oli silverwood-cope

Last month I started my Somatic Experiencing training, first module taught by exceptionally coherent and brilliant Kavi Gemin at SOSI We’re learning to observe the nervous system in activation and in resource, to track what’s happening in the body without rushing to fix or interpret it. Practising Levine’s concepts of titration and pendulation in real time, to experience these as a participant, after just reading about them and learning theory, was powerfully clarifying for me. One of the aspects that’s really landed in my body, is orienting and grounding; to feel their impact as a genuine biological need to be attuned to and prioritised, rather than some soft warm-up ritual before any ‘real work’ begins. We’re mammals, and mammals need to scan their environment and find it safe before the nervous system can settle enough to move into anything else. I felt that more keenly than I’d ever noticed before, both basic and profound. Tracking physiology feels like a superpower, I notice it moving through everything, at home, in conversations, in the ordinary back-and-forth of being with people, antenatal appointments, postnatal visits. I see it most in birth reflections, where safety lies in art of slowing down. Helping someone to stay with what’s here rather than escape into narrative, or be sucked into trauma vortexes, takes a quality of presence that I think SE is teaching me how to hold. More to come as the training unfolds #midwifery #birthreflections #birthtrauma #traumainformedcare #nervoussystemregulation #somatichealing #somaticexperiencing #perinatalmentalhealth #birthworker

Today, on International Day of the Midwife, I’m thinking about Mary Cronk. Mary was a fierce, tender, radical midwife, who spent fifty years believing in birth and physiology, refusing to let the system forget what midwifery was actually for, and never afraid to raise her voice. Mary described the midwife as a ‘professional servant’ (a phrase I didn’t feel comfortable with at first), but it was a deliberate counter to the paternalistic medical model of her time. A radical act: to centre the autonomy and physiology of the individual, not the institution’s convenience. Right now that vision is under serious threat. Birth units closing, community midwifery reconfigured out of existence, postnatal care fragmented. Midwives reduced to data entry and automated tick-box processes, overworked, underpaid and burning out faster than they can be replaced. Midwifery is an ancient relational, physiological, autonomous practice built on continuity, trust, and deep knowledge of how birth unfolds when the person feels known, safe, and held; a human presence that makes medical intervention less necessary or at least more bearable if it is. So today, as a midwife and mother of three daughters, I’m honouring Mary to say: every person who gives birth deserves better than this. Midwifery matters. Fight for it before it’s gone. [pics from Normal Labour and Birth conference in Grange over Sands, 2015] #InternationalDayOfTheMidwife #IDOM2026 #IDM2026 #OneMIllionMoreMidwives #MaryConk #PhysiologicalBirth #ContinuityOfCarer #RealMidwifery #MaternityMatters #HealingBirths #MidwiferyInCrisis

playing some fun records tonight @retreatstroud , pop in for a pint (or not), stay for a dance! 🕊️👁️✨👁️🕊️

Full Moon BY ALICE OSWALD Good God! What did I dream last night? I dreamt I was the moon. I woke and found myself still asleep. It was like this: my face misted up from inside And I came and went at will through a little peephole. I had no voice, no mouth, nothing to express my trouble, except my shadows leaning downhill, not quite parallel. Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight. Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer. Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight. Like in woods, when they jostle their hooded shapes, Their heads congealed together, having murdered each other, There are moon-beings, sound-beings, such as deer and half-deer Passing through there, whose eyes can pierce through things. I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible. There’s no material as variable as moonlight. I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking: Good God! Who have I been last night? Source: @poetryfoundation (Feb 2007) Moonstone: @ashburtonrealantiques #fullmoon #scorpio #fullmooninscorpio

Somatic Experiencing™ Professional Training Programme Something I’ve been working towards for a long time is finally happening. I’m starting the 3-year SE™ training, a body-based approach to healing trauma developed by Dr Peter Levine, rooted in the idea that our nervous systems hold the imprint of overwhelming experiences, and that with the right conditions, they know how to complete and release them. As a midwife, I see every day how birth and perinatal experiences live in the body long afterwards. SE gives me a precision toolkit for working with that, gently, and at the pace the nervous system can tolerate, without needing to re-tell or re-live the story. I’ll be weaving this into my birth trauma support work, birth reflections, Birth Experience Circle, and yoga practice. The beginning year is structured so practitioners develop our own somatic awareness and capacity for self-regulation before applying skills with clients. Here’s to being a more grounded, attuned person in all situations, interactions and relationships in my life too! #SomaticExperiencing #BirthTrauma #TraumaInformedCare #HealingBirths #Midwifery #NervousSystemHealing #Birthwork #SE

.. this amazing write up of Tom’s shop left me speechless 🩵💛💚 ✨✨✨ . @discodoli

slinking into Tom Wood’s small, densely layered ‘den of antiquity’, @ashburtonrealantiques gives the sense of being somewhere sacred. An arrangement so overwhelmingly rich and magical, I wasn’t just looking at ‘things’ but suddenly inside a vortex of meaning, encountering thousands of human feelings and experiences distilled into form. It’s a two person situation, one in one out, plus Tom in amongst it all, orchestrating items into groupings. ‘Taxonomy’s an art’ he proposed as I stood gawping at his astonishing curation. Whatever’s going on in there feels far more mystical and artful than the definition of taxonomy I looked up later (a scientific process of naming, of controlling and categorising into order and hierarchy). Rather, a deeply intuitive practice: a gentle kind of magic grounded in observation, imbued with the care and attention it takes to notice what belongs with what, and why. How ordinary becomes quietly sacred. How objects that might otherwise feel discarded or disconnected are transformed when placed into subtle constellations, echoing each other in texture, age, pattern, material, memory, or something less tangible, some other story brought onto this plane. The last place I felt this kind of atmosphere was @pittriversmuseum , where, unlike most museums, objects aren’t grouped by geography or time, but by type and function: all masks together, all tools together, all amulets together. Classification recast as ritual; objects, memory, and human meaning gather into something larger than themselves: Jung might say, archetypes made visible. In the same way, many objects @ashburtonrealantiques seem to embody universal themes: birth and death, sustenance, celebration, ritual, protection and fear, transformation, spirit and the unseen. I loved meeting Tom, a magical artistic person, with a huge heart and brain like a planet. Fair to say I was bewitched.

📷 @patgrimm Together Against the Far Right march and House against Hate. 28 March 2026 London at its finest @togetheralliance Half a million of us turned up to march against the far right, to show what community looks like and to dance for love, peace and unity 🕊️👁️✨👁️🕊️ #stopthefarright #lovenotwar #houseagainsthate

Together Against the Far Right march and House against Hate @r3_soundsystem 28 March 2026 London at its finest @togetheralliance Half a million of us turned up to march against the far right, to show what community looks like and to dance for love, peace and unity 🕊️👁️✨👁️🕊️ 👊🏽this track for the unified bounce! [ID: Sugar Is Sweeter - CJ Bolland, Armand Van Helden's Drum 'n' Bass Mix] #stopthefarright #lovenotwar #houseagainsthate

Let’s go fck fascism

Love this photo of my beautiful pal Romy with her boy Asher, who you can’t approach, stroke, or even catch his eye as he’ll have ya! Momentous spring equinox day of plans, goals and new beginnings ✨🧞‍♂️

A date for your diary… EVERYTHING CONNECTED Jemma Bursnell @emotionalwaterfallart Solo Show 13-21 March The Sanctuary, @brimscombemill , Stroud We’re opening this one properly. Join us for the launch of Jemma Bursnell’s new solo exhibition - a bold mix of painting and reworked hand sewing rooted in rave culture and radical positivity. This work is about love. Connection. Community. Creativity in pressure-cooker times. So we’re turning the opening into a celebration. Launch Party - Friday 13 March - 5-9pm Cherry from 5pm DJ Marcus dropping early 90s house and breakbeat @discodoli taking it home from 8pm (Plus there’s a great night RUFFNECK TING happening @stroudbrewery just down the canal if you want to continue the party) Food and drinks from 5pm at @thelongtablestroud Free entry Come for the art. Stay for the dancefloor. Then on Saturday: Free Art Workshop - 1-4pm - Saturday 14 March Join Jemma for a relaxed, drop-in collage workshop using recycled materials. You can also contribute to a community wall hanging. Free or donation. All ages welcome. No booking needed. Let’s make this one special. Tag your people. Share it. Show up. #emotionalwaterfallart #freeparty #stroud #raveculture #stroudcreatives