Workshops with CE Credits for MFCC

Hanna Somatics is a mind-body technique developed by Thomas Hanna that enables us to move toward greater mind-body integration, ease of movement, and freedom. This workshop introduces the somatic self, somatic theory, and exercises for assessing and somatically transforming ourselves. As we transform, we move toward freeing the wisdom of our somatic selves.

Many practitioners, across a broad range of disciplines, carry a sense of impending ecological, economic, and social global crisis. Aware of an urgent need to shift how we live and how we understand what it means to be human, many are working for sustainable change. However, proposed solutions often perpetuate a retreat into isolation or a reach for tribal exclusivity and conformity. How then do we find solutions that integrate the need for belonging with the need to respect the uniqueness of the individual?

Do you spend a lot of time just going through the motions? Are you frequently bored, anxious, or blue? Do you procrastinate or find yourself blocked? Do you have trouble believing that your efforts matter? These are all problems related to the process of making meaning. Natural psychology can help you meet these challenges!

How can you be open and vulnerable to love your partner, and, at the same time, free to continue to grow as an individual? This balance of merging and still maintaining your own center is never completely worked out, because each partner is continually changing. However, this dilemma of competing needs can be dealt with in ways that will add even more aliveness to what you already have together. In fact, a relationship that offers closeness, and at the same time freedom, can be a superb opportunity for your own deepest growth.

The Gestalt model teaches us that we are intensely relational, creative, and meaning-making by our deepest nature. Since birth we’ve been actively creating relational patterns as our best possible solutions to complex social situations and challenges. Depending on our developmental support, these patterns may be in or out of awareness, flexible or inflexible, supportive of ongoing growth and learning, or locking us into unsatisfying repetition of old, out-of-date dynamics.

“Mothering a daughter is often among the most intensely satisfying and challenging experiences of a woman’s life,” write Renée Schultz. “We yearn for support for ourselves as mothers and for wisdom in nurturing our daughters into healthy women while sustaining close and loving relationships with them. Yet many of us fear that the wonderful ease and joy of our relationships with our daughters will unravel during adolescence. We know that mothers are held to impossibly high standards and yet we worry that we might not be measuring up.

Do you sabotage yourself? Is there something you really need to get done but you just don’t do it? Are there parts of your life that stay stuck no matter how hard you try? Do you have to force yourself to do what you need to do — and even that doesn’t work?
Inspired by what she learned while releasing her own writer’s block, Ann Weiser Cornell created a step-by-step program to help you get unblocked and find your forward-flowing action. It's based on Inner Relationship Focusing, a body-based method for listening deeply to yourself.

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) has been described as a personal practice for clarifying and living one’s values, a guide for interpersonal communication, an effective process for conflict resolution, a powerful tool for social change, and a language of compassion for any life situation. Deepak Chopra has called this process “the missing link.” In a fun, lively, collaborative, and supportive environment, we integrate practices that support individuals to change the way they communicate and relate to themselves and each other. Learning NVC helps liberate us from:

How is it to be a person in your sexual/erotic body-self in a positive way? How can our natural being of Eros, the life force, flow from our excitement to be alive and impact others without abuse of power? How can we bless our energetic self rather than live in shame and fear? We are often faced with the dilemma of inhibiting our physical excitement out of fear that we will be "too much" or be "misunderstood" by others. This shame is usually rooted in some old experience or learning which lead us to diminish our own lively self — our erotic spirit.

Being fully present through mindful awareness is a crucial factor in giving us resilience to face challenges that arise in our daily lives. –Daniel Siegel
Resilience is a dynamic positive behavioral adaptation process, which individuals can utilize when encountering significant adversity or trauma. It is the capacity to cope with stress and catastrophe.

This transformative training gives educators, counselors, parents, and childcare providers the practical tools they need to bring the many benefits of mindfulness to children K-12. Participants will have the opportunity to deepen their own mindfulness practices, learn about various mindfulness-based curricula, and bring these practices back into their lives and work. Research shows that mindfulness practices decrease stress, anxiety, and depression in children, while improving emotional regulation, attention capacity, and social relations — all proven contributors to academic achievement.

This workshop is designed to help couples understand at a deeper level why they were attracted to each other, why they get stuck in endless power struggles, and how to safely begin to work through those stuck places toward a safer and more satisfying relationship. Couples share only with their partner and are able to maintain privacy. Couples are shown:
• New communication skills to break destructive cycles of relating
• How to channel the energy from arguments to create passion and stability

Using the power of modern neuroscience, informed by ancient contemplative wisdom, you can use your mind alone to change your brain for the better. Mental activity changes neural structure in a process called neuroplasticity, which gives you a great opportunity to redirect the brain, and thus your whole being. During this workshop, you will explore “self-directed neuroplasticity” for steadying the mind (a key to both worldly success and spiritual practice), cooling the fires of stress reactivity, and weaving positive experiences into the fabric of your brain and self.

Intuition is an incredible source of wisdom that everyone can tap into. The magic comes in awakening it and trusting its guidance in our lives. Yet too many of us walk around out of touch with our inner voice. What stops us from listening? How can we listen more?

“As women we have a unique power of creativity in our reproductive system,” Suzanne Scurlock-Durana writes. “That power is used not only to create new life, but also to bring personal projects into being. However, that energy can be blocked by physical, emotional, or spiritual trauma to the pelvic floor and the female organs.

Spiritual traditions point to the essence of our being, calling it fundamental consciousness, true self, non-duality, and many other names. This dimension is the core of our own nature and can be experienced by anyone willing to approach it with patience and openness. Fundamental consciousness is experienced as clear, luminous spaciousness, pervading our body and our environment as a unified whole. Realization Process is a precise method of attuning to and embodying fundamental consciousness.

Abandonment is a primal human fear and the underlying cause of emotional distress and dysfunction. Susan Anderson, psychotherapist and author of Taming Your Outer Child and Journey from Abandonment to Healing, will share powerful tools of emotional and spiritual healing to help you reverse abandonment’s universal wound. You will be taught exercises for each of the five stages of abandonment: shattering, withdrawal, internalizing, rage, and lifting; how to conquer “abandoholism” and other outer child behaviors; how to make new connections; and steps for healing abandonment.

The ability to sustain and enjoy a loving relationship over time is a blessing and supreme accomplishment. When stress, conflict, or periods of separation are successfully resolved, those experiences inspire resilience, strengthen the bond, and expand us as individuals. A couple’s issues are often a result of old attachment programming — body-based emotional habits that trigger ineffective reactions to feelings of threat. Honing skills for soothing stress and embracing loving pleasures can help partners work as a team to heal old pain and to build on the strengths of their connection.

The rediscovery of shamanism has emerged as a major thrust in the spiritual reawakening of the Western world. The techniques of traditional shamans provide an extraordinary method for accessing hidden dimensions of reality and connecting with inner sources of power and wisdom.

“Breema is a living expression of the unifying principle of existence, and is based on the Nine Principles of Harmony that help us live a more meaningful life,” writes Jon Schreiber. “We use Breema bodywork, Self-Breema exercises, and Breema’s practical philosophy as tools to unify body, mind, and feelings, and to become familiar with what it means to truly be present. Breema is a new education that presents the possibility of experiencing moments of being present in our day, so that we can live a more harmonious life, and move in the direction of self-understanding.

Are you living the life you were most meant to lead? Join us on a journey of transformation through the use of meditative movement, visioning exercises, powerful affirmations, and the support of a warm-hearted community. In this experiential workshop, you’ll discover your infinite capacity for creative evolution, get a clearer picture of your true nature and take home a daily practice for ongoing integration of body, mind, heart, and soul.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a powerful therapeutic method for healing trauma-based problems. Shedding new light on trauma survival—including sexual and physical abuse, accident and surgical trauma, and grief—EMDR is opening doors of the heart to genuine spiritual transformation.
This course is limited to mental-health professionals who are licensed to provide treatment, and mental-health interns who are currently being supervised by an EMDR-trained supervisor. Through lecture, hands-on practice, and demonstrations, participants will be shown:

People in leadership positions who strive to be inspiring, influential, and highly effective must be exquisitely present, fully alive, and unafraid to know anything about themselves. When you can engage the powerful feelings of others without the need to control or tame them, that’s radical aliveness. When you can learn to hold a space where conflict and challenge are welcome because they serve as doorways to fresh insights, that’s also radical aliveness.

In Esalen Gestalt Coaching, we combine Gestalt awareness skills with the tools of Relational Coaching, to support taking a fresh look at the basic patterns we have been actively creating since birth. Some patterns are supporting us in connecting deeply with others and reaching our life goals. Others are more limiting, out of awareness, perhaps based on old stresses and fears.

Each of us finds our true selves through our emotions. In order to become whole, we must discover how our experience is organized in limiting, unconscious patterns and through that process, learn how to organize our experience in new ways.

This experiential workshop is saturated with brain-savvy resources for recovering resilience—our body-brain’s innate capacity to cope with the dilemmas and disasters of everyday life and restore vitality and life balance. Linda Graham guides participants through practical tools and techniques including resourcing through breath and movement; deepening emotional empathy and self-compassion; shifting perspectives through mindful awareness and reflection; expanding relational resonance and resourcing in community; and evolving consciousness toward compassion and connection.

"Love is the experience of emotional and spiritual awakening to the bliss that is the true condition of the soul," says Daphne Rose Kingma. "Love is an essential human quest and intimate romantic partnership is love's most luminous expression." Join this best-selling author and expert on matters of the heart for an immersion into the spiritual and emotional preparations necessary to attract love into your life. Focusing on the four keys to true love—Faith, Intention, Trust, and Surrender—Daphne guides you on a step-by-step journey to self knowledge that can liberate your heart.

Our inability to handle personal criticism from loved ones is a common Achilles’ heel. The more deeply we are in love, the harder it is to handle. Soon, couples feel they are walking on eggshells, unable to express themselves honestly, and the love fades. Raising children and dealing with money during an economic recession magnifies the problems even as those problems become the reason couples stay together. The result? Couples often remain legally married but psychologically divorced—in a minimum-security-prison marriage.

The fall season is a time to reflect, renew, and invite our deepest intentions. Meditation offers a profound opportunity to focus inward, and to deeply connect with oneself, create intentions, and reflect on life values and aspirations. It is a perfect time to cultivate the heart, body, and mind through meditation practices that open us to our deeper experiences of love, compassion, joy, and wisdom. 

We are drawn to others not because of our similarities, but because of our differences which provide the means for growth and development. Differences become conflict when there is a struggle to convert the other person to our way of seeing or doing things. While it is natural to want to have things go in accordance with our preferences and desires, getting caught in the grip of these impulses can cause great harm to a relationship. The most important factor in the development of healthy and fulfilling relationships is the ability to manage differences skillfully.

In this workshop, we will combine traditional Buddhist practice of the “Divine Abodes” (brahmavihara) of lovingkindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity, with movement meditation and ecstatic dance, to help us access and cultivate these wonderful and transformative qualities of the open heart. We will particularly focus on developing embodied expressions of these four abodes based on our understanding that embodied practices are the key to making the qualities real in our daily lives.

True happiness is not about acquiring anything, but rather opening to the natural joy and aliveness right inside of you. Awakening Joy is based on a popular ten-month course taken by thousands since 2003, and designed to develop our natural capacities for well-being and happiness.

Milton Erickson (1901–1980) was one of the foremost twentieth-century practitioners of hypnotherapy. He created an original and highly effective hypnotic method to foster the natural mechanisms of mind and brain that we all possess. Erickson’s hypnosis was based in a firm belief that the unconscious is a reservoir of potential and that hypnosis is the way to access that potential. Recent neuroscience research corroborates this belief in finding that the brain has many intelligent, unconscious pathways.

Gratefulness is the key to joy. Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.
-Brother David Steindl-Rast
Many ancient wisdom traditions refer to the natural state of the human psyche as joy, peace, and love. The Greek word psyche means soul, and the essence of the soul is love. Yet, simply by living in a world of uncertainty, we all have experienced some wounding of the heart, which causes us to retract our love to protect against further hurt.

Would you like to find wise inner guidance from all parts of yourself? From your body’s internal promptings, your heart’s intelligence, your mind’s clearest insight, and even your own soul’s wisdom? Would you like to get all of yourself together in an integrated way? Process Acupressure teaches you how to gain a holistic perspective on your life directions and general health. And it teaches the skills of how to uncover the wise guidance that lies at your own unique center.

The "desire path to enlightenment" elevates the unconscious passion of the body to the radical understanding of mind, providing a truly integral psychology. Participants discover the lost drive which serves as a powerful motor for transformation. Rather than seeing desire as illusion, we analyze how desire operates in the body as a microcosm for spiritual change. This workshop is for those who seek to move beyond impasses in their own life path in medical, therapeutic, and spiritual practice, whether as patient or clinician.

Feminism is an unfinished project. Women have gained rights equal to men, but as women and men, have we really understood the power of the feminine? This workshop is for women and men who want to explore the feminine-masculine relationship within themselves and with others.

All too often, the words we express create walls when we were hoping for connection or understanding. This workshop provides practices to integrate the principles and processes of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to help us say the hard stuff without poking the finger of blame.

Spinal awareness is a combination of the Feldenkrais Method®, Taoist energetic science, and the Esalen experience. In this workshop, participants will experience movements that help bring new awareness as well as maintain health and assist in the rehabilitation of pain, tension, stiffness, limitation, and injury.
The use of joy and humor will be the undertone of this week. Real freedom in the body is also freedom of spirit and fun.

The power inherent in painting is that it can awaken a wild vein of passion that will not go back to sleep. Using only the simple tools of brush, paper, and paint, Awakening the Creative invites you on a highly personal journey of daring and discovery, made possible through a safe environment and the support of Stewart Cubley and his experienced staff. The potential is to tap into an extraordinary resource: the vibrant, driving force of your own creative spirit.

In order to become whole, we must engage in the ongoing process of discovering our own personal truth. This truth may challenge us, may even be painful, before it gives us new freedom and expands our horizons. When we choose to remain content with intellectual wisdom only, we limit ourselves and limit our relationships. When we integrate the full breadth of our emotional wisdom, we open the path toward becoming whole.

The purpose of our lives is to be happy. -His Holiness the Dalai Lama

At some point in each of our lives we have been hurt, mistreated, or disappointed. Unfortunately too many of us linger too long in self pity and anger. Learning to acknowledge and grieve our wound is the beginning of a process that ends in forgiveness. We will begin with grief but this workshop will focus on the qualities of gratitude and compassion that lead to forgiveness. Compassion understands the universality of suffering with the desire to make it better, while gratitude reminds us of the beauty in each life that pain cannot fully obscure.

It is our nature to be free—and to express that freedom spontaneously and without hesitation through song and dance, poetry and play. Moreover, we each have the ability to wake up to who we already know ourselves to be: people dedicated to a sane and just world made up of individuals who celebrate their common humanity and this planet of indescribable beauty through singing, dancing, playing, and caring for all sentient beings.

In the urgency and speed of life, time squeezes our attention into a narrow band of to-do’s. What suffers is connection — to yourself and to others. Perhaps early in the new year is the time to step away from the demands of your life, recommit to your relationship, and relax some of the coarse energies of the body, heart, and mind in order to access the deeper waters of gratitude, kindness, and compassion.