A Year of Depth Work
A PsychoEnergetics Approach
A PSEN Study Group in Lisbon, Portugal
starting in 2022
Presented by Joana Carvalho
PsychoEnergetics Training Faculty Member
Assisted by Margarida Santos
PsychoEnergetics Year of Depth Work
Furthering Our Fires of Transformation
The PsychoEnergetics Years of Depth Work in Lisbon, Portugal, meets in the beautiful and peaceful Hotel Seminar Torre d´ Aguilha in Carcavelos. Our Year of Depth Work 2022-23 is based on the theme: Furthering Our Fires of Transformation
Furthering Our Fires of Transformation
We will explore the depths of how we can be able to work with a felt sense of the life force in the mind and body: a life force in motion, which will include the forces of eros and aggression. This kind of life force ignites the heat of passionate pursuit.
Furthering Our Fires of Transformation – dates
Session 1:12th November( new participants only)- online from 9.30 to 1pm
November 26th 27th (in person),
28th October online -from 6.30 to 9.30 p.m.
13th January online- from 6.30 to 9.30 p.m.
Session 2: February 10th-12th (in person),
14th April online- from 6.30 to 9.30 p.m.
Session 3: May 26th – 28th (in person),
7th July online- from 6.30 to 9.30 p.m.
Optional online group: bi weekly from December 2022 to July 2023 (schedule to be chosen accordingly to the group needs)
700€ per year (new participants)
580€ per year ( PSEN students)
“Early-Bird”: 60€discount for registrations before October 1st with the full payment
40 € discount for registrations before Octuber 15th – does not apply to PSEN students
We ask for a deposit of 150€ to formalize your registration
Various payment options available
The fee for the online group is paid separately.
The Years of Depth Work will be given in Portuguese.
For more information or registration please contact:
Joana Carvalho: [email protected]
Location:
Torre D´Aguilha
Estrada Mata da Torre,
São Domingos de Rana 2785-599
http://www.seminariotorreaguilha.com
The Year of Depth Work is for professional practitioners and therapists from various healing modalities
We also accept applicants with a sincere interest in furthering their own personal developmen
Embodiment is the foundation for all worthwhile pursuits. It is the ground within which the conscious self is both formed and transformed”
About our 2022-23 Year of Depth Work in Portugal
– Our 2022-23 Year of Depth Work consist of the following:
- 3 in person meetings
- 4 on-line meetings
- We also offer monthly online gatherings
– Our Year of Depth Work is for practitioners and therapists of various body and mind healing modalities. It is also appropriate for anyone committed with their personal process and growth.
– During these Year we will transmit and practice various ways to increase the therapeutic awareness and ability to help deepen both the personal process as well as to facilitate a deepening of our client’s process.
– We will practice and learn how to deepen the therapeutic relationship as a way of deepening the client’s process and facilitating change.
– We provide our Year of Depth Work in a peaceful hotel seminar where we also have the option of working in the beautiful gardens depending on the weather.
– We have the options of sleeping in the hotel for those who prefer to do it, or driving home at the end of the day.
- We will have a maximum of 22 participants.
– Our Year of Depth Work is conducted by Joana Carvalho, member of the PSEN faculty training program in Spain, assisted by Margarida Santos graduated from the PSEN training program. We will also have the collaboration of Michael Mervosh co funder of the PsychoEnergetics Training Program.
– We also offer an optional bi weekly online group for personal process and supervision for the participants that chose to deepen their personal and professional growth. This group takes place from December 2022 to July 2023.
Please note:
– Hotel Seminar Torre DAguilha has accommodation and meals available, payments for the Year are made separately from the accommodations.
– Participants pay for the yearlong training costs, and they pay directly to the hotel for their meals and lodging arrangements.
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To respect the cohesiveness and integrity of the group and training process, we ask the participants to make a commitment for one full year at a time.
This year we will work with life force, aggression, and our ability to come more fully alive, in body and in mind.
Aggression is often mis-understood as a force that essentially hostile, violent, or only destructive. While this may be one aspect of a distorted form of aggression, ultimately it is a force that is ruthlessly in service of life. This fundamental force sees to our very existence. It allows us to pursue what brings us alive, it connects and binds us with others. It serves as a securing function.
Yet our deepest anxieties will also attach to our most primal aggressive tendencies as well. We tend to fear the aggression that lives within us, and often project it onto others.
When we can learn that we are capable of withstanding another’s aggressive force, and we can invite them to come up against us, our clients can deeply transform their own relationship with aggression, and enter more fully into relationship with an ‘other’.
In this year, we intend to make use of the vitality and the safety of our group and grounds to explore the following:
- Explore the ‘life negating’ aggression and the self-destructive patterns that result, that live on in us.
- Make use of healthy and functional aggression as a way to secure the people, places and things we need.
- Learn how to more clearly and directly communicate “I am here now, now you be here too”.
- Explore essential ways of holding the affects of interest and enjoyment within us, and see how they serve to provide the necessary support for transformative encounters.
We will look 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 will 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 will also learn what it takes 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.
In our Embodiment Practices:
We will explore ways to have a felt sense of the world as it moves through our bodies.
We will explore how 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 continue to work with the resistances that prevent us from being fully present to our lived experiences.
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 further our mindfulness each morning of the training, and apply this skill to our practicum sessions with clients.
In our Practitioner’s Mind segments:
We will provide further transference and counter-transference dynamics.
We will highlight their relevant functions for the practitioner, and deepen our understanding of their essential importance for transformational processes.
In our Process Teachings we will foccus on:
Boundaries and Limits. We will grow our understanding of the importance of setting and holding these – both to create safety and to allow work to unfold over time in do-able, digestible increments.
Holding Container. We will learn more about what it means to provide an effective process for those we work with. A containing function can both calm and enliven the inner world of our clients.
Support and Challenge. These functions also provide containment, and are offered in a balanced way through the skillful attention to what is essentially needed by our clients.
Becoming a Disturbing Force. This is becoming capable of questioning unexamined assumptions, disrupting deadening behavioral patterns, inviting unforeseen and new possibilities, and demonstrating new potential for embodied vitality. We will learn the difference between being disturbed as an awakening function, as opposed to a disrupting or negating function.
We will provide enough safety to all participants to feel supported, so they can take the necessary risks that get them out of the habitual patterns in their way of relating, so to better learn and grow as practitioners.
Introduction to the PsychoEnergetics Years of Depth Work
What is PsychoEnergetics
PSEN combines a study of the ‘psyche’ and its depths, with a study of the body’s ‘energy’ and intelligence.We practice depth work and process facilitation, using the practitioners engaged body and mind to deepen the client growth and to support the awakening of conscious awareness, as well as the enlivening vitality of one’s interior life
Depth Work
Depth work refers to personal processes that are intended to be healing or therapeutic in nature; it is intended to shift one’s point of view and level of awareness beyond the current lens we typically use to perceive our lives. It requires a more ‘non-linear’ approach, one where we drop further into our interior spaces, to the more subtle and unconscious aspects of the psyche, using the felt sense of our bodies to open our minds to places we have yet to see clearly, or at all.
The Art of Process Facilitation
As process facilitators, we track and follow a process that is unfolding over time, before we make any attempts to intervene upon it. We do not direct or take over another’s experience, but instead, we profoundly accompany another to where they are, especially where they cannot accept themselves or their reality.
We also help to guide people to go where they have not yet gone, to where they have been unable or unwilling to go, without forcing them to do so, and without allowing them to remain the same – that is the art of process facilitation
Embodiment Work
Embodiment is a central component of PsychoEnergetics. We will actively cultivate exercises and practices that support our own Embodied Presence.
We will provide participants with various opportunities to practice both embodying and transmitting their own presence in and of itself as a function of wholeness, vitality and health.
We will actively explore the differences between speaking generally about our experiences and speaking directly from our experiences, as we become more capable of being ’embodied presences’ who can bring forth and transmit the energy of our internal experiences.
Mindfulness Practice
We will be focusing on strengthening and solidifying our presence by actively practicing mindfulness.
We will be practicing Mindfulness as a way to helps us not to judge our experience. Learning to accept our experience as it is, while also learning to accept the impermanent nature in all of our experience.
Practitioner’s Mind
We consider developing a ‘Practitioner’s Mind’ essential for becoming skilled facilitators, as this fosters the ability to actively think on behalf of the client.
We will have with immediate consults available, and post-session group supervision sessions.
We work with Transference by focusing more on how to be informed by, and make use of, our own Counter-Transference as practitioners.
Process Teachings
Learning how to enter, deepen and navigate our own internal processes is fundamental to understand the interior lives of others, making us better able to accompany them as the move through their own increasingly subtle and complex depths.
PSEN process teachings support the ongoing learning of the practitioner by deepening their awareness, appreciation and understanding of the underlying and dynamic processes taking place in our interior lives.
PSEN process teachings also provide us with useful lenses through which we can hold our attention on another’s interior space, and also to support its unfolding movement and lived experience.
We will be focusing on these specific Process Teachings:
CREATING CONTAINMENT – We learn to be deeply embodied and mindfully aware of our own interior, as well as being attuned to the body and mind of another.
CREATING SPACIOUSNESS – Deepening requires time, space and patience. We learn to make room for something to happen.
BOUNDARIES AND LIMITS – The ability to establish and maintain boundaries and to set and honor limits, are aspects of a functioning holding container. And they are fundamental in creating safety for both the client and practitioner
SLOWING DOWN THE PROCESS – We do this to be sufficiently grounded and centered in our bodies, and to be responsive to our client’s present moment experience.
TOLERATING UNCERTAINTY – We learn to trust the process of the unfolding “not-yet-known“.
CREATING AND TOLERATING DYNAMIC TENSION– we keep a ‘dynamically charged’ experience in the ‘here and now’, and staying with the experience by giving it the time, space and attention required.
BEING ATTUNED AND DIFERENTIATED – by doing so, we provide enough safety to support our clients, so they can take the necessary enlivening risks that get them out of the habitual patterns in their way of relating.
TRACKING PROCESS vs CONTENT – these is another important skill, necessary to help the client to go pass the verbalization of an event to the deeper meaning that is giving life to that event.
SUSPENDING JUDGMENTS – we practice setting aside the impulse for judgments rather than make it go away. This allows for a more vulnerable aspect of the self to emerge.
MAKING PROCESS OBSERVATIONS – making an observation about a client’s process, does not require a response from the client, rather it allows for a new orientation to arise in a way they could have do it on their own
USING QUESTIONS AS INQUIRIES – a good question does not lead to an immediate answer. It creates an owning that leads to an exploration towards something “as yet unknown”
TRACKING PECULIARITIES – we learn to notice small and subtle idiosyncrasies- those uniquely defining features that grab our attention but are unaware to the clients. We practice bringing these forward for exploration and not correction.
BECOMING A USEFUL DISTURBING FORCE – the active interest and aliveness of the practitioner is key to initiate new possibilities that disturb the sameness of the client´s cryonics habit and ways of being.
Years of Depth Work Structure
We will offer four Years of Depth Work each with a specific content and theme to be practiced which meet three times a year. Our Years of Depth Work are based on the circular notion of ongoing learning, in contrast to a linear progression. A participant can enter at any particular Year being offered, and then, if they choose to, proceed through all four years in order to complete all the themes.
Our Years of Depth Work will be conducted by Joana Carvalho, member of the PSEN faculty training program in Spain, assisted by Margarida Santos graduated from the PSEN training program. We will also have the collaboration of Michael Mervosh co founder of the PsychoEnergetics Training Program .
We also offer an optional bi-weekly online group for personal process and supervision for the participants that chose to deepen their personal and professional growth. These group is facilitated by Joana Carvalho.
Each day of each module for the Year follows a specific format
Mornings 
- Guided Mindfulness & Embodiment Meditation
- Lecture/Presentation/ Transmission on Theme for the Day
- Initial Experiential Practicum Session Based on Theme
- Peer Support Group Processes Based on Theme
Afternons
- Embodied Awareness Movement
- One to One Practicum Sessions Based on Theme
- Demo Sessions with Supervision
- Supervision Group Sessions
- Community Integration Experience in Large Group
