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Embodied Awareness: a New Anatomy This ten month course is designed to give an integrated understanding of the body and brain discovered through experiential anatomy. The framework is a synthesis of contemporary neuroscience, intersubjectivity theory, body psychotherapy and bodymind centering. Drawing from both established traditions and new research, we will learn more about how body awareness works, how to cultivate it, the neural networks involved and how this is linked to self-regulation, imagination and mentalisation (the ability to perceive oneself and others as subjective agents). The body systems offer different modes of organising experience – there is a difference in engaging with the world through bone or through fluid or through muscle. Not only that but there are multiple points of access into body awareness – following breath, attending to sensation, noticing spontaneous images, moving in space or being moved by another. We become refreshed by shifting focus. We discover how to go beyond habitual patterns of being in the body into new ways of knowing. The course has a strong practical experiential component utilising group, individual and dyadic explorations involving different ways of accessing and developing embodied awareness. A compendium of illustrative and engaging reading material (approximately 150 pages) will be given to participants on a month by month basis. This material makes links between brain, body and psychological process for study between sessions. When we meet there is space to discuss, share and refine our understanding of our bodies. This course will integrate factual, visual information with kinesthetic experience of the body to gain understanding of form and function both internally and externally. This course offers:
What relevance does it have for therapists? An important aspect of psychotherapy is the ability to entertain a full awareness of one’s embodied subjectivity. This course puts the emphasis on the therapist’s body for its own sake, rather than for its function as a container for others’ process. It will help you find not just your clients in your body but yourself, your intrinsic and flexible capacities for sensing, and your core resources. Body awareness is both a receptive and a dynamic, active art. Just as we sometimes don’t know what we are trying to say until we let ourselves just speak, so we need sometimes to move, sound, breath, receive touch to discover more clearly what it is we are sensing and feeling. Embodied self- knowledge is deepened through feedback from a variety of sources. Being aware of varying, complex or subtle body sensations and images is part of having more than one perspective on oneself and others; it is distinctly different than reflective or analytic thought. And yet it is the perfect partner for these modes – a foil, a counterbalance, a richer background. Awareness of the body can provide a ground reference or ‘third’ which can then be used for reflection on a therapeutic process. The body offers a reference point (not a truth) which can be understood as feedback on the impact of the relationship, the resonance of the material, and the affects, sensations and images generated co-creatively by therapist and client. The body is neither the origin, nor the end point of self-knowledge. Rather it is part of a continual feedback loop, that connects us to ourselves, and our social and physical environment. Vitality and renewal Therapist are used to using their bodies as a resource for clients, but unless therapists also have ways to renew their relationship with their own body, the result may be chronic dysregulated states, leading to exhaustion and loss of vital energy. It is not unusual to find therapists devoting themselves to their clients but subtley or not so subtley resisting self-care. We may be well-developed in our capacity to attune to others, but we must also be able to ‘come back home’ and find security, pleasure and well-being in our own bodies. Our bodies are not so much an instrument as a whole orchestra, capable of (playing) an enormous range of registers, resonances, rhythms and melodies. “The senses long accustomed to habitual modes of perception begin spontaneously to see, hear, smell, feel things anew…., we begin to discriminate more finely, attend more closely, and experience more fully. We come back regenerated. ** This course is not: - a bodywork training - a medical anatomy study group - a creative arts workshop - a psychotherapy group - a movement and music course - a seminar on mindfulness, focussing or visualisation (though it may have elements from these) But rather An experiential journey through the brain and body as it relates to a psychotherapy/psychological process Within A contemporary relational neuroscience framework Paradox: the body must, on the one hand, provide enough robustness and stability to act as a foundation for consciousness, and, on the other, be so exquisitely sensitive, finely tuned and complexly self-organising that our state of self can change rapidly in response to our relational environment |
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Psychotherapy, Supervision, Consultation and Training email Roz Carroll |