Vitalizing Ourselves, Vitalizing Our Work
Tuscany Workshop Format and Content
Enacting A Vitalizing Presence:
Engaging Spontaneity & Passion in Service Of Change, Growth & Aliveness
This workshop explores using vitalizing interventions that are enriching and transformative in their lived experience, rather than simply reflecting on one’s own process.
The practitioner’s ability to enact their own embodied and vitalized presence depends on participating in unconsciously driven, spontaneous, and viscerally felt encounters with their clients.
We must be capable of setting aside being helpful in order to be available.
We work with ‘active witnessing‘ by entering fully into the lived experience of another, then digesting & reflecting back to them internal conflicts and dilemmas in ways that can recognizes them, empowers them, and moves their lives forward in new ways, thus becoming better able to bear living.
This is such challenging and rewarding work: supporting the client’s growing ability to grow by facing paradox and dilemmas, tolerating uncertainty and complexity, and ultimately, accepting ‘what is’.
“Transformative change is not a consequence of a logical, sequential, reflected upon process, but of conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious, mutual penetration.
The goal is not insight or understanding alone, but rather a transformation, a radical change in people’s nature as they come into contact with the frozen parts of themselves that are yearning to be reached, known and recognized – a change which is always a result of an interaction.”
– Boaz Shalgi
About The Theme For The Upcoming June Workshop
I shape the content for this partcular workshop based on my own deep immersion into the content and material that I bring forth.
I have spent many months exploring this vitalization theme by studying various theories, and by practicing their applications with my active clients.
I will sculpt this workshop to the relevance of this theme for each of the participants who attend this workshop.
Experiencing The Core Self
The Core Self holds the unique integrity of the individual, which we as helpers must be aware of, but can never interfere with.
The work takes place within the therapist, not in the client.
It is a kind of conscious echo-location, a sensing of the inherent vulnerability of its existence. There is a great deal of sensitivity needed to attend to the Core Self in another.
Understanding & Activating One’s Personal Idiom
The Core Self is the kernel of our very being, and it is invested with a positive, ruthless demand to realize its potential through the ‘use of the object’.
This is a crucial step forward in the forming of one’s own unique human character.
The helper’s receptivity to the idiomatic aliveness of the client can support the release of that person’s true self to realize a future that has been unknown to them and has been unexperienced by them.
This is a remarkable thing to witness and experience, from both pracitioner and client.
Opening To the ‘Boon’ – Embodied Presence, A Living Myth & The Pursuit of Passion
“It is of great importance that the therapeutic ‘material’ we discuss with our clients be present, to some degree, to our senses. It must not just be an abstract idea, but something which is ‘happening’, that we can feel, and almost touch.” (Boaz Shalgi)
If we are to transform what is foreign, alienating or unreal in our clients into something real and personal, into something they can feel and sense for themselves as a real part of their life, it is crucial that we speak to them in a way that is tangible, and pulls them into a reality they can face, live with, and become enlivened by.
Examples of Vitalizing Themes
Embodied Presence
Our most essential and fundamental skill for containing the possibility of novelty and aliveness, when we can be individuated and ‘other’ to our clients.
Orienting To Aliveness
Requires the ability of our bodies to have a felt exchange with the flow of life, and and the ability to open our minds to new possibilities and novel encounters in the presence of risk.
Holding A Vital Mind
Only a passionate mind living within the therapist can engage the client’s deadness and fears, and truly help someone address and transform their darkest fears.
The Generative Unconscious
Grow a deeper appreciation for how the unconscious core of both therapist and client are in constant communication, is always a mystery, and surprising us.
Deep & Active Witnessing
Witnessing is a vitalizing therapeutic function. Experience how our own internal worlds resonate with and respond to what a client carries within, to create new ground.
Deepening Personal Process
Learning how to join with & enter the client’s surface issue; hold the trouble in both mind and body; move beyond knowing into wonder; and embody a state of reverie.
Workshop Content
Here are some samples of essential clinical material to be presented.
Growing Our Capacities For Complexity, Paradox & Surrender
These characteristics are embedded in essential therapeutic encounters, which are imbued with profound personal implications for changing both therapist and client. Ghent says that ‘surrender is not an act performed, but a letting go’ in order to become whatever is being created in the moment. It is the most basic need of the human psyche.
Understanding A Radical Approach To Transformation and Change
This approach offers a straightforward, mutual and unexplained spontaneity, which is unconsciously driven, and requires the vulnerability of surrendering fully, in body and mind, to an encounter with our clients. This process vitally and ruthlessly moves life forward. And it can happen ‘in any given moment’, all at once.
Working With The Three Essential Components That Validate & Transform Human Experience
Bion’s three dimensions of experience and existence are needed in the therapeutic encounter in order to transform the human condition – the domain of the senses, the domain of myth, and the domain of passion.
The Workshop Format
Morning Guided Embodiment Meditation
Start each day with a grounding and deepening into your own internal experience, preparing your body for the work ahead.
Mornings & Afternoons In Our Working Group
Our primary way of working together for all embodiment and mindfulness practices, and for all training lectures, & demo sessions.
Vitalizing Dyad Sessions
Used on occasion during the workshop to deepen connection to self and other. Consists of an experiential ‘session’ to work one’s developmental edge.
Afternoon Reflection Group
Consists of client, practitioner and observer. Helps to deepen the work by providing practitioner with feedback and support.
Hikes & Working w/Horses
Optional segments before breakfast each morning. Hiking, and/or energy work with horses are also woven into the experience of vitalization.
Afternoon & Evening Mealtimes
Supportive and engaging communal sharing after each working group session to solidify our connections and deepen mutual enjoyment.