Openness, Surrender & Mystery Year
This Training Year will be offered at PSEN US Site in 2019-2020 and at the PSEN European Site in 2021-2022.
In this training year, we will explore entering Spaciousness and the Unknown as vehicles for change & growth
and we will work with developing the internal capacity to tolerate uncertainty while facing inevitability..
This Training Year will be offered in the US site in 2019-2020.
Please contact Jimena Galfaso for more information about our training in the US site
Week 1: Sept 11-15, 2019
Week 2: Nove 20-24, 2019
Week 3: March 18-22, 2020
Central Program Elements
Themes For The Year
This year’s training themes center around the practitioner’s ability to let go of a helping or a ‘fixing’ agenda. Instead, we create a space for the client to deepen into their internal conflicts and dilemmas in ways that can move their lives forward – as they become better able to live, love and work.
This is challenging but rewarding work, and it supports the client’s growing ability to develop by appreciating paradox, tolerating uncertainty and complexity, and regularly surrendering to ‘what is’ within the self and in the world.
In our process facilitation practicums, we will be working with creating an active sense of space. We will practice using space to create openings for new possibilities; we learn how to let go of our ego, and let ourselves come towards something larger than our own will.
All these practices will foster our ability to ‘Trust The Process’ as we work with another, which is key to growing a sense of mastery in our work.
During this year of training, we will practice suspending judgment, while accepting the imperfections of our humanity. We will work issues such as self-acceptance and the acceptance of others as they are; we will work with our mindfulness to cultivate our capacity for deeper compassion and relatedness, especially when it is least deserved, and most needed.
Training Content
In our Anatomy of Emotion segment, we will address the difficult emotion of Fear. We will learn how to hold effective boundaries that enable us to be both attentive and responsive to someone who is caught in the grip of immobilizing fear that overrides the client’s body and mind. We will explore ways to question fixed beliefs and orientations that allow our fears to dominate our lives.
We address the issues of the Paranoid Character structure in this coming year. Our knowledge of this particular character tends to be quite limited. Paranoia basically involves experiencing what is inside as if it were outside the self. We will learn to work effectively with people who are suffering from an overwhelming fear and shame, culminating in a type of ‘annihilation anxiety’.
We will continue to explore the curious and unaddressed dynamics of Trans-Generational Haunting, growing our understanding of the ‘unconscious to unconscious’ transfer of self-destructive coping strategies – due to the unresolved traumas of previous generations.
We come to understand how we play out in our present day lives what our ancestors could not consciously process or work through, and how these dynamics are active in deeply embedded patterns of resistance that our clients carry.
This Training Year will be offered in Spain in 2021-2022.
Please contact Verónica Lassus for more information about our Training in the European Site [email protected]
We will continue to deepen the practice of Embodied Mindfulness, paying special attention to the challenging matter of being more fully incarnated and present in our body-mind. We grow our ability to enter into encounters with others as a ‘felt exchange’, working with both our grounded-ness and our sensitivity to allow life to flow through us as practitioners.
Something opens our wings.
Something makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us.
We taste only sacredness.
– Rumi
We will practice facing differences without needing to escalate or inflate ourselves, or to engage in contentious, right/wrong or good/bad representations of reality. We will practice holding a more complex, “no contest” state of being when dealing with the tension of differences and conflict.
We will continue to deepen our practice of Embodiment through attention to our breath moving through our bodies, bringing special attention to the technology of breath as prana or life energy being exchanged, as taught in the Hatha yoga tradition.
We will practice using breath effectively as a resource in our practicum sessions.
We will learn to shift our internal experiences of emptiness from a life-negating space of lacking, to a life-enhancing space of opening, readiness and vastness.
To deepen our capacity to become more human, we will address the pervasiveness and vulnerability of self-rejection, and how it leads us to the rejection of others, and eventually, of the world around us.
We will also work with cultivating spaciousness on the most fundamental levels of awareness, such as with the space between the in-breath and the out-breath; in the space to be found between words; and eventually, in the space between two thoughts.
We will also work with the elemental force of air, and we will practice opening to the vastness and space within the natural world around us.
We will learn to bring this spaciousness into our PSEN practicum sessions with others, and learn to distinguish between active spaciousness and passive spaciousness.
The Bright Field
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.
Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
by S. Thomas
PSEN Curriculum
Each training year is centered around a specific theme and learning purpose. In order to complete the training, the trainees are required to participate in all four training modules, over the course of four years.
Registrations and Contact Person: Jimena Galfaso – [email protected]
I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element.
It is my personal approach that creates the climate.
It is my daily mood that makes the weather.
I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous.
I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration;
I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.
In all situations, it is my response that decides
whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated,
and a person is humanized or de-humanized.
If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.
If we treat people as they’re called to be,
we help them become what they are capable of becoming.
- Goethe
To be accepted in the training, and also to respect the cohesiveness and integrity of the training group and training process, the new trainee must make a minimum commitment for one full year of training at a time.