Soma Skills Program at River Nile School
In 2024, we partnered with the Centre for Multicultural Youth’s youth settlement service to deliver an 8-week Soma Skills Program for students attending the River Nile School in North Melbourne, a specialist education service for refugee and asylum-seeking young women.
“Facilitating a Soma Skills Youth program was an honour as it allowed me to create a space where students could truly find rest in their own way. One student regularly attended just to take a nap, which was an act of deep participation in their journey towards self-regulation. A meaningful ‘glimmer’ as a facilitator was witnessing students recognise how subtle, simple practices could ease anxiety and shift hyper-vigilance. They came to understand the difference between performative participation versus the embodied and integrated experience of a regulated nervous system.”
- Soma Skills Facilitator, Tea
Our Partner
The Centre for Multicultural Youth (CMY) is a non-profit organisation based in Victoria and focused in the growth corridors in Melbourne’s North West and South East regions, and in regional centres in Ballarat and Gippsland. CMY aim to create a society where multicultural young people live a life where they are connected and can fully reach their potential.
CMY reached out to Collective Being in 2024, requesting a trauma-informed movement program with a focus on regulation and self-care for students at a local school, The River Nile School.
The River Nile School is an independent Senior Secondary College dedicated to empowering young women of refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds through tailored education, English language development, and holistic support.
The Program
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Once a week for 8 weeks at a partner yoga studio in North Melbourne, we delivered our Soma Skills Program for the River Nile School.
Soma Skills is a group work program integrating mindfulness and movement-based practices to support young people with self-regulation, stress-relief and social connection.
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12 students who enrolled in the program as one of their electives. All students were young women from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds.
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Drawing on her lived experience and professional expertise, our program facilitator, Tea, adapted our core Soma Skills curriculum to the group of multicultural and multilingual students. In doing so, Tea ensured the content was accessible and applicable to support the newly-arrived students with the adjustment to life here.
As she grew to know the group, Tea increasingly focused on practices that supported participants to ground, rest, and move their bodies with curiosity, as opposed to critique.
The Outcomes
Due to the success of this program, the River Nile School continues to offer our Soma Skills program in 2025.
The young women who participated reflected that the program supported their physical and mental wellbeing (see testimonials below).
Teaching staff from the River Nile School reflected that the program was genuinely trauma-informed and appropriate to the needs and experiences of their students.
What Participants Say
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