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;