Workshops with CE Credits for Psychology

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.

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.

By the time we are adults, we live by a set of habitual behaviors, thoughts, beliefs, and emotional reactions. These may have evolved from trauma, fearful experiences, or normal everyday worries. Without inner exploration, these unconscious programs turn on brain circuits and cause us to believe our reality is true. The result is that we hardwire the brain to reflect the problems, personal conditions, and circumstances in our lives.

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 impact of stress on health is well recognized. Now the efficacy of stress reduction as an adjunct to medical treatment is being recognized in more and more health care settings. In 1996 Dr. Mark Abramson founded a program at Stanford University Medical Center using the 2,500-year-old technique of Mindfulness Meditation to train patients as an adjunct treatment for many different medical conditions.

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.

The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, and the study of its structure and function is one of the most rapidly developing fields in contemporary science. Yet many great mysteries remain, including understanding the brain processes involved in memory, perception, mental illness, and arguably the greatest unanswered question in all of science: How are consciousness and mind related to the physical processes within the brain?