Bioenergetic Workshop Schedule 2008

Title: The Art & Anatomy of Empathy
Date: 17 May
Facilitators: Pye Bowden & Garry Cockburn
This weekend workshop will focus on the nature and importance of empathy in therapy & counselling environments. It will provide some recent findings from neuroscience in respect of its psychobiological nature and an opportunity for participants to focus on the formation and development of this aspect in themselves. There will be physical exercises in the big group to provide better access to the part of the brain involved in empathy and the opportunity to work in small groups on their own potential with this remarkable phenomenon.

Title: Too Much and too Little: Working with Clients who Have Been Sexually Abused
Date: July (Sat/Sun dates to be advised)
Facilitators: Pye Bowden & Cynthia Davey
Persistent re-experiencing, and persistent avoidance of memory & emotion are major issues for clients who have been sexually abused. These two phenomena are also the basis for two of the four diagnostic criteria in the DSM IV Manual for PTSD. This workshop will help counsellors become more conscious of the difference between these two protective mechanisms in their clients. It will provide some mind/body tools for addressing the difficulties each type of defence throws up. Pye and Cynthia are experienced ACC counsellors.

Title: Non-verbal Attunement between Client & Therapist: The Right Brain Challenge from Neuroscience
Date: September (Sat/Sun dates to be advised)
Facilitators: Pye Bowden, Garry Cockburn & Kate Dent Rennie
A number of people expressed disappointment at being unable to attend this workshop when it was offered last year. This workshop will cover similar territory: development of the social brain in the first year of life from both a psychobiological and attachment/behavioural perspective; the challenge from neuroscientists such as Allan Schore for therapists to pay much more attention to the nonverbal aspects of the therapeutic relationship when working with clients with early issues: the opportunity for participants to tune in to their own early preverbal experience and to try working with “a client”, being much more in touch with this aspect of themselves.

Title:The Art & Anatomy of Empathy
Dates: Sat 17 May, 10:00am to 5:00pm; Sun 18 May, 9:00am to 4:00pm
This workshop will focus on the nature and importance of empathy in counselling and psychotherapy environments. It will look at recent developments in neurobiology and ask if there is more to empathy than reflecting thoughts and feelings…..more involved than being warm and accepting? Is it empathy when the client is challenged to face the very thing they are avoiding at the moment?
The workshop will provide an opportunity for counsellors and therapists to put together moments from their collective experience of empathy with the new information from neuroscience about what seems to be actually happening in brains and bodies at such times.
There will be physical exercises in the big group to help better access those parts of the mind/body system involved in empathy, and work in small groups to identify personal styles and ways to develop these. The workshop provides an opportunity to deepen one’s understanding and experience of this remarkable moment-to-moment phenomenon.
The workshop facilitators are Pye Bowden, M.Guid & Couns, MNZAC, CBT., and Garry Cockburn, BSW(Hons), MNZAP, CBT. Pye and Garry are partners in real life and in their therapy business, ‘Mind & Body’. Both have presented at International Bioenergetic Conferences and had papers published in the Clinical Journal for Bioenergetic Analysis.

Title: Bioenergetic Psychotherapy: A Taste for Practitioners
Date: Sat 27th September 2008
This one-day workshop will show how the body provides a surprising and important point of access to personal issues. The workshop will provide counsellors with the opportunity to work therapeutically with their own issues using the bioenergetic modality.

Title:The Heart of the Matter: A Bioenergetic Perspective on Attachment, Heart and Healing
Date: Sat/Sun 1st & 2nd November 2008
The attunement between caregiver and infant provides a model for the non-verbal relationship between therapist and client, and highlights the importance of affect regulation. Physiologically, both involve right brain processing and the ‘smart vagus’ nerve circuitry involving the heart. Bioenergetics, at home with the body and right brain processing, invites practitioners to learn about these developments from neuroscience and take the opportunity to enhance their own practice of somatic responsiveness.

Contact for Workshops: <pye.bowden@paradise.net.nz> Phone: Wgtn 04-473-6555

“Implicit relational knowing is predominantly outside of awareness, and rarely in focal attention. Much of the subtlety and complexity of what we know is never put into words”

Lyons-Ruth