.
Schedule
May 5 @ 7-8PM (MT)
Gillian Soder
The Body of Experience
In this opening session, Gillian introduces the nervous system through an accessible, anatomy-informed lens, bridging science and lived experience. Rather than viewing the body as something to override or control, this talk explores how the nervous system is constantly interpreting the world around and within us, shaping how we feel, move, react, and relate. You’ll begin to understand how your internal state is not a personal flaw, but a natural process that is always adapting, responding, and trying to protect you.
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This session offers a foundational map for the series ahead, helping you make sense of emotional experiences, regulation practices, and psychological patterns through the lens of the body.
You’ll leave with a new perspective on your own experiences, rooted in curiosity, compassion, and a deeper understanding of how your body is working for you, not against you.
May 7 @ 7-8PM (MT)
Trista Davis
The Emotion of Experience
In this talk, we will explore emotion through an embodied lens, inviting you to move beyond overthinking and into deeper self-awareness. With her grounded, accessible approach, Trista unpacks how emotions are not just mental experiences, but physical ones that live in sensation, breath, posture, tension, and movement.
Blending somatic insight with practical tools, Trista speaks to the truth that while the mind can rationalize, defend, and create stories, the body often reveals what is most honest. This session explores what emotions may be pointing to, why true release cannot be thought through, and how practices like breathwork, slowed-down movement, posture, imagination, and somatic awareness can create safe pathways for emotional expression and release.
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Thoughtful, compassionate, and deeply relatable, this session, offers a powerful invitation to listen inward, meet what is present, and understand emotion not as something to suppress, but as something to learn from and move through.
May 12 @ 7-8PM (MT)
Michele Theoret
The Psychology of Experience
Do you ever find yourself asking “what is wrong with me?”
It may bring some relief to learn that most of the way we experience the world and how we respond to it is due to an automatic and unconscious process orchestrated by the nervous system. Adaptive survival strategies become automatic patterns designed to ensure safety and connection, however if the system becomes biased toward threat and rejection, the survival responses that once offered protection may disrupt future connection, strengthen dysregulation, and reinforce immature strategies.
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Somatic practices are a way of meeting ourselves with more curiosity and compassion. We can simply notice sensations, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and patterns without reactivity. Viewing our struggles and behaviours as adaptive survival strategies or ‘parts’ versus the whole of who we are. As we begin to understand these ‘parts’ our capacity for creativity, connection, confidence, expands. During this session we will explore attachment and poly-vagal theories grounded in somatic practices for meeting our own unique ‘parts’ and patterns.
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May 14 @ 7-8PM (MT)
Jillian Schecher
The Joy of Experience
In this session, you’ll learn how to shift your internal state in real time using simple, practical tools rooted in The Joy Method™.
Rather than staying stuck in overwhelm, stress, or emotional reactivity, you’ll be guided to build awareness of your nervous system, understand what you’re experiencing, and learn how to gently move yourself back into alignment simply and quickly.
This is not about bypassing your experience. It’s about learning how to work with it.
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You’ll leave with a repeatable framework to help you feel better, think more clearly, and respond to your life from a place of steadiness, presence, and Joy.
