A six-week program for the body that has not been able to settle for a long time.
If your nervous system has spent years swinging between alert and shutdown — racing one hour, crashed the next; unable to rest even when the room is quiet; flooded by light, sound, smell, or another person's voice — you have likely been told to try harder to relax, to breathe, to do yoga, to manage your stress.
Roots & Regulation is a six-week group program for nervous system regulation, run by video, in a small group, with a clinician facilitating each session in real time. Ninety minutes a week, for six consecutive weeks, with a posted workbook, weekly practices to take into your own days, and a measure of how you are doing at week one and again at week six.
It is not a course you work through alone in your own time. It is a small group of people meeting the same clinician each week, in the same shape of session each week, building the same set of tools together.
The program is built for people whose nervous systems live in the conditions biio. sees most often. It does not ask you to qualify by having a particular diagnosis.
You may know the territory: a body that flares at things other bodies barely register, a heart that climbs when you stand up, gut symptoms that arrive without warning, sensory inputs that turn from manageable to unbearable inside a few minutes.
Your autonomic nervous system has been running the emergency programme without an emergency to respond to — and you have probably been asked to manage that with willpower.
You may know the state where the body is too exhausted to act and too activated to rest at the same time — and how rarely that state is met with anything useful.
You may have spent years masking through environments that were never designed for it, and arrived in adulthood with a sensory and autonomic system that has been over-recruited for a long time.
The program is built for the bodies that have been carrying this — it does not ask you to qualify for it by having a particular diagnosis.
Each week builds on the last, and the shape is part of how the nervous system learns to settle — the body regulates better when it knows what is coming.
The first session is about safety. The group meets, the agreements are co-created — you can pass at any time, cameras are your choice, sensory needs are welcome. A baseline wellbeing measure. Resonance breathing — the most foundational, most stabilising breath in the program. A first yoga nidra to close.
Polyvagal theory in plain language. The three gears — green (safe and connected), orange (mobilised and activated), red (shutdown and collapsed). None of them is wrong; none is a failure. The goal is not to live in green — it is to have a wider window, and more access to the transitions between states.
A worksheet to map your own sensory profile — what you seek, what you avoid, what is tolerable in green and unbearable in orange. Sensory needs are neurological, not preferences, and they deserve to be met without justification. Practices for downshifting through sensory input rather than fighting it.
A glimmer is the opposite of a trigger — a small cue of safety the nervous system can register, if you can train your attention back toward it. The week names why your sleep is broken in physiological terms, and what actually helps. Rest as a state, not the absence of activity.
The vagus nerve, the longest in the body, runs through the throat. Humming, toning, and the bee breath stimulate it directly — not as metaphor, as mechanical vibration of nerve-dense tissue. Often the most accessible regulation tools when movement is not: you can hum lying down, in the bath, in the car.
You build your own personal regulation plan from the tools that have actually worked for your body. A flare protocol. A sleep rhythm. A five-minute daily practice. The exit measure to see what has moved. A long closing yoga nidra.
Predictability is part of the medicine. The session follows the same sequence each time, so your nervous system can stop bracing for what comes next.
You do not need any prior experience with breathwork, yoga, or somatic practice. The program assumes none.
It is not psychotherapy. If you are working with a psychologist, counsellor, physio, GP, or specialist team, this program runs alongside that work — not instead of it.
Regulation is built by consistent, compassionate practice; it is not a destination you arrive at by week six. Some people feel something shift in week one. Some feel it later. Both are completely normal.
It is not the right starting point if your situation right now calls for acute mental health support. If you are in crisis, please contact Lifeline (13 11 14) or your treating team. The program will still be here when the acute work is in hand.
Roots & Regulation was designed and is facilitated by Sarah Cliff at biio. Sarah has worked extensively with the population this program is built for, and the program reflects what she has learned in those rooms about what bodies in chronic dysregulation actually need from a group setting.
Predictability. The option to pass. Sensory accommodation. No expectation of performance. And practices that work even when standing, talking, or sitting upright is not on the table that day.
The same clinician facilitates each cohort across all six weeks. The group meets the same person every session.
Medicare rebates are not available for this program.
Some private health funds cover group programs of this kind under extras cover — worth checking with your fund directly.
Some NDIS plans may cover participation, depending on the plan. The intake team can help you work through what is possible.