Awakening the Mental Health Clinician’s Body, Mind and Heart

This four-hour theoretical and experiential workshop will interest mental health clinicians who want to deepen their clinical practice.  The goal of the workshop is to add to the processes clinicians use for understanding and processing their own experience to better understand their clients.  The workshop is not aimed at adding to processes for direct use with clients.

The workshop provides the theory of how all that we take in from the world is first experienced in the body before it makes its way up to the mind.  We will look at both eastern and western ideas of how experience is processed in the body and the mind.  We will then engage in a somatic meditation practice that allows us to study our experience on both bodily and psychological-emotional levels.  When we understand our experience at this more foundational level, we can make use of it in client sessions for the purpose of working more deeply with client process and dynamics as they unfold moment-to-moment in sessions.  The workshop will assist clinicians in integrating session content with client process and dynamics.  Such a focus allows us to move away from solely addressing the events clients relate to also looking at how clients somatically experience those events and psychologically and emotionally process them.  We will make use of some small group practices for the purpose of trying out such somatic practices in a safe setting to prepare you to integrate this way of being with clients in sessions.  We will debrief and process all of the practices within the workshop.

The workshop will be offered one Saturday afternoon in October and December from 1 pm to 5 pm with a short break midway through.