The challenge of personal transformation is faced differently in the East and West. Typically, Eastern meditation emphasizes how to cultivate higher states of consciousness that "go beyond" ego identifications, while Western therapy focuses on how to "work through" problematic states. This workshop explores an integrative model that suggests how to use both approaches in a complementary way: sometimes "transcending, sometimes "transforming", and often doing both at the same time. The connection between meditation, generative trance, and selfrelations will be a central focus.
Participants will learn how to incorporate sensory, psychological, mythic, spiritual and unitive states to bring personal potential to social change at a community, professional and cultural level.
Stephen Gilligan (2008) demonstrates the induction of a trance with a volunteer who wants to “feel at home” with herself, but often feels disconnected and scattered. He invites intention and uses mindfulness and body movement to release the weight of fear and disconnection. Afterward, the volunteer claims the experience was “intense,” and “beautiful.”
Meditation offers useful and varied methods for brief therapy. Important scientific studies on meditation's neuroscience and clinical applications show many meditation methods are effective. Yoga, Buddhism, Daoism and Zen are described, each with its key concepts and unique approaches to mental development. Attendees learn research, theory and useful meditation methods step-by-step, including concentration, breathing, mindfulness, wu-wei, qi gong and zazen. Case examples form links to practice. Therapists will fine lasting solutions to enhance therapeutic work.
Adolescent self-harming behavior is on the rise and is one of the most challenging presenting problems school professionals, healthcare providers, and therapists will face in their clinical practice settings. In this "hands-on" practice-oriented workshop, participants will learn several distress management tools and strategies to strengthen the adolescent's self-soothing and coping capacities and family connection building rituals and therapeutic experiments to foster closer and stronger parent-adolescent relationships. Parent management skills for constructively responding to their adolescents' inevitable self-harming slips will be presented.
The systematics of using guided imagery (GI) for psychotherapy and/or healing will be presented, along with the rationale for each component. Using a volunteer, the attendees will participate in creating a GI; then the presenter will carry out what they have designed. If time permits, attendees will experience a generic group GI.
We all have a feminine part and a masculine part, both yin and yang. Whereas the masculine part helps us to control things, analyze things, and make things happen in the world, the feminine part is our guide to, and the connection with our soul. We need ways to resonate with our feminine side in order to have direction, meaning and purpose, and to fulfill our mission in life. This workshop will address how hypnosis and some other strategies can be used to help us resonate with the feminine in our lives.
Usually, we are not aware of our breathing, yet we are always doing it. Moreover, breathing provides a way of consciously managing processes of an unconscious nature. During this course, a theoretical introduction will be made from breath work traditions such as Yoga, to our actual medical understanding of the breathing process. Practical and simple exercises will be done and clinical applications will be given, including the use of breath work in hypnosis.