Raymond Castellino | Founder, Master Trainer, Facilitator
Ray Castellino was known for his significant and lasting contribution to the field of prenatal and perinatal therapy. He passed away in December of 2020 after actively teaching his work around the world for 50 years, 30 of them focused on pre and perinatal work.
Ray began his growth oriented journey in 1969 and drew on decades of experience as a natural health care practitioner, consultant and teacher. His roots were in Polarity Therapy, taught by Randolph Stone. This core paradigm was formative to how he thought and worked. Starting in 1990, he became a practitioner, a pioneer and a trainer in the field of pre- and perinatal therapy with the use of energetic and somatic approaches to facilitating secure attachment and bonding.
His practice focused on the resolution of prenatal, birth, and other early trauma by efficiently and safely moving into harmonic resonance and co-regulated states while supporting individuation and differentiation at the same time. He did this in two settings: small groups of adults meeting together for several days and weekly family sessions of 1+ hours.
One key innovation was the development of the eight guiding principles for working with small groups and families. These principles are the foundation for creating safety, high function levels, and the optimal growth of babies and children in the context of their relationships within their families.
Ray’s work began with the development of the Womb Surround, a small-group process workshop for adults. The group process workshops that he developed for adults are called Womb Surrounds. Ray had dedicated his career to developing and teaching this method. He developed a three phase training process that includes: The Foundation Training; with followup in paths: 1. Family Practitioner Training for learning skills for working toward becoming an approved Family Facilitator 2. Mentoring graduates by having them assist and later co-facilitate Womb Surround working toward approval as a Womb Surround Facilitator and 3. Supervision with the focus on the practitioner’s process. All 3 of these have been continued after his passing.
As his work evolved, he discovered that the skills utilized in his workshops could also be applied to working with families and children. This new application of his work saw the birth of the family clinic known as BEBA — Building and Enhancing Bonding and Attachment. Continued research, facilitating workshops, and key collaborative innovations gave way to the development of teachable methods used today in the Foundation Training and later in the Family Practitioner Training.
Together with Mary Jackson, Ray developed a system for evaluating the needs of pregnant moms, their babies, and co-parents. This involves establishing layers of support for the baby, the parents, and the birth team. When the layers of competent support are in place the mother and baby are free to find the impulses they need to birth from the inside out.
Working alongside Mary Jackson, Tara Blasco, and Anna Chitty, Ray discovered and developed several ways in which to anchor into a universal resourced state of being. This is referred to as accessing the “Blueprint Energies”. These blueprint states of consciousness provide a basis for gently and safely discovering early imprints, that is, implicit somatic memories, through intention, a co-regulated tempo, movement in highly cooperative relational fields, and connected social processes. This approach is taught in the Castellino Prenatal and Birth Therapy Training.
Castellino Prenatal and Birth Therapy Training graduated fourteen classes in Santa Barbara, then Ojai, California, in Switzerland, in the UK and in Spain, using this groundbreaking model with Ray as the teacher, including co-teachers Mary Jackson, Tara Blasco and Anna Chitty in recent years. Foundation Training number fifteen (T15) began with Ray, Anna, Mary and Tara and was continued by Mary Jackson and Tara Blasco after Ray’s passing. Mary and Tara are currently co-teaching T17 in Ojai, CA and T18 near Barcelona, Spain.
Ray was a frequent presenter at national and international conferences including the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health, the American Polarity Therapy Association, the Craniosacral Therapy Association of North America. He was also a founding board member of the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children.