Breakdown vs Breakthrough  Amsterdam – May 2024

PSEN work addresses ‘what it requires of us’ to be alive as a human being in challenging times.  We do this by actively working with transformational processes and unconscious forces at play in our interior worlds.

One aspect of what it takes to be more fully alive is confronting our fears of breaking down in order to gain new abilities to break through into experiences which are novel and growth-producing.

One of the deepest fears we carry about ourselves in times like these is that we won’t survive living into an uncertain future, as we will have to face aspects of ourselves that have gone unlived until now.

The two essential questions to be explored when working with breaking down vs breaking through are:

• How do we come to understand an ‘unlived past’ that is continuously re-enacted in our present-day experiences?

• How do we then project fears of breaking down into an endlessly awaiting future?

Many of us have been feeling ‘at an edge or at a breaking point’.  We carry concerns about being able to handle the profound disruptions taking place in our personal and collective worlds.  It is harder and harder to avoid the harsh realities of an uncertain and foreboding future for us all.

Many of us have had to struggle with disorientation, anxiety, and despair as we feel the loss of stability, goodness and wholeness in our families, institutions, economies and ecologies.

Those of us who do depth work with clients have seen increasing experiences of emotional turmoil on the brink of collapse.  How to best work with these processes in others, while being at risk to our own experiences of coming undone?

• This workshop will address understanding and practicing what it takes to be able to provide containment and facilitation to those who are facing a ‘transformational opportunity’ – breaking down vs breaking through.

 At any crisis point there is a real possibility of breaking down and losing one’s ability to function, yet there can also be an opportunity to break through into a completely new ways of thinking, experiencing, and engaging with life. 

This type of work requires a practitioner to face their own vulnerabilities in order to provide the depth of containment and presence required to see through an ‘unbearable moment’ with another human being – not avoid it and not push through or foreclose it.

About PSEN Depth Work For Practitioners:

Living systems need to be disturbed in order to grounded and enlivened enough to change.  Disturbance comes through the ability of the individual to feel and think differently from others, and differently than their own fixed ideas and rigidified beliefs. As a practitioner, the ability to be a grounded support, and yet also a disturbing force for another, provides our clients with the following:  

• A sense of being seen and directly engaged where they currently are, while at the same time being challenged to take worthwhile risks and lean into new potentials, in ways that are unlikely to come from within themselves.

• Introductions to and demonstration sessions of various methodologies of PsychoEnergetics process facilitation – our uniquely crafted body-mind approach to in depth psychological work .

• An approach to and in-depth exploration of our fundamental need as human beings to grow beyond our limited sense of being, and through passionate encounters, to reconnect to a zest for life that can renew us, and move us forward.

• An opportunity to engage practitioners in the depths of their own psyches while having a felt sense of a lived energy through sensations in the body, in order to better support their clients in becoming more whole and alive.

IN OUR PSEN EXPERIENTIAL WORKSHOPS, PARTICIPANTS:

Receive opportunities to practice our PSEN Body-Mind approach through:

•  Fundamental Embodiment Practices
•  Guided Mindfulness Meditations
• ‘Actively Presencing’ one’s Body and Mind 
• Depth & Process Facilitation