Furthering Our Fires

of Transformation

Training Year

This Training Year will be offered in the PSEN European Site in 2020-2021 and in the PSEN US Site in 2022-2023

In this training year, we work with the issues of individuation and differentiation, and by looking deeply at exactly what it takes to ‘transform’ a fundamental way of being within the self.  This is represented symbolically by the elemental life force of fire.

We learn to withstand the necessary amount of inner heat within us to burn away that which is no longer (or never was) life-giving and life-serving. We also learn what is required of us to tolerate the ignition of grounded creativity and embodied inspiration – that which can bring forth new possibilities and potentialities for meaningful life, love and work.

“Becoming an embodied and mindful presence in the midst of unfolding, present moment experience.”

Working with Differentiation, Inspiration & Transformation Dynamics in Depth Work & Process Facilitation

In this year we will learn to work effectively with the Obsessive/Compulsive Character, and appreciate the core challenges these individuals have with making life choices, surrendering control, trusting their feelings, and rushing into action.  Like the rigid character, obsessive/compulsive people fear their own hostile feelings, and suffer from excessive self-criticism over actual and imagined aggressive tendencies.

These characters avoid deeper immersions into emotions as part of a whole, preferring to focus on separating out small parts of experience, and dwelling on minutia.  They tend to hear all the words, and none of the music of life.

We will also further our work with the emotional anatomy of anger, as well as with the interplay of guilt and shame, and their relationship to thwarting or enhancing vitality.  We will explore essential ways of holding the affects of interest and enjoyment within us, and learn how they serve to provide the necessary support for transformative encounters.

In our Embodiment Practices, we will explore new ways to have a felt sense of of the world as it moves through our bodies. In Ghana, this is known as seselelame, an inner realm in all the world is being perceived and experienced through body sensations. This is direct and powerful way to move beyond the abstractions of the mind, and into the depth of the body’s way of being alive to the world.

In our Mindfulness Practices, we will further our ability to work with the middle way, by entering the inevitable gap between our desiring, and the object of our desires.  We will also better understand the defensive functions of rejecting ‘What Is’, and grow our appreciation for how the mind lives in and through the body, and not simply in our heads.

We will also look at the dynamics of unconscious transfer of wounding and trauma from one generation to another – sometimes referred to ‘Trans-generational Haunting’.   We will come to appreciate how we carry the unfinished errands of our ancestors in the depths of our psyches, and enact them, much to our own detriment.  By making these errands conscious, they can become positive and life-giving experiences of deep meaning and value.

For our Practitioner’s Mind segments, we will provide further teaching on counter-transference dynamics by highlighting its relevant functions for the practitioner, and deepening our understanding of its critical importance for transformational processes.

Finally we will also understand important differences between Erotic and Eroticized Transferences, and examine how they potentially can play out in depth work and process facilitation.

This Training Year is offered in Spain in 2020-2021

Process Teachings

This will be a year in which we dive more deeply into understanding the issues related to various types of trauma, including developmental traumas.  Therefore, we will learn more about the following process teachings to effectively facilitate depth work:

  • Understanding the importance of setting and hold particular boundaries and limits, both to create safety and to allow work to unfold over time in do-able, digestible increments.

 

  • Learning what it means to provide an effective ‘holding container‘ for those we work with, that can both calm and enliven in inner world of our clients, through the skillful implementation of essential supports and challenges needed by our clients.

 

  • Becoming a disturbing force on behalf of our clients, capable of questioning unexamined assumptions, disrupting deadening behavioral patterns, inviting unforeseen and new possibilities, and demonstrating new potential for embodied vitality.   In these ways, we learn the difference between being disturbed as an awakening function, as opposed to a disrupting or negating function.
This is the true joy in life,
the being used for a purpose recognized
by yourself as a mighty one;
the being a force of nature…

Life is no brief candle to me.
It is a sort of splendid torch which
I have got hold of for the moment,
and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible
before handing it on to future generations.

–      George Bernard Shaw

 

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]

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TREE

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books —

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

– Jane Hirshfield 

 

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.