About The Bodies – Embodiment in  the Therapeutic Relationship

Certificate in Embodied Therapeutic Practice – beginning April 2020 in Oxford.

“..the lived body cannot be understood apart from the system ‘‘mind–body–world.’’ Where there is a body, there is a personal world, an opening upon the world which is unique.”  – Jennifer Burlington.

Each of us has a unique embodiment and it is through our embodiment that we are shaped by experience and come to know ourselves, each other and the world. Body psychotherapy offers a route to this opening to the world by addressing our embodiment directly with a range of understandings and practices that can inform and extend your work with your clients. This experientially and theoretically alive course will offer an opportunity to integrate some of what body psychotherapy has to offer. We will consider ways of being in and understanding the therapeutic relationship as an embodied relational phenomena where we learn to make more use of our felt experience.  All bodies and modalities are welcome.

The course will run for one weekend a month for 5 months.

For further details on the taster day (dates, costs, curriculum) click HERE

For further details on the course (dates, costs, curriculum) click HERE

About The Bodies – Embodiment in the Therapeutic Relationship

Certificate in Embodied Therapeutic Practice – beginning Sept 2019

This post-qualifying course is designed for experienced counsellors and psychotherapists (as well as the recently qualified practitioner) who are interested in developing their knowledge and skills in working with the body in the counselling and psychotherapeutic relationship. 

This course will be an opportunity to develop your understanding and clinical practice with regard to the body and its place and potential within the therapeutic relationship.  

The course will consist of experiential exercises, theoretical input and exploration, skills practice, self study and play – there is no learning unless there is play (and some pain of course). The course will be experiential and touch on your own process and history. Self care practices will be explored.  It will also be a place for exploration and integration of the theoretical underpinnings of working with embodiment. 

The course is not accredited.  A certificate of attendance will be provided and you will take away extensive learning and experience to resource and extend your capacity to be with your own embodiment and that of others in the therapeutic relationship.  

Course duration: 10 days over five months (one weekend per month) commencing September 2019

Course dates:     (10:00am – 5:00pm each day)

• Saturday 21 Sept / Sunday 22 September 2019
• Saturday 19th Oct  / Sunday 20th October 2019
• Saturday 23rd Nov / Sunday 24th November  2019
• Saturday 14th Dec / Sunday 15th December 2019
• Saturday 18th Jan / Sunday 19th January  2020

Some of the clinical, theoretical and experiential explorations we will make:

• Becoming a body – how we come to having a body, being a body, and experience ourselves as an embodied mind.
• The social construction and cultural mediation of the body.
• Embodiment and  the developmental theories we can make use of. 
• Working with embodied self care systems that manifest to protect us – the defences, character structures and holding patterns that are embedded in our physiology and how we can meet them.  
• Trauma, neglect,  discrimination, oppression and shame – how do we work with how these phenomena shape embodied experience?
• Embodiment practices that we can engage in to resource ourselves, our clients and the therapeutic relationship.
• How we might work with the breath, touch as well as the energetic communication between bodies.
• Addressing eros and embodiment – coming to life and sexuality in the therapeutic encounter. 
• Working with embodiment that has been gendered, raced,  and marked as ‘other’. 
• Noticing and tending to your clients’ non-verbal expressions and what they tell us about the inner world and emotional history.  
• Expanding your therapeutic range and creativity through use of embodied perceptions and reflections.   
• Listening and feeling into your own embodiment to deepen your understanding and use of the transferential matrix.  
• Making use of the micro-skills of ‘implicit relational knowing’ that contribute to attunement and the repair of ruptures in the relationship. 

Course Aims:

The course is designed to broaden your awareness and engagement with embodiment to enhance your way of working within your therapeutic approach & modality.

Experientially – our own experience is the main teacher so there will be personal explorations of your experience of embodiment. Doing this in a learning community extends the learning considerably as we learn from and sensitise to the diversity of experiences of embodiment.  This resources our work. 

Theoretically – we will explore some of the key ideas and theories that underpin embodied therapeutic practice in a variety of ways to support embodied integration – theory is best integrated through experience.  

Participants Need to be:

• Qualified or recently qualified practitioners of counselling and psychotherapy.  
• All bodies are welcome.  

Assignments:

Reading and self reflection exercises will be set for each of the weekends. There will also be audio visual resources that you will be pointed to mix up the formats to meet differing learning styles and preferences.  

Participants will be encouraged to keep a learning journal – parts of which you might share with the tutor/peers.

About the Tutor:

I practice as a body psychotherapist and supervisor in London and I have done so for 20 years now.  I trained at the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy in the 90s and have continued my education since through exploring a diversity of traditions and practices including transpersonal perspectives. I have been particularly interested in what body psychotherapy has to offer all therapeutic modalities. My current areas of focus have been on working with chronic shame and exploring racism and whiteness in the therapeutic encounter.  I have taught in a range of institutions as well as independently. I also like to make art, write and wander.  

Some thoughts on my approach to learning:

“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking”. 

Richard Rohr

And I would add to this quote that we have the capacity to live ourselves into new ways of relating to self and other, through relationships that offer an opportunity for exploration and unravelling from our conditioning. Academia has emphasised thinking over practice and in this course I want to bring thinking, practice (play & experiment) and personal exploration together as an expression of embodiment and embodied learning.  The ego many of us understand is not an agent of the psyche that is particularly changeable, so we have to engage at several levels of experience for shifts to happen to our perspective and way of relating to self and other in the world. Hence we will explore how we integrate head, heart and belly as the resource for our work.   My intention is to co-create a learning environment that optimises the potential for learning and unlearning.  

Venue: The Albany Centre, St Albans.  

Booking a place on the course : click HERE