Courses.
Courses Overview
Providence: 40 Days of Sacred & Strategic Rest
with Octavia F. Raheem
The Neuroscience of Rest
with Jennifer Sterling M.S, CNS, SEP, R-DMT, LCAT | Registered Dance/Movement Psychotherapist
Meditation to Lead Through Clarity and Uncertainty
with Shawn J Moore
Rest for Race-Based Stress and Trauma
with Dr. Gail Parker, Ph.D., C-IAYT, E-RYT 500
Imagination and leadership: Remembering A Forgotten Way of Knowing
with Dr. Chanti Tacoronte Perez
Restorative Leadership Retreat: The Art and Soul of Rest, Deep Relaxation & Sacred Space-Holding
with Octavia F. Raheem
Summer Rest Sadhana
with Octavia F. Raheem
Pause & Prosper: Awakened Business
with Octavia F. Raheem
Elective
The Yin of Leadership: A course in gentle, steady, power
with Octavia F. Raheem
Elective
Practicum + Capstone Retreat
with Octavia F. Raheem
{only open to certification pathway teachers}
Please note: courses will generally be offered around the same season in subsequent years. The teacher, day, and time are subject to change.
Providence: 40 Days of Sacred & Strategic Rest
with Octavia F. Raheem
This intimate, high-level 40-day group experience is designed for leaders who are changemakers and creators that are ready to unlock new levels of possibility, not through striving, but through rest.
Providence: 40 Days of Sacred & Strategic Rest offers a sacred, structured space to slow down, listen in, and return to your deepest source of wisdom. Through our proprietary framework, you’ll move through a guided process to:
Clear Internal Barriers to Rest – Gently release ingrained patterns of overdoing and self-sacrifice that have kept you running on empty.
Clarify Purpose and Desire – From a rested and rooted place, you'll reconnect with what you truly want and the deeper why behind your work.
Create from Clarity – You’ll begin to move forward with greater precision, ease, and power—aligned with your values and inner knowing.
This is not a typical coaching program. It is a carefully curated, small-group experience where every member brings depth, lived wisdom, and a commitment to transformation.
October 28, November 4, 11, 25, & December 6, 2025
12:00-2:00pm ET.
Duration:
10 Hours
What You Receive:
Every other week live coaching and rest-based sessions grounded in ancient ancestral technology, somatics, and modern neuroscience.
Thoughtfully designed integration prompts to help you embody rest between sessions.
A confidential, supportive circle with other seasoned leaders walking a similar path.
Direct access to expert facilitation and community that sees and honors your unique voice and impact.
What Changes:
You develop a deeply resourced relationship with rest as a tool for clarity and direction.
Your next steps become clearer and more aligned.
You feel more grounded, creative, and capable of leading with trust.
You experience the relief and empowerment of being deeply supported and seen.
This experience is for those who carry much and are ready to carry differently. It’s for those who know their work matters, and who are ready to root it in something more sustainable, soulful, and true. Rest.
Space is limited to preserve the depth and intimacy of the group. If you’re ready to create from a place of clarity and connection, this space is for you.
The Neuroscience of Rest
with Jennifer Sterling M.S, CNS, SEP, R-DMT, LCAT | Registered Dance/Movement Psychotherapist
In this course, we’ll explore rest not just as a pause, but as a powerful, body-based practice that supports emotional regulation, nervous system repair, and liberation—especially for Black/Brown women who’ve been conditioned to carry the weight of strength.
Drawing from Dance/Movement Therapy, neuroscience, and liberation psychology, we’ll unpack how the body stores urgency and what it means to truly feel at rest.
Participants will learn how rest reshapes the brain, calms chronic stress patterns, and allows us to move from survival into connection. We’ll discuss the politics of exhaustion, the cost of hyper-resilience, and how reclaiming rest is an act of resistance and self-return.
Gentle movement and sensory-based practices will be woven throughout to help participants embody rest in real time. No movement experience is necessary—just a willingness to listen inward. Participants will leave with simple, neuroscience-informed tools to bring rest into daily life with more intention, ease, and compassion.
January 13, 20, 27,
February 3, 2026
12:00-2:00pm ET.
Duration:
8 Hours
Meditation to Lead Through Clarity and Uncertainty
with Shawn J Moore
In an era where change is the only constant, leaders face the daunting challenge of navigating through uncertainty while maintaining a clear vision. The ancient Buddhist practice of the three prajñas, or wisdom tools—listening, contemplating, and meditating—offers a powerful framework for leaders to explore and refine their leadership style. This workshop delves into how these tools, embodied through the practice of a consistent meditation practice, can transform leadership effectiveness, fostering a culture of compassion, innovation, and mindful decision-making.
February 10, 17, 24, March 3, 2026
12:00-2:00pm ET.
Duration:
8 Hours
In this 4-part series, participants will:
Explore meditation practices and the necessary skills to establish and maintain a consistent meditation practice.
Engage with meditation as a tool for developing self-understanding, mental clarity, and equanimity in leadership.
Apply the three prajñas as a means to listen deeply to themselves, their team, and the community to make informed decisions while navigating complex situations with visionary decision-making.
Four Session of the Experience:
Part 1 —
Understanding Meditation, Leadership, the Three Prajñas, and their Intersection
Part 2 —
Exploring the First Prajña: Listening - The Art of Receptive Leadership
Part 3 —
Exploring the Second Prajña: Contemplating - Navigating Complexity with Insight
Part 4 —
Exploring the Third Prajña: Meditating - Cultivating Clarity and Compassion
Rest for Race-Based Stress and Trauma
with Dr. Gail Parker, Ph.D., C-IAYT, E-RYT 500
A foundational course for leaders, coaches, and consultants holding space at the intersection of healing, identity, change making and social impact.
You aren’t just leading your organization or company. If you are a coach, you are not simply inviting people to slow down, you are holding space for bodies carrying generational wounds, systemic pressure, and the lived experience of race-based stress. You are working alongside, leading, and coaching bodies that also hold the key to collective and generational healing.
Led by a true luminary and wise elder, Dr. Gail Parker offers a compassionate, research-informed, and body-centered framework for understanding and addressing race-based stress and trauma through the healing practice of rest.
Rest is a practice of presence, of skill in conscious action, and of nervous system repair. When offered with cultural sensitivity and trauma awareness, it becomes an empowered tool for processing racialized trauma, creating psychological safety, and restoring dignity to rest-deprived bodies.
March 10, 17, 24, 31 2026
12:00-2:00pm ET.
Duration:
8 Hours
This course is required for all Pause Rest Lead® Rest Coaches because we believe: Rest is not neutral. Rest is not one-size-fits-all. Rest is reparative.
In this course, you will learn how to:
Understand the distinct characteristics of race-based traumatic stress, and how they differ from general trauma or PTSD.
Use rest as a practice for nervous system regulation and psychological resilience.
Facilitate rest spaces that acknowledge and honor the impact of racism, cultural identity, and systemic oppression.
Create containers of deep safety, inclusion, and affirmation for clients and communities of color.
Practice your own rest and restoration as an act of self-liberation and leadership.
This course will deepen your capacity to meet your clients with nuance, skill, tenderness, and embodied awareness.
Imagination and leadership: Remembering A Forgotten Way of Knowing
with Dr. Chanti Tacoronte Perez
For time immemorial, imagination has been intertwined with creativity and the power of creativity with the birth of ideas, technology, and knowledge. However, the over-culture has branded imagination as a tireless producer of ideas to solely turn a profit or marginalized it as “childish,” “silly,” and “unreal.” What if we approached imagination with reverence rather than a means to an end? What if we acknowledged imagination as a sense comparable to taste, smell, or touch? What if we intimately knew imagination as a power? What if imagination had less to do with making something and instead getting to know a part of our soul?
This course welcomes a practical relationship to imagination that will transform your relationship to leadership and space holding. While many truths can be told about the ineffable imagination, we will approach it with reverence, acknowledge it as a sense, recall its power, and regard its epistemic agency. Through practice, we will untie the knots that have claimed or shamed our individual and collective imaginations and remember its abundant gifts.
May 5, 12, 19, 26 2026
12:00-2:00pm ET.
Duration:
8 Hours
Restorative Leadership Retreat: The Art and Soul of Rest, Deep Relaxation & Sacred Space-Holding
with Octavia F. Raheem
For revolutionary leaders, healers, and visionaries ready to embody rest as sacred, rest as ritual, and rest as a path to power.
While they move at the speed of destruction, you know better.
This is your invitation to slow all the way down.
Join Octavia F. Raheem for a deeply nourishing retreat and training designed for powerful leaders who are ready to reimagine how they hold space for themselves and others.
Rooted in restorative yoga and more than yoga training. This is a reclamation of ancestral wisdom in your body and nervous system. This is an initiation into a more restorative way to lead and have impact.
June 25-28, 2026
Duration:
30 Contact hours
Through the supported and grounded practices of Restorative Yoga, guided deep relaxation, and trauma-informed space-holding, you’ll learn how to:
Lead group rest sessions from a place of embodiment, presence, and ease.
Facilitate transformational rest experiences that invite safety, surrender, and healing.
Hold space in a way that feels sustainable, authentic to you, and anchored in presence with your clients or team.
Work with your own and others nervous system, not against it, when leading, teaching, or supporting others.
Reclaim rest as a necessary, spiritual, and sacred act.
You’ll leave this training not only with tools, skills, more capacity, confidence, and language to guide others into rest, your own body will be deeply held, resourced, and replenished.
This is for you if —
You’re a coach, guide, facilitator, therapist, or teacher craving a more restorative way to serve
You’re exhausted from over-functioning and ready to lead from a place that nourishes rather than depletes
You want to create spaces of refuge, softness, and transformation in a world that often demands urgency
You believe rest is not escape—but resistance, wisdom, and deep medicine.
Space is limited and first registration priority is given to those who have applied and been accepted into certification path at Pause, Rest, Lead® School of Sacred Studies.
Summer Rest Sadhana
with Octavia F. Raheem
In the fast-paced world of high-impact leadership, rest is often seen as an afterthought. However, true leadership, especially transformational leadership, demands that we practice what we preach, that we practice what we endeavor to teach. This Summer Rest Sadhana is an invitation to deepen your relationship with rest, refine your nervous system, and prepare to hold space for other leaders in their own restorative journeys. An often overlooked and essential key to leading others in rest is to first embody it yourself.
As part of the Pause, Rest, Lead® Facilitator Training, this 77-day experience is designed to allow you to integrate and apply everything you’ve learned throughout your training to yourself, life, and leadership. You’ll design and curate your own personalized summer sadhana, one that supports your unique needs as a leader. Through daily rest practices, journaling, and deep self-study, you will prepare to lead others with the wisdom of someone who has truly experienced the power of rest.
June 29, 2026 – September 14, 2026
Duration:
Daily.
You pick the time and place.
Key Elements of the Experience:
Daily Rest Practice:
You will commit to a daily restorative rest practice. Whether through guided meditation, body-based relaxation, or intentional pauses, this practice will not only heal your own nervous system but also deepen your ability to model and hold space for others in their rest. Octavia will support you in designing this for yourself.
Self-Study & Journaling:
Engage in a daily self-study practice to reflect on your relationship to rest. Your journal will become your sacred space to explore these questions and track your growth.
Nervous System Healing:
Through rest, you will support your body’s nervous system in healing and recalibrating.
Design Your Own Summer Sadhana:
Building on the foundations of the Pause, Rest, Lead® training, you will create a personalized summer sadhana. This practice is designed specifically for your needs and leadership style, integrating everything you’ve learned into a powerful, individualized experience of rest and rejuvenation with the support of the leader trainer.
Reflection & Integration:
At the end of your Summer Rest Sadhana, you will be required to submit a three-page essay reflecting on your experience.
Preparation for Facilitating Rest:
The deeper your practice, the more effectively you will be able to guide others on their own rest journeys.
This summer is your time to pause, restore, and integrate. By embodying the practice of rest, you’ll create a solid foundation for yourself as a leader. One that allows you to guide others with wisdom, presence, truth, and integrity. Your reflection at the end of this experience will help you see how far you’ve come and how deeply you have integrated rest into your leadership.
Electives
If you are a certification candidate, choose one of the following:
Pause & Prosper: Awakened Business
with Octavia F. Raheem
You are here to create sacred space in the world, not run yourself or business into the ground.
Pause & Prosper: Awakened Business is a four-module course designed to support you in building, nurturing, and sustaining a business that is deeply aligned with your values, your body, and your vision of liberation.
This is business education reimagined for healers, visionaries, and rest revolutionaries—those of us who are not interested in hustling harder, selling louder, being broke, or crashing out in the name of “success.”
This is about building something sacred. Something that holds you, even as you hold others.
This course is for you if you are —
Have been in business as a solopreneur or entrepreneur for at least three years.
Building or reimagining your business from a place of alignment
Tired of traditional business advice that ignores your body, your spirit, and your deeper knowing
Ready to lead in a way that reflects your rest values and your revolutionary heart
You’re not just building a business. You’re tending to a sacred ecosystem where healing flows, rest is honored, and abundance moves in integrity.
April 7, 14, 21, 28 2026
12:00-2:00pm
Duration:
8 Hours
Tuition:
$3333
We will explore:
Rooted Vision & Soulful Clarity
Get clear on your sacred “why.” Who are you here to serve, and why does it matter?
We’ll ground your business in a vision that feels true in your body, not just impressive on paper.
You’ll define success in your own language, aligned with your nervous system and spirit.
Rest-Centered Offer Creation
Learn how to design offerings that center rest for both you and your clients. From private coaching to group programs and retreats, you’ll explore how to build containers that are regenerative, intuitive, and easeful to deliver. We'll deconstruct urgency, scarcity, and over-giving so your offers serve without self-sacrifice.
Wealth, Worthiness, and Mindful Money
To truly thrive in this calling, you must also examine your money story the beliefs, fears, and patterns forced upon you through very real systems of oppression and the ones you've inherited or internalized about wealth and worth. We will bring awareness and compassion to these narratives, in order to untangle scarcity from your sense of self. This inner clarity opens the door to both allowing your work to be both spiritually fulfilling and materially supported.
Sacred Marketing & Visibility
Marketing doesn’t have to feel like manipulation. You’ll learn to share your work in ways that are honest, grounded, relational, and rhythmically sustainable. We’ll explore how to be visible without being performative and how to grow your presence without blowing out your nervous system.
The Yin of Leadership: A course in gentle, steady, power
with Octavia F. Raheem
Honor softness, stillness, and sensitivity as sacred tools for transformation.
This is a radical unlearning of the hustle, of false urgency, and over-functioning. This course invites you to lead with steady, gentle power.
The Yin of Leadership is a healing, embodied training designed for coaches, facilitators, and visionaries who are ready to reclaim softness, not as weakness, as wisdom.
Through the slow, spacious practice of Yin Yoga, you’ll explore how gentleness can become a foundation for power that is sustainable, relational, and soul-aligned.
A remembrance of the quiet, grounded presence that transforms lives—without shouting.
This course is for you if you are —
You’re a revolutionary leader craving a more spacious, embodied way to serve.
You want to hold space that invites healing, not just change.
You’re tired of seeing your team or clients exhaust themselves in the name of “impact” and want to both model and teach a new way.
You believe softness, slowness, and stillness are necessary medicine for our time.
Dates coming soon
Tuition:
$3,497
In this course, you will:
Learn the yin principles, practices, and how to guide others into deep stillness and embodied presence.
Explore the nervous system as a guide in your leadership, coaching, and teaching.
Cultivate the inner posture of receptivity, patience, and intuitive leadership.
Repattern how you hold space, shifting from performance to presence, from push to permission.
Examine and unlearn internalized urgency, perfectionism, and extraction in how you serve
Expect to spend time on the mat, on the ground, and in deep reflection.
Expect your body to exhale in ways it hasn’t in years.
Expect to meet parts of yourself you may have rushed past in the name of leadership.
Practicum *Online
with Octavia F. Raheem
This required practicum is a vital step on the path to certification in the Pause, Rest, Lead® method. Trainees will rotate through structured cycles of observing, facilitating, and giving/receiving feedback in a supportive and reflective environment led by Octavia Raheem. Designed to deepen presence, refine teaching skills, and strengthen the ability to hold transformative space, this practicum integrates real-time practice with thoughtful mentorship.
By the end, participants will demonstrate increased confidence, clarity, and alignment in their facilitation.
Completion of the practicum is required prior to beginning the capstone and receiving final certification.
September 15, 22, 29, October 6, 13 2026
12:00-2:00pm
Duration:
34 Hours
Only open to certification pathway teachers
Capstone Retreat *In person
with Octavia F. Raheem
A brilliant culmination of your rest teacher and facilitator journey.
You’ve moved through a life-changing curriculum. You’ve rested, unlearned, remembered, and reimagined. You’ve begun the deep work of becoming a rest leader—not just in theory, in embodiment and practice.
Now, you are ready to complete the final step. The Pause Rest Lead® Capstone Retreat is a sacred in-person gathering designed to mark your transition from trainee to certified Rest Teacher and Facilitator. It is both a celebration and a ceremony—an opportunity to land in your body, integrate your learning, teach from your unrepeatable voice, and fully be in your rest leadership.
Over the course of this immersive experience, you’ll join others in the certification program in four powerful days of rest, reflection, and shared facilitation. Each participant will have the opportunity to guide a group rest coaching session for the training group and lead teacher bringing your skill, vision, and creativity of the Pause Rest Lead® method into the light.
Though you will be evaluated and receive feedback, This is not a test. It’s a mandatory rite of passage, a moment to rise and lead from your most rested, rooted self.
October 26-29, 2026
What’s Included:
A thoughtfully held container for final practice and facilitation
A welcome reception to ground and gather as a community
Time for integration, play, more rest, and celebration
Dinner on night one and three to nourish and connect, please note breakfast, lunch, and dinner on night two will be on your own
Upon a satisfactory capstone assessment, ceremony to honor your completion and welcome you into the Pause Rest Lead® circle as a certified teacher and facilitator
Please Note —
The in person capstone and certification is a live event and will be held in or around Atlanta, Georgia USA. Travel to the Atlanta, Georgia area, lodging, breakfast, lunch, and dinner on day two are not included and will be the responsibility of each participant. A planning guide and local recommendations will be provided to support your ease in organizing accommodations.