The daily stress as well as tension from chronic pain and unresolved emotional charge is stored in the deep tissues of the body. There is a natural tension releasing and trauma recovery tremoring mechanism that nature equipped all bodies alive. It is familiar to most however we were socialized to suppress these processes as shaking generally is interpreted as vulnerability or a symptom of an illness.

Practicing Dr. David Berceli’s Stress, Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE®), we activate the psoas muscle, which is the main muscle responsible for the contraction and releasing of the body and is intimately connected with the nervous system. Through 7 simple exercises the practitioner can self-induce the natural neurogenic tremor mechanism that liberates cortisol and adrenaline in the body, and helps to discharge the nervous system.

Every body, and every life-story is different, and even though there are no conscious memories, the body can discharge naturally. Once the technique is learned, it can be self-applied and works as a great tool to for regular stress-releasing process without analyzing what is going on.

I find that TRE® is a great tool to apply together with Compassionate Inquiry, especially that during CI practice the body can kick-off its natural shaking mechanism to discharge. I have experienced it with clients as well as with myself.

This showcase workshop is for CI practitioners to deepen their relationship with their body and to recognise the mechanism in their clients as well.

 

About Anna Sólyom

A Guided Meditation Session

About Vimalasara (Valerie) Mason-John

This workshop will explore the basic spinal energy series taught in Kundalini Yoga. This basic spinal series works systematically from the base of the spine all the way up to the top. All 26 vertebrae receive stimulation and all the chakras receive a burst of energy. Many people report greater mental clarity after regular practice of this kriya. A contributing factor may be the increased circulation of the spinal fluid, which is crucially linked to having a good memory.

 

About Michelle Peddle

The workplace is one of the essential settings where individuals find -or not – a sense of dignity (at earning their life), of worth (being useful) and fulfillment (being part of a team). More than ever, organizations face unpredictable challenges (covid, war,…) that directly affect what they do and how they do it. It adds pressure on employees, at all levels of the hierarchy. This can lead to staff becoming more defensive, feeling more alone.

CI can be a tool to be used to help staff gaining awareness of their triggers, defense patterns. Providing them with tools to become more authentic can allow them to strengthen bonds with colleagues and make more use of collective intelligence and potential.

Steve and Isabelle will each share their experience of using CI in the workplace : with a team in a corporation (working both individually and collectively) and with a club of entrepreneurs.

They will share- humbly and honestly – with you what they learned: what worked and what did not work, where and when CI could be proposed and where and when it should absolutely not, the does and don’ts that they got out of the experience.

They will also experiment their approach with participants , so that they can experience first hand the potential of the Ci in the workplace.

– We will invite a participant to share about his/her experience at work place and do a demo using CI

 

About Steve Borloz

We will briefly understand the construct of the mind and the true nature of emotions through the Indic (Vedanta) lens. Further we will learn about our innermost and deepest location of our True Self, and how access and ability to function from this space impacts our role as a Compassionate Inquiry therapist; while being present, holding space and providing a safe container to our client.

 

The explorations will be on how:

1. Our emotions, bhavās, impact us at the mental, physical and energetic levels. The ability to engage, experience, process our emotions but not identify with them, is key to being an emotionally balanced person, sthithapragnya.
2. Vedanta’s perspective on how to cultivate the ideal position of a therapist, which is always in deep awareness and equanimity, sāntam, where there is no residual of any emotional charge.
3. Understand the role of our heart, hriday, in our process of psychological evolution and psychological wellness.

 

About Anirudh Goel

Dr. Maté will model the process of Compassionate Inquiry with conference participants and instruct therapists in the practice of this powerful technique to help clients access deep healing and transformation. This will be both an experiential, participatory workshop where participants will be guided through their own personal process, as well as a training to teach the method of Compassionate Inquiry to health professionals, therapists and social workers.

You will learn:

1. How to cultivate presence, being with what is
2. To bring attention to body signals in clients and yourself
3. To enhance your perception of what is not being revealed overtly
4. To enable clients to access emotional states through body awareness
5. How to create and maintain a safe sacred space between client and therapist
6. How to facilitate the expression of what has remained unexpressed
7. How to keep a client engaged in present moment experience
8. The importance of patience, respect and choice in the therapeutic process
9. How to uncover early traumatic events of childhood and unconscious feeling states through compassionate inquiry
10. To decode the unconscious beliefs that contribute to personal suffering in self and others

 

About Dr. Gabor Maté

At the root of all addiction is pain and as CI practitioners, we have a precious opportunity to work with our clients in ways that support deep, sustainable healing and recovery. The last thing most people want to feel is pain, and we can heal this pain by courageously turning toward it with a skillful person who can be with us. Our job as CI practitioners is to compassionately share this journey with those who are trusting us with a very sacred process of going to the very source of what seeds their addictive behaviors. This workshop explores the relationship between trauma, addiction, and disconnection and the remedy which is connection. Whereas the original traumas occur within a relational context, the healing can too. Join Dr. Wendy Harris for an exploration of how to use CI to support recovery from addiction.

 

About Dr. Wendy Harris (Livtar)

The second two verses of the Yoga sutras can be simply translated as:

Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah (1-2)
Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind

Tada drashtuh swarupe awasthanam( I – 3 )
When the mind is settled, the Seer abides in Itself, resting in its own True Nature.

Gabor says; “(The real goal of therapy …I believe, is to help people connect to the truth of themselves.

A yoga or any embodied practice can be a beautiful way of cutting through the noise of limiting self beliefs, of releasing tension in the body and moving towards our essence.

It can also be used to spiritually bypass our unresolved trauma. In this workshop we will examine how we can utilise an embodied practice in conjunction with CI, as a vehicle to deepen our self-awareness and further develop the Qualities of a Therapist.

Using Yoga, Breath and Chi Kung we will explore ways of using our (an) embodied practice to come to presence, enhance awareness of our inner landscape, uncover beliefs, and work with intentions.

With the arising of our self-awareness we will apply the various lenses of Trust Curiosity, Presence, Non-judgement, Acceptance, Compassion, Humility, Playfulness and Non-attachment to help us come home to our Authentic selves.

 

About Jacqueline Irvine

If we are to invite compassion in others, we need to experience compassion ourselves first. “What do I need?” is a fundamental question of a CI practitioner that desires to be present, self aware and attuned to self firstly and secondly with the client. But what is in the way of our self-care practice and how can we incorporate short and effective self-care practices into our day? Instead of being a marathon runner, waiting for that self-care moment in the morning or evening, become an interval sprinter, aware of your span of attention and daily landmarks to address your needs. Find delight in nourishing yourself and reconnect with your playful and joyful inner child.

Paula and Doris will share results of a self-care survey conducted within the Compassionate Inquiry community and offer valuable and quick self-care practices that offer huge impact. This experiential workshop will provide practical and empowering well-being tools to nourish your nervous system through micro-moments of self-care, breath, gratitude, mindful movement and more. This will be a dynamic playful workshop, where you will engage in a powerful experiential practice of self-compassion, playfulness and self-care.

 

About Paula Nowak Droog, Doris Polak Kuder

 

Childhood trauma has long-lasting effects on physical and emotional well-being over one’s lifespan. Epigenetics means “above” or “on top of” genetics, referring to external modifications to DNA that turn genes “on” or “off.” These modifications do not change the DNA sequence, but instead, they affect how cells “read” genes.

You will learn:

How childhood trauma exerts multiple epigenetic effects on individuals
The epigenetic factors that change genetic expression
The effect of intergenerational trauma on gene expression in offspring and their descendants
How to repair epigenetic changes with diet and lifestyle practices
Interventions with children that can reverse epigenetic changes

 

About Sat Dharam Kaur ND

Combining Expressive Arts with the Compassionate Inquiry Approach is an amazing opportunity to utilize the healing, sensitive and compassionate creative process inherent in each of them. Together, they can create a bridge for healing, transformation, embodiment and empowerment. Come participate as our feelings/beliefs/stories come alive in a way that allows us to practice and deepen our Compassionate Inquiry awakenings in ourselves and in our clients.

Within this workshop we will reveal how/when/why to use music, movement, guided imagery, body mapping, art-making and storytelling to amplify and expand the learning occurring in a CI session. We will explore how designing Expressive Arts interventions/homework assignments for our clients who are working with their childhood traumas can deepen and expand the CI experience in their sessions.

We will also allow time for an experiential art process where participants will do their own art-making based on this interweaving that they can then keep and take home with them. And finally, in this workshop, we will take the time to become more sensitive to ourselves, our process and to each other, working in pairs and together in the group, to ignite the sparks of creativity.

“Expressive Arts can mobilize the body and fire the imagination and thereby help to restore vitality, self-efficacy, mastery and self-expression.”
– Bessel S. van der Kolk, MD

“Your creativity doesn’t come from your trauma; it comes from your sensitivity.” – Dr. Gabor Mate

 

About Jane Goldberg, Yvette Lyons

 

Self Regulation Techniques for Therapists and their Clients

Self regulation techniques for both therapists and their clients are crucial for the development of a safe and healing therapeutic relationship. Understanding our nervous system and implementing effective self regulating techniques allows us to continually build the skills necessary to maintain a healthy relational container.

There are many techniques that we may use in order to come back into regulation, even after distressing experiences, thoughts and feelings. The purpose of this workshop is to explore and continue the process of building a self-regulation tool kit that participants may use for themselves and also their clients.

Another purpose is to begin the process of compiling useful self-regulation techniques that participants practice in order to create a database of these techniques within the CI community. During the workshop, we will introduce each technique and then have participants practice the skills and methods in an experiential and fun way. The self-regulation practices will come from a variety of sources, including Compassionate Inquiry, Polyvagal Theory and somatic-based approaches amongst others.

This workshop will be highly interactive and engaging, with an energetic and experiential component.

Movement
Breath & Voice
Strategy to switch from a sympathetic nervous system response into parasympathetic
Stabilization technique
Relaxation Technique
Visualization Technique
Physical discharge strategy

 

About Lorraine O’Mullane, Stacey Nicklas, Tiph Fedor

   

How can CI help activists and changemakers, especially those of us who live with complex trauma? We are all currently caught in these huge structural fault lines; inequality, climate change, colonialism, forced migration, homelessness. In what ways can we apply CI to our lives and to our calling as we navigate an era of significant socio-cultural trauma?

In this experiential session, using the five levels of compassion, parts work and Museum of Homelessness neuroscience based research into Dehumanised Perception, we will explore how CI supports change making work. We will share insights and learnings from a pandemic spent on the streets with people who are homeless and from building a survivor community movement in London. We will explore how those of us who are trying to make change in the world whilst carrying trauma can do this work safely and effectively by using CI in our everyday lives.

 

About Jess Turtle

This experiential workshop will offer participants an opportunity to engage in nervous system regulation through guided exploration in established methods employed in theater training and professional theater performance settings. This voice and movement-based workshop will introduce participants to a series of sequential exercises from the field of Performance Voice which are used in theaters internationally, and which aim to support participants in releasing muscular tension, opening up responsive breathing, and freeing the voice. These explorations ultimately support participants toward an embodied state of Presence that may mirror Dr. Richard Schwartz’ concept of Self.

The field of Performance Voice training and coaching in Canada was established with the opening of the Stratford Festival in 1953. Voice coaches have historically and quietly engaged with interdisciplinary approaches drawn from psychotherapy; with early Canadian theater voice trainers inspired by the work of Carl Jung. In subsequent decades, theatre voice trainers continued to collaborate with experts in the fields of psychotherapy and psychology, with noted New York-based feminist psychologist Dr. Carol Gilligan documenting the role that voice played in her research and publications.

This workshop offers participants an embodied exploration in nervous-system regulation, which may be of benefit for trauma-impacted populations. This workshop also aims to bridge knowledge from the Compassionate Inquiry community with the field of Performance Voice, and to begin a collaborative and embodied discourse that can support generativity and creativity across disciplines.

Participants are encouraged to wear comfortable clothing that will allow them to engage in a variety of movement explorations which may include lying down on the floor, stretching arms and legs, and moving in space. The workshop will be tailored to support inclusion of all bodies and abilities.

 

About Shannon Vickers

In this workshop we will explore the physiology, the dynamics and the function of shame and the inner critic that feeds shame and the perception of worthlessness. We will explore the adaptive function of shame and practice guiding clients to recognize it and have compassion for it. By creating space and exploring the parts and their role in shame and resulting behaviors we support the client’s understanding of how it all worked in an attempt to maintain the life sustaining attachment for the young child.

There will be opportunities to practice the skills in dyads and triads to put what the participants learned into practice immediately. Main stepping stones to be practiced:

• #12 Bring the client’s awareness to understanding their behavior as a coping mechanism. .. move away from making themselves wrong. Shame is often considered useless, painful and an unnecessary hindrance to a happy life. We want to support the client in recognizing that even shame had a survival function
• #13 Ask the client to identify the underlying belief.
• #14 Challenge the current belief by examining other possible reasons… When shame is present, it blocks seeing oneself as a worthy person. Every triggering event is considered as further evidence that the person is unworthy and the shame escalates. Therapist guides the client in considering other possibilities and loosening the grip around old beliefs
• #16 See the client for their possibility… The therapists can bring to the client’s attention that if they believed they were entirely unworthy they would not have come for therapy. The fact that they showed up and want to work on themselves shows that there is at least a part of them that sees the worth and wants change.
• Invite the client to do some follow-up work on their own between visits

 

About Maria Egervari (Manjeet Adi)

Postpartum mood disorder diagnoses such as postpartum depression (PPD) have been increasing in recent years, and are being normalized for women entering motherhood.

The general medical community’s approach is to externalize and pathologize the symptoms, giving the more blanket diagnosis of PPD and the use of antidepressants sometimes with some traditional talk therapy or CBT to manage symptoms, rather than looking at or treating underlying causes.

Based on a CI approach to supporting postpartum mothers, Charlotte Watson has come to believe that PPD can be a gift, if one chooses to take the path of seeing PPD as a symptom and following a path of inquiry to understand more about the underlying causes of their PPD, so these can be addressed, as opposed to simply pathologizing with a check box based diagnosis and use of medication to manage symptoms.

In this work, Charlotte Watson has identified 3 key areas which she believes the underlying causes sit in, as well as offering targeted and personalized support to each mother to address her symptom of PPD from the underlying causes.

Charlotte will be presenting on the 3 key areas she has identified in her work of bringing a CI approach to mothers with PPD, as well as sharing Case Study’s to demonstrate how this has worked and the gifts that PPD has given these women, when approached with a CI lens.

 

About Charlotte Watson