Embodiment in Practice

Session Details

Session 1

Embodied Relational Psychotherapy
An introduction to embodied practice and key concepts, including:

• Mindfulness, "body-mindfulness" and self reflexivity
• Developmentally based psychotherapy
• "Implicit relational knowing"
• Working with somatosensory experience
• Recognizing and differentiating affective states
• The role of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS)
• The role of the breath in emotional regulation
• Integrating body/mind and relational psychoanalytic perspectives on transference and counter-transference
• Ethical issues

Session 2

The Neurobiology of Emotions and the Neuroscience of Psychotherapy

• The latest developments in our understanding of the neurobiology of affective states.
• Contemporary views on how psychotherapy works in relation to brain chemistry, physiology and functioning.

Meditation and Mindfulness

• Current understandings of how the brain changes as a result of the meditation process, drawing on Western psychological research and Eastern Buddhist practices
• Recent research showing the powerful therapeutic action of meditation and, in particular, of “mindfulness” practices.
• The value of using mindfulness techniques in psychotherapy, for both therapist and client
• Mindfulness-based exercises that can be integrated into psychotherapy practice

Session 3

Engaging the Mindful Brain in Psychotherapy
Presentation and demonstration (live and on video)

• Using a Mindfulness-based psychotherapy approach to bring moment to moment awareness to the process of therapy
• Accessing and contacting core processes of thinking, feeling, moving, external sensing, and internal sensing, during therapy
• Using contact words and statements that invite mindfulness
• Tracking signs of Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) arousal
• Using mindfulness and contact statements to regulate ANS arousal
• Staying with present experience
• Using assisted meditation with clients as a bridge to psychotherapy

Session 4

Shaped by Experience: Mapping the Emotional Body

• How developmental history and attachment style is present in body structure and expression
• Neuropeptides and embodied emotional memory
• Ways of recognising and accessing different embodied patterns of emotional and energetic organization

Session 5

Attuning, Empathizing and Somatic Resonance
An experiential exploration to develop and refine awareness and therapeutic skills in:

• Listening with the whole body-sensitizing to subtle energetic communications
• Establishing connection
• The physiology of relational experience
• Assessing and tracking the levels and qualities of engagement
• Developing a somatic sense of self

Session 6

Two Bodies in the Room: Working with the effects of trauma
We focus further on developing embodied and mindful approaches to:

• "Psychobiological regulation" - helping clients to regulate affect
• Detecting signs of hyper-arousal and dissociation
• Establishing boundaries and containment
• Modulating and/or widening the "window of tolerance" for emotional arousal
• Developing "response flexibility"
• Embodied relational approaches to working with attachment disturbances in clients and with different attachment patterns between therapist and client

Session 7

Embodiment in Practice

In this final session we further consider and explore ways of enhancing deeper levels of integration in ourselves and our clients:

• Becoming more mindful and embodied clinicians
• Creating resonance and the processes of interpersonal integration and coherence
• Enhancing self-organization and self-regulation
• Taking embodied and mindful practices into your own work

Note: Each teaching session will include the opportunity for experiential exploration, discussion, practice of skills and consideration of case material. References and readings will be supplied.

Marianne Kennedy is the course convenor and she will be present at all sessions