Speaking & Workshops
Paul du Buf brings three decades of addiction nursing and a three-minute practice that a room can learn in one sitting — for festivals, conferences and treatment organisations.
Paul du Buf · ERA-Institute
Three minutes
The practice is called ERA — Exhale, Rest, Allow. It is built on the natural pause at the end of the out-breath. Nothing is forced and nothing is held. What is new is meeting that pause awake, rather than reaching for the usual exits.
What I bring to a programme
The same material, pitched to the room. Each can be adapted in length; the workshop is the one people talk about afterwards, and the keynote is the one that changes how an organisation sees itself.
We treat compulsion as a personal failing. It is not. It is the nervous system doing the only thing it knows to escape what it cannot yet bear, and every strategy it reaches for costs the same thing — our presence.
Trauma-informed training gives people a vocabulary and changes very little, because the constraint is not knowledge. It is that the organisation’s own regulation strategies are themselves compulsive: urgency, control, the reflex to fix.
On a panel of clinicians I bring the organisational argument; among practitioners and teachers I bring the clinical rigour and the trial data. Either way, the perspective the rest of the panel is not carrying.
A note on safety. The practice is trauma-safe by design. Nothing is held and no breath is ever retained; the pause is visited, not produced. Anyone who finds it activating simply rides the exhale to its end, and the session works either way. Eyes open is always explicitly fine.
About
Paul du Buf is the founder of ERA-Institute, which helps organisations build trauma-integrated cultures. He spent three decades as a nurse in addiction services and is the author of Shadow Dancing. He developed the ERA practice and the eight-week Still·point programme, working where addiction, trauma and contemplative practice meet.
“Ask people with long-term recovery what changed, and versions of the same sentence keep returning: I stopped fighting.”
Credentials
BSN, RN, NMP, CGNC
Certified Global Nurse Consultant,
International Council of Nurses
Written
Shadow Dancing: Embodied Recovery from Trauma and Addiction
Languages
English · Dutch
Based
Between Europe and Canada
Invitations
Tell me the room, the length you have and the audience, and I will send a full proposal. I am glad to hear that it is not a fit — a quick no is more useful to both of us than silence.
Send a speaking enquiryOr write directly to paul@era-institute.com