PSEN Training Content
While much of the focus of the training is on the deepening of unfolding process,
we give our attention to relevant and meaningful content to support depth work.
Establishing Solid Ground, Holding & Containment:
Creating Stability & A Solid Foundation for Change & Growth
This year’s training themes center around the practitioner’s ability to be rooted in their own embodied presence, capable of setting aside a helping or a ‘fixing’ agenda. Instead, we create an ‘active witnessing’ function, capable of accompanying another, while holding and reflecting back to them their internal conflicts and dilemmas in ways that can both empower them and move their lives forward – as they become better able to think and act in new ways; and better able to live.
This is challenging but rewarding work: supporting the client’s growing ability to develop by facing paradox, tolerating uncertainty and complexity, and accepting ‘what is’.
Examples of Practitioner Content
Embodied Presence
This is the most essential quality that we will consistently focus on and cultivate in each of our training weeks – having a vital body and a clear mind.
Relating To Wholeness
A deepening of the work from Philip Shepherd’s Radical Wholeness. The ability for our bodies to have a felt exchange with the flow of life.
Practitioner’s Mind
Learn about the function, the trouble, and transformative potential of Projection & Projective Identification in depth processes.
The Unconscious Self
Having a deep appreciation for how the core of every one must remain a mystery, and cannot be impinged upon or exposed at will.
Counter-Transference
Understanding our own reactions to the inevitable and important emotional reactions and transferences clients have about us.
Deepening Into Processes
Learning how to 1) Join with & enter the issue; 2) Hold the trouble in mind body; 3) Move beyond the fixed pattern.
Training Content
Here are some samples of essential clinical material to be presented.
Working With Breakdown in Transformative Processes
These are events imbued with profound personal significances. The unconscious purpose of breakdown is to present the self to the other for transformative understanding; to have its core distress met and understood directly – so that breakdown can become a breakthrough.
Working With The Importance of Disappointment
Disappointment is what happens and what we feel when something we expect, intend, or hope for does not materialize. The ability to tolerate and rebound from this feeling is essential to our maturational process.
Understanding How To Work More Effectively With Character Structure
Our client’s character provides a powerful and unconscious form of communication, leaving its traces upon our interior lives as their practitioners. Their character is a nonverbal, ego-syntonic and powerful shaper of interpersonal space as well – through action as well as inaction. In depth work, character needs the ‘other’ in order to come ino life, to make its mark, and to find its meaning.
Our Training Format
Large Group
Our primary way of working together for all embodiment and mindfulness practices, and for all training lectures, & demo sessions.
Small Peer Group
Usually 5-6 group members who lead their own support group. Helps to integrate fresh learning, and to stay connected to the community.
Dyad Sessions
Used daily during the training week. Consists of individual client and practitioner ‘practice sessions’ to work one’s developmental edge.
4
Triad Sessions
Consists of client, practitioner and observer. Helps to deepen the work by providing practitioner with feedback and support.
5
Morning Movement
Optional segments before breakfast each morning. Hiking, short high-intensity workouts, yoga or kundalini breathing options.
6
Evening Community
Supportive and integrative communal sharing each evening after dinner to solidify connection and deepen mutual enjoyment.