Dublin, Ireland

Contact: Brenda Boland @bibiboland@hotmail.com

Big Sur, CA. USA.

Contact: Esalen.org

Contact: gestalt.on.ca

Big Sur, CA. USA.

Contact: Esalen.org

Cleveland, OH. USA.

Contact: Susan Muntz 216421-0468

Contact: Heather Keyes@www.ihintegral.edu.mx

It is all too easy to stay stuck in a rut, unable to see or do things differently even when we know we want to change. Join storyteller Ann Randolph and somatic psychologist Michael Clemmens for a weekend of new insights and creative, fun practices designed to jump start change in your life. This is a bold, alternative approach that supports deep process and joyful exploration.

During this workshop, we will begin from the premise that if we change our “embodiment” (physical expression) and our basic stance in the world, we rewire our perspective and can then evolve differently if we choose. Through improvisation and movement exercises, the participant plays with a variety of expressions and expands their creative range. In addition, participants will put the pen to the page and literally let the body speak on the page. The body does not lie and the improv/writing exercises inform us of where we are stuck and how we can move through to a new perspective.

Both Ann and Michael work from creative, warm, and innovative styles that enable participants to find the optimal and safe path into better awareness of themselves and ways to move forward. This experience is for those who are interested in shifting their lens on life through experimenting with how we mentally and emotionally organize the world. Through humor, play, improvisation, small and large group discussions, and various one-on-one exercises, you’ll have the opportunity to reframe life in order to tell new stories about the future.

“We develop relationships with ourselves and others through the physicality of our vision, smell, touch, and movement,” says Michael Clemmens. “These relationships, or dances, shape what we believe is possible and how we behave in the present. In this program, our focus will be on the ways in which we create relationships through our bodies. By attending to our present dance with others, we can become more aware of our existing context and optional ways of interacting.

“The structure of the program will be experiential exercises, practice sessions, and group discussion to develop our awareness of self and the group. We will begin with our earliest movements (prior to birth) and then explore how we co-create our bodily membership in the more complex gestalts of family, groups, and cultures. Our goals will be to experience how we create relationships through embodiment, and to develop skills in attending to ourselves and others.”

www.esalen.org

As counselors, therapists, consultants, organizers, and activists, we confront traumatic events and their consequences, both past and present. As practitioners and organizers, we do our best to support healing and restore empowerment, using the tools and narratives of our various methods and disciplines, working at particular “levels of system” (individual, family, community, organizational, societal/political). Yet as we work, we may sense that the way we define these narratives, as well as our own roles in them, may block our view of a deeper story: a story in which we ourselves are part of a traumatized field, and trauma can be seen as a normative, even supported condition of our society. In the absence of an integrating narrative, even powerful insights like this may only feel more isolating and depleting, setting us further apart from our wider communities of relationship and practice.

A Gestalt relational field model offers us tools and support to begin to move flexibly and systemically among all the systemic levels of this pervasive cultural dynamic. During this five-day course jointly sponsored by GestaltPress and Esalen Center for Theory and Research, join us as we build our own embodied relational learning community. Our shared goals include processes to:

• Articulate a new narrative that holds the whole social field, without losing sight of the individual;

• Build a creative community of support that is open to other communities of activism and practice, moving flexibly from one level of social organization and belonging to another;

• Incorporate the powerful new insights of neuroscience to support and complexify our perspective, without losing sight of the social dynamics of brain patterning;

• Restore our own energy, creativity, and empowerment through embodiment, relationship, and new communities of belonging.

Additional faculty will include Deborah Ullman, Esalen President Gordon Wheeler, numerous other afternoon workshop leaders, and morning plenary team leaders to be announced.

Please note: There is an extra $15 tuition fee for this workshop.

CE credit for psychologists;

CE credit for MFTs and LCSWs;

How do you experience yourself as you watch an actor move across the screen in a film, see a sculpture, hear the turn of a phrase in poetry, or listen to a piece of jazz? Often we see and hear parts of ourselves as we engage in these mediums.

In this workshop, we will utilize Gestalt awareness and several creative mediums to explore the parts of ourselves that deeply resonate with art, film, poetry, writing, and music.

We will reflect upon our own embodiment; what has been introjected as ideal, or how we 'should be', how we are attracted and repulsed by certain images, notes, phrases and forms, and experience and express our own sacred forms of embodiment as lively and authentic.

Participants are invited to bring forms of expression (instruments, art materials, writing).

This workshop not only increases the capacity of the intervener (clinician, coach, consultant) but can be applied to work in clinical and organizational settings.

Upon completion of this workshop participants will be able to:

• Articulate their knowledge gleaned through experiment about their own embodiment
• Design experiments for clients that will increase clients' awareness of how they are or are not embodied
• Identify ways in which they have introjected an idealized form of embodiment
• List images, notes, phrases and forms that repulse
• Be able to articulate what it is that is repulsive about these forms
• List images, notes, phrases and forms that attract
• Be able to articulate what it is that is attractive about these forms
• Describe how alternative forms offer opportunities for increasing capacity for expression
• Express and articulate their forms of embodiment through a variety of mediums
• Apply the processes explored in this workshop in the clinical or organizational setting with clients

December 6-11, 2015

Esalen Institute

How is it to be a person in your sexual/erotic body-self in a positive way? How can our natural being of Eros, the life force, flow from our excitement to be alive and impact others without abuse of power? How can we bless our energetic self rather than live in shame and fear? We are often faced with the dilemma of inhibiting our physical excitement out of fear that we will be "too much" or be "misunderstood" by others. This shame is usually rooted in some old experience or learning which lead us to diminish our own lively self — our erotic spirit. At its core, our healthy erotic self is our creative energy which we feel as natural excitement.

In this workshop, we will utilize Gestalt awareness and dance movements to explore and celebrate our energy, and decrease the corresponding shame which often impedes our sense of embodiment — our experience of feeling our own body in relation to the world. We will do this through movement exercises, meditations, journaling, and group discussion. The emphasis will be for participants to develop awareness of how to use their own energy and flow in complimentary support of others.

November 22-December 20, 2015

Esalen Institute

“We develop relationships with ourselves and others through the physicality of our vision, smell, touch, and movement,” says Michael Clemmens. “These relationships, or dances, shape what we believe is possible and how we behave in the present. In this program, our focus will be on the ways in which we create relationships through our bodies. By attending to our present dance with others, we can become more aware of our existing context and optional ways of interacting.

“The structure of the program will be experiential exercises, practice sessions, and group discussion to develop our awareness of self and the group. We will begin with our earliest movements (prior to birth) and then explore how we co-create our bodily membership in the more complex gestalts of family, groups, and cultures. Our goals will be to experience how we create relationships through embodiment, and to develop skills in attending to ourselves and others.”

November 15-20, 2105

Esalen Institute

This transformative workshop is a deep dive into the terrain of our so-called “negative” beliefs and fears (also known as introjects), and the embodied process of repatterning, or shifting, the body's energy around these beliefs and fears. This process enables our innate health and wholeness to emerge. Through the co-creation of a powerful group field, you will be working with your own introjects and their physical, emotional, and cognitive patterns — particularly how and where they resonate in your body. Attending to sensation and energy, mindful awareness practices, and movement will comprise a significant part of this didactic and experiential Gestalt-based workshop. We will practice methods to repattern our bodies on neurological, energetic, and muscular levels through a synthesis of Gestalt theory and practice, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and energy psychology. The design of this workshop will include some theory, large and small group exercises, and discussion.

Guadalajara Mexico  

Contact Marina Ayo Balandrano @

contacto@institutophg.org.mx

www.institutophg.org.mx

(33) 3121-9392