Becoming Alive To Yourself
Embodying & Experiencing ‘Life Force in Motion’ – The Transformative Power of Eros & Aggression
A New PSEN Workshop in
Lisbon, Portugal
October 24th – 26th, 2025
Presented by
Michael Mervosh & Joana Carvalho
Please note: This workshop is also the first module of the Portugal PSEN Study Group led by Joana Carvalho & Margarida Santos
Embodying & Experiencing Eros & Aggression in Service Of Change, Growth & Aliveness
People typically experience genuine uneasiness and anxiety about activating and expressing the deepest parts of themselves.
These deeper places within the self have to do with bodily experiences of sexual, sensual and passionate movements of energy, usually ‘towards or against’ another person, another body.
Spoken words often mask, or fail to convey, the unnerving power of these inner forces.
In the end, we are all looking to be a part of something that matters, engaging with other people who can receive us and withstand us.
Conversely, we also struggle to be on the receiving end of another person’s erotic and/or aggressive (often combined) expressions towards us, or at us.
In this NEW workshop, we will each have the opportunity to gain fresh and illuminating perspectives and insights into the nature and functions of erotic life force in the body, and the same for the necessary aggression found in life force.
By the end of the workshop, each participant will have the opportunity to experience a new quality of aliveness, as well as taste a newfound sense of freedom of expression, that can arise our of experiential ‘practice’ sessions with one another.
Time will be made for self-reflection, integration and discussion of our explorations.
“There is a dynamic tension between holding and penetrating that fosters a mutual deepening as intimacy deepens – knowing the other is dynamically related to desiring the other; a mutual enhancement, one seemingly defining the other through opposition, yet each paradoxically intensifying the other. To hold is to grasp; to penetrate is to transgress.
Our work is penetrating and enveloping, incisive and containing, a firm receptivity that retains, envelops, and holds the other in mind.”
Andrea Celenza
About The Theme Of “Becoming Alive To Yourself”
The paradox here is that we need others, as witnesses and as participants, in order to become most alive to ourselves. We need to have the ability to work through inner resistances, without being cajoled or forced to comply with another, so that our natural way of being most alive to ourselves can emerge, and liberate us, in a way not possible before now.
The theme and the content for this particular workshop is the culmination of Michael’s two decades of deep immersion into the human aspects of the erotic and the aggressive that are ultimately in service to aliveness – to life – and to engaging these forces of life that abide within us.
Joana & Michael have spent a good deal of time shaping this vitalizing and life-giving theme for this Lisbon workshop. They will sculpt this workshop to the personal relevance of each of the participants who attend this workshop.
Engaging In Processes That Create Movement In The Body, Creativity In The Mind
This workshop explores working in sessions to practice providing the necessary safety through containment to allow for the risk of ‘spontaneous aliveness’ – life force in motion – that can enliven, enrich, disturb, excite, unsettle, and enthuse – all at once – both practitioner and client.
We will explore the question, “What is deep psychological and emotional work really for? What is it’s deepest purpose?”
THE EROTIC
We believe that it is so that we can be more able to feel alive, and take up the opportunities provided to us by a diversity of life, no matter how much we might struggle, suffer or get hurt along the way.
It is the erotic creates our world. The erotic is made of the very creative things of life, and it is deeply linked to passion.
The erotic is a maverick. It is capable of the unexpected, and it provides us with therapeutic momentum in a process session. The issue is one of facing one’s experience of passion, an intensity of feeling with no easy resolution.
We will give living examples of erotic life, and test the waters by entering into exchanges that allow for bring the erotic alive in the room, and allow participants to share their own authentic responses and reactions to such life-giving spontaneity.
AGGRESSION
The practitioner’s ability to own and contain their own embodied aggressive impulses determines their ability to participate with the presence and depth needed to help another work through their own inner conflicts with this life force within.
Healthy aggression is needed to ‘break through’, to get through, to penetrate another person’s attention. ‘Realness’ shows up when aggression is being activated. Realness is connected with ‘agency’, the ability to make something happen.
Aggression and realness need contact through opposition. This has nothing to do with hostility. Except most of us carry inner conflicts and anxieties about allowing our aggressive impulses to have voice and expression.
We will work with gaining a most useful understanding of aggression’s life giving potential, especially as it pertains to “pressing against the resistances of the world, to bring ourselves alive”.
“Transformative change is not a consequence of a logical, sequential, reflected upon process, but of conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious, mutual penetration.
The goal is not insight or understanding alone, but rather a transformation, a radical change in people’s nature as they come into contact with the frozen parts of themselves that are yearning to be reached, known and recognized – a change which is always a result of an interaction.”
– Boaz Shalgi
In this workshop, we will:
Define, Discuss & Explore Our Capacity To Embody The Erotic As A Felt Force
Each participant will have the opportunity to do this essential within the safety of their own time and way, for themselves, and while being with another.
There in turn will be opportunity to be an active witness to another’s erotic aliveness, in ways that receive, affirm and enhance, while not imposing or interrupting the process or expression of the other.
This experience can often be deeply healing, as well as open up new pathways for self-activation and self-expression, that have been previously foreclosed, or never before considered.
Define, Discuss & Explore The Embodiment Of The Aggression As Life Force
The earliest place of our being understood that our ability to move against another was a way to feel ourselves a utterly alive, as fetuses do in utero. Freedom of movement lives in the kernel of our very being.
Aggression that is life-giving is invested with a positive, ruthless demand to realize its potential through the ‘use of the object’. We will better understand how this use of another, especially to press ourselves against the other – physically or psychically – is healthy and necessary for genuine growth to take place.
The practitioner’s receptivity to the expressive aliveness of the client can support the release of that person’s becoming more connected to and alive to themselves. And paradoxically, they can be more able to better experience another for who they really are.
We will practice this ability to withstand another’s aliveness, especially when it feels threatening or destructive, can be one of the most healing of experiences for someone. This is a remarkable thing to witness and experience, for both practitioner and client.
Opening To The ‘Experience’ Of Being Vitalized – Embodied Presence & The Pursuit of Passionate Encounters
“It is of great importance that the therapeutic ‘material’ we discuss with our clients be present, to some degree, to our senses. It must not just be an abstract idea, but something which is ‘happening’, that we can feel, and almost touch.” (Boaz Shalgi)
If we are to transform what is foreign, alienating or unreal in our clients into something real and personal, into something they can feel and sense for themselves as a real part of their life, it is crucial that we learn how to speak to them in a way that is grounded, felt, and tangible.
We will learn about both the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of working with the aliveness of eros and aggression, and balance the practice of containment (through grounding and slowing down) with enlivening (through spontaneous gestures and authentic responses) that renew, invigorate, and intrigue both client and practitioner.
Registration and Contact:
Scheudule:
From Friday 24th 9.30 am to Sunday 26th 5 pm
Workshop Fees:
420€– if paid before September 1st
470€ – if paid after September 1st
* Participants pay a 220€ deposit to reserve a place in this workshop.
Workshop Venue:
Torre D´Aguilha
http://www.seminariotorreaguilha.com
Participants do the hotel reservation via :
How We Will Practice Deepening Erotic & Aggressive Processes
Using Embodied Presence – this is our most essential and fundamental skill for containing the possibility of novelty and spontaneous aliveness, when we can be individuated, present, and also an ‘other’ to our clients.
Orienting Towards Aliveness – this requires the ability of our bodies to have a felt exchange with the flow of life, and the ability to open our minds to new possibilities and novel encounters in the presence of risk.
Holding A Quiet Mind – only a passionate mind living within the therapist can engage the client’s deadness and fears, and truly help them address and transform their darkest fears.
Deep & Active Witnessing – witnessing is a vitalizing therapeutic function. Experience how our own internal worlds resonate with and respond to what a client carries within. Use this awareness to create new ground.
Deepening Personal Process – learn how to join with & enter the client’s surface issue. Hold their trouble in both mind and body. Move beyond knowing into wonder. Engage a state of reverie.
Michael Mervosh
Licensed Psychologist
Michael is a licensed clinical psychologist with MGM PsychologicalAssociates in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He has been devoted to full-time private practice, providing intensive individual and group psychotherapy for 28 years as a psychodynamically trained psychotherapist, who utilizes a body-oriented as well as Jungian influenced approach to working with his clients.
He was the co-founder, along with Irene Tobler, of PsychoEnergetics Training, a four-year depth and process facilitation training program and community-oriented learning group. PSEN Training has been offered in the United States and Europe, and had 50 students in each training year. It had been in existence since 2006. In June of 2024, Irene and Michael decided to complete the training based in Spain in order to develop more of their own particular paths.
Michael is now teaching at The Western Pennsylvania Community for Psychoanalytic Therapies (WPCPT) in Pittsburgh, PA, and is offering a new type of depth training that combines psychology, psychotherapy, and myth, called VITALIZATION TRAINING. It is currently being offered in his new workshop and training facility called Lifebridge Sanctuary, located in the town of Rosendale, NY, in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City. You can find more about this training here.
For more information about Michael’s work, go to michaelmervosh.com.
Joana Carvalho
Joana started working with groups as a yoga teacher since 2000.
Her passion for deepening lead her to study body-mind oriented therapy, including healing work and transpersonal work. She is a PsychoEnergetics Practitioner and a Psychotherapist.
She has a private practice in Lisbon where she works individually and with groups. Joana was a Faculty Member in the PSEN Training in Spain from 2012 to 2024 and a Staff Member/Supervisor in AlmaSoma Transpersonal Institute in Lisbon since 2012.
She facilitates PSEN workshops in Lisbon since 2017 and started the Portugal PSEN Study Group in 2021.