BT12 Super Course 05 – Mythic Yoga: Creative Transformations Through Body and Mind – Kathryn Rossi, PhD
Is personal enlightenment really possible? Can we creatively experience our own transformational stories via yoga? We propose Erickson’s naturalistic–utilization therapy and Rossi’s 4-stage creative process are consistent with yoga’s ancient science of self-inquiry, mental dexterity and Buddha’s Four Noble truths. In this workshop we will have an opportunity to experience the stories of ancient yoga and self-transformation as presented in our new book, Creating Consciousness: How Therapists can Facilitate Wonder, Wisdom, Beauty, & Truth. We will practice gentle hatha yoga for all fitness levels and volunteers will share their current life transitions. Please bring your yoga mat if you have one.
Therapists working with single mothers often hear stories of abandonment, disempowerment, loneliness, hopelessness, victimization, rage and unrelenting stress. Disturbing perceptions and emotions such as these, and the distorted interpretations that result, may rigidify into psychic schemas comprised of patterns of dysfunctional reacting and compromised coping. Identifying negative schemas, and harnessing the mind’s powerful potential to transform them, will be the dual focus of this course. Participants will explore the way in which the quiet mind, combined with the evocative and rhythmic language of hypnosis, can fuel a subconscious shift from confusion to clarity. Participants will experience the way in which sympathetic identification with transformed metaphors, drawn from the substance of personal stories, can fuel an alchemical shift that decreases stress, increases ego strength, and paves the way to inner peace.
The cutting edge of rapidly expanding scientific evidence highlights that the more we learn about the biology of depression, the more important psychology and social experiences become in shaping recovery on all levels. Participants will learn to utilize therapy as a social process that can teach clients skills experientially in order to reduce and even prevent depression. Interventions involving skill building homework assignments, and experiential methods of hypnosis and mindfulness will be considered in depth through group hypnosis and at least one skill-building exercise.
BT12 Super Course 02 – Passion, Vitality and Intimacy: Integrating Attachment, Differentiation and Neuroscience – Ellyn Bader, PhD
Many partners crave intimacy or demand it, yet they fear the involvement that makes intimacy possible. Learn to use attachment theory, differentiation theory and neuroscience principles to lead your couples out of pain. Create sustained change with challenging issues such as infidelity, ongoing hostility, narcissism and pervasive conflict avoidance. Videotapes and clinical case examples will be used throughout the workshop.
BT12 Super Course 03 – Harnessing Mindfulness: Tailoring the Practice to the Problem – Ronald Siegel, PsyD
Mindfulness-based psychotherapy is the most popular new treatment approach in the last decade—and for good reason. Mindfulness practices hold great promise both for our own personal development and as remarkably powerful tools to augment virtually every form of psychotherapy. Mindfulness is not, however, a one-size-fits-all remedy. In this workshop you’ll learn how mindfulness practices work to alleviate psychological distress, and how to creatively tailor them to meet the needs of diverse people and conditions. We’ll examine how to use mindfulness practices to help resolve disorders such as anxiety, depression, and stress-related medical problems, while enriching and enlivening therapeutic work.
BT12 Super Course 04 – Finding Freedom from Pain: Solving the Complex Puzzle of Trauma and Pain – Peter Levine, PhD, & Maggie Phillips, PhD
The incidence of persistent and chronic pain conditions have become a public health crisis with more people suffering from chronic pain than from diabetes, cancer, and heart disease combined. The cost of suffering (human and financial) is huge and in part results from the fact that pain is so complex—ranging far beyond the intersection of neural transmission and sensory experience. The puzzle of pain involves a complicated labyrinth of emotions, sensations, culture, individual experience, genetics, spiritual meaning, as well as habitual physiological reactions. This workshop presents both the art and science of working with the resources of the body to reverse the effects of physical, emotional, and trauma related pain.
BT12 Short Course 27 – Illuminating Solutions with the Trance-Sending Light of Compassionate Playfulness – Betty Blue, PhD
Participants are invited to explore and experience spiritually uplifting, trance-forming, life-affirming, compassionately bonding and solution rehearsing processes and techniques comprising Transcendence-focused Playfulness. Emphasis will be on how such processes may transform learned helplessness into personal empowerment and contribute to emotion-based neurochemical regulation, well-being, immunoenhancement and gene expression. Examples and group participation will highlight “Metaphorplay”, playful paradox, soothing and energizing imagination activation, musical catharsis and reciprocating the compassionate radiance of “natural highs”.
Each couple describes a core scene which happens over and over again from which they want relief and therapists attempt to offer it. Imago Couples Therapy posits that while each core scene is unique, the theme of each couple’s story is identical: ruptured connection and the desire for restoration. All symptoms are branches on this tree. This workshop will develop and demonstrate that theme, and describe and demonstrate a singular intervention that helps couples restore connection.
This workshop will link the work in a science of perspective taking to work in mindfulness and acceptance-based psychotherapy, drawing especially on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Dr. Hayes will show how perspective taking can rapidly overcome barriers in psychotherapy, and when to deploy these methods.