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Ethical Space Holding - Exploring the Veil. 

Race, the Body, and Ethical Presence” with Juel McNeilly

 

  

For white facilitators


We know you’re committed to creating a face space for your clients. That’s why you do this work - to help other people feel better, to heal.  

And we know that you’re likely to have done ‘the work” around your own conditioning in relation to race and systemic racism. 

We’d like for you to take a moment to consider that although you’re convicted in this work, racial conditioning and systemic power can still show up somatically, often subconsciously.  Without this awareness, triggers can accidentally cause harm, restrict you from creating a space for repair and unconsciously perpetuate harm caused in the wellness world.

For BIPOC facilitators 


Ethical Space Holding is a shared container that acknowledges that people of colour within the wellness space often carry the cost emotionally, relationally, and professionally when awareness of racial bias is missing among your white co-facilitators and colleagues.

This course is not designed to extract stories from you, expect you to educate, or expect labour from you. The purpose is to help you name and recognise internalised adaptations shaped by systemic racism in order to reclaim choice, pacing, and boundaries in relational spaces.

This short course, created and facilitated by Juel McNeilly for The Whole Health Project (and included in our Somatic Foundations Facilitation Training) created in recognition that the wellness world, although often unconsciously, perpetuates racial bias. These patterns can cause harm to Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour and continue to uphold systems rooted in systemic racism.

This course has been designed and adapted to take both White Bodied and BIPOC facilitators through a somatic process to recognise where racial bias lives in the body (for White Bodied facilitators) and how racial bias has affected the body (for BIPOC facilitators).

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Ethical Space Holding with Somatic Facilitator Juel McNeilly.

 

 INVESTMENT FOR STAND-ALONE TRAINING

$120

 

**The Ethical Space Holding Training is also included in The Whole Health Project’s Somatic Foundations Facilitation Training. Click on the training to find out more. 

Sign up now

Words below are adapted from Juel McNeilly

Many somatic, trauma-informed/aware, and wellness training programs, events, workshops and classes carry a strong commitment to care - and yet still feel under-resourced when race, power, and difference enter the room.

Ethical Space Holding is a somatic, trauma-informed learning experience designed to meet this gap.

This work explores how racial conditioning and unconscious bias live not only in beliefs or language, but in the nervous system - shaping regulation, perception, relational safety, and the ability to hold space ethically in moments of discomfort or rupture.

Through a combination of guided video teachings and live, facilitated sessions, participants are invited to build embodied capacity to:

  • Notice how racial conditioning and systemic power show up somatically
  • Stay present when discomfort, shame, or defensiveness arises
  • Work with rupture and repair without collapsing, bypassing, or causing harm
  • Strengthen ethical, relational presence across difference

Rather than offering scripts or quick fixes, Ethical Space Holding supports a slower, deeper learning process - one that builds awareness, discernment, and responsibility in the body over time.

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Ethical Space Holding does not aim to make participants “perfect”, “healed”, immune to racism or free of bias. It supports the capacity to stay - with oneself, with others, and with what is tender  in ways that foster trust, strength, inclusion, and ethical practice.

Who This Work Is For - And Why It Matters

 

Ethical Space Holding is designed for facilitators, both white-bodied and people of colour, with an understanding that racial conditioning lives differently in each - and that real change only becomes possible when these differences are approached somatically, not just intellectually.

Much of the work around race and equity has been framed through concepts, language, and policy. While important, this has often left a critical layer untouched: the body.

When internalised racism is addressed primarily through thinking, compliance, or performance, very little actually transforms. Instead, we see familiar patterns repeat, polarisation, silence, defensiveness, and a reliance on frameworks or KPIs that measure participation rather than presence, or impact.

Ethical Space Holding begins from a different premise: lasting change happens from the inside out.

Because bias, power, and racial conditioning do not live first as opinions or values. They live as posture, breath, impulse, tone, timing, and nervous system response.

For white-bodied participants

This work offers a way to engage with racism without collapsing into guilt, avoidance, or over-intellectualisation.

Rather than asking “What should I say or do?” - which often comes too late - the work supports participants to notice how internalised racism shows up somatically, long before words form. When this layer is not addressed, even well-intentioned action can unintentionally reinforce harm or lead to withdrawal, defense and polarisation.

A somatic approach is essential because it:

  • builds capacity to stay present during triggering or uncomfortable conversations
  • interrupts automatic conditioned defensive or distancing responses
  • moves the work beyond box-ticking and performative compliance / awareness
  • allows insight to translate into embodied, relational change
  • creates safer conditions for honest, challenging conversations that can actually be metabolized
  • forms a foundation for ethical space holding

This is not about becoming “better” or more correct. It’s about developing the nervous system capacity required to remain in contact - with impact, with complexity, and with responsibility - without shutting down, minimising, avoiding or rushing to resolution.

For people of colour

Ethical Space Holding acknowledges that people of colour often carry the cost when capacity from non-BIPOC is missing, emotionally, relationally, and professionally.

This work is not designed to extract stories from you, expect you to educate, or expect labour from you. No one is required to explain, represent, or make their experience understandable for others. Active participation is invitational, not obligatory.

The somatic focus supports people of colour to:

  • name and recognise internalised adaptations shaped by systemic racism
  • explore where contraction, vigilance, or self-monitoring live in the body
  • reclaim choice, pacing, and boundaries in relational spaces
  • experience shared responsibility for holding the field 


The intention is not to pathologise or weaponise resilience, but to reduce the unspoken expectation to endure, accommodate, or remain regulated for others.

 INVESTMENT

$120
 

**The Ethical Space Holding Training is also included in The Whole Health Project’s Somatic Foundations Facilitation Training. Click on the training to find out more. 

Sign up now

A shared container, with clear boundaries

 

This is a space for embodied inquiry, not debate, performance, or proof.  This is a personal exploration with the hope to make a non-personal impact. It is not about arriving at an agreement, but about building the capacity to stay present when difference and power are alive in the room.

By working somatically, the conversation shifts from ideology to experience, from polarisation to contact and from compliance to responsibility.

This is where meaningful change becomes possible - not through force or urgency, but through increased capacity to meet what is already here.

- Juel McNeilly

Juel McNeilly 

A somatic facilitator, embodied leadership coach, and educator with over 14 years of international experience supporting individuals and groups to develop awareness, resilience, and relational capacity. Her work sits at the intersection of body, nervous system, and relational ethics, helping participants notice how conditioning, patterns, and the deeper layers of values and emotion show up beneath conscious thought.

Juel’s approach is grounded, relational, and experiential. She guides participants to slow down, listen beneath words, and cultivate the embodied presence required to navigate complexity, difference, and tension with clarity and care. Drawing from a rich interplay of modalities and the interconnection of body, mind, emotion, values, and patterns, Juel has developed and refined practices over more than a decade to support leaders, facilitators, and institutions in responding ethically, repairing effectively, and holding space with integrity.

You can hear Juel speak more to this and find out more about her work here.

 

 INVESTMENT

$120
 

**The Ethical Space Holding Training is also included in The Whole Health Project’s Somatic Foundations Facilitation Training. Click on the training to find out more. 

 

Sign me up