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The material presented here is an expanded version of pdf and audio resources you will find on my clinical website. If you would like to be on the mailing list for live and web-based workshops please provide an email address.
Putting this material into practice is one the one hand potentially simple. On the other hand, it is less straightforward than might appear – for several reasons. One is that the cultural messages we are steeped in are contradictory to how the body-mind actually works. I have applied this material on myself and one-to-one for about two decades. I can honestly say that it took me many years of sustained effort to break through cultural programming and not be paying partial lip service to its basic principles.
Secondly, although our culture encourages self-motivation and self-healing, true resilience is not to be found in pure self-reliance. Some internationally respected resilience experts have (only half-jokingly) called for self-help books to be burned [1]. With all that extraneous political and social and environmental noise in the world, finding peace inside is certainly less easy than it should be.
A third factor is the left brain dominance in Western cultures, which causes a tendency to skim over rather than truly engage with the sensory richness of the present moment. How we attend to the senses is part of both the internal sense of self and our external sense of how the world appears. So stepping into a different form of attention/attending (different from the one that has become habitual) is not a trivial matter, and this important skill is regularly re-visited in the practical exercises (below).
Introduction : The idea of working with the body ... may not be familiar. The cultural tendency is to impose whatever we think on the body, which rarely produces the best possible outcome.
Language and speech patterns - a small number of particularly helpful phrases to employ when conversing with the body-mind.
Misconceptions (and re-frames). 21st Century Western culture is full of unfortunate misconceptions that are contrary to the way our bodies have evolved to function.
Arriving to the place/space you are in - is not a trivial matter. The body-mind needs us to fully arrive.
Assuming the correct position... - prone, supine, enthroned, recumbent or vertical? Take your pick.
The core technique of "Gesture-Response" - how to enter a creative and healing feedback loop
Love, Gratitude & Appreciation as fundamental resources and evolved ways of orienting to the world.
Miscellaneous notes - Depth of experience, emotions, breath, distraction.
References & Notes
