Embodied Presence Workshop 2

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Course Overview:

This 8 day course will introduce the important role of embodied awareness both for living and for being a therapist. Broken up into 4 x 2-day clinics over the year, we will experience how our embodied self is what creates authentic presence.

We will:

  • Cultivate a sophisticated level of embodiment, and through specific somatic modalities discover how deeply intelligent and responsive our bodies are in interaction.
  • Explore observing, facilitating, witnessing and resonating as embodied skills, and look diagnostically at the organisation of systems within a person.
  • Enrich the repertoire of how we make contact by embracing the many textures and rhythms of our different functional systems.

The work is a synthesis of Gestalt Psychotherapy, Somatic Practices, and Relational approaches. It draws upon the philosophical legacy of Phenomenology and the advances in Neurobiology that have influenced contemporary psychotherapy practice.

The physiological knowledge is based in her BA honours degree in somatics and movement education and her further studies with worldwide leaders in the field.

  • This course is made up of 4 clinics over the year this being the second of 4.
  • We highly recommend that you enrol in all 4 workshops if you can so that you experience the full 8 module course. However you can book individual workshops as well.
  • Limited spaces.

Module Three: Skeletal Alignment: Grounding Flying and Falling

The bones create a structured schema for our awareness. The architecture of our bones creates our shape and the sense of where we are in space. We will experience firsthand how this elegant form evolved over time. We will practice noticing the smallest of dances always going on inside us, as we continually adapt and adjust in response to our proprioception. Although our skeleton is the heaviest system in our body-being, we will sense into its aliveness. We will explore how the experience of our weight facilitates a grounded sense of ourselves. Let’s travel from Earth to Space playing with the forces of gravity and rebound, centripetal and centrifugal force. We will try out how our weighted bones help us show up steadily to meet the unexpected with our clients, and how our vertical alignment is a huge resource for our presence.

Module Four: Muscles and Action: Vitality, Mobilised Energy and Contact

We will learn how the flow of energy and tension in our muscles is shaped by our relating. Our deepest muscular holdings are neurologically wired adaptive responses we learned though our life experiences.  How we hold back, tighten up, squeeze down, and arc up create a physiological signature of our life story. We will support one another to explore how we survived our lives, experiencing how our self-protective strategies might still be showing up in our muscle memory. We will explore six fundamental movement patterns as the developmental foundation for contact: how to yield, push, reach, pull grasp and release. As we experiment with these actions as the basis of how we make contact with our world; we see them coordinating, orienting and organising our responses.  With a kind gaze to all the ways we might have needed to modify our contact, we will learn how to gently contact our life force and mobilise our energy toward satisfaction. In exercises, scores and clinical examples we will see how this simple model is a huge support both for ourselves and for the people who entrust their process to us.

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