Find and Re- find your Seat
A Feldenkrais inquiry into finding your best, most supported and dynamic base as you sit with clients in psychotherapy and counselling
As psychotherapists and counsellors we spend much of our professional life seated. Are you interested in how you might be able to sit more comfortably, breathe more freely and be more supported posturally as you sit with clients? Are you interested in how this might be achieved while at the same time having a pleasurable, interesting and stress and body tension reducing workshop experience along the way?
This workshop is led by Anne Mc Guinness Feldenkrais Practitioner and Psychotherapist. Anne will use the Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement approach to neuro-muscular re- education to first help you to find out how you organise your sitting and what you may be doing that leaves you sitting in a way that is not as helpful as it could be. The same approach will then be used to allow you to explore and play with possibilities that make your sitting more comfortable while at the same time more grounded – and all this in an effortless way.
Date: Sunday 20th May 2018
Time: 10.00am – 5.00pm (assemble at 9.45am to start promptly at 10.00am)
Location: Clonlea Yoga Studio 28b Sydney Avenue Blackrock Co. Dublin (clonleayogastudio.com for directions, map and details of parking and transport)
Cost: 90.00 euro
CPD: 5 and a half hours- certificates available
Booking and Information:
Anne McGuinness Feldenkrais Practitioner and Psychotherapist annemcguinn@ gmail.com or Ph. 086 8141 702
Participants will lie on the floor and will be guided by Anne in making small, easy and pleasurable movements that explore and expand their awareness of their own personal movement habits as well as enlarge the movement choices and possibilities open to them.
Feldenkrais uses novel, pleasurable, slow, gentle and often playful movement explorations done with awareness to reduce the muscular tension associated with ordinary life stresses, as well as more traumatic stress, either physical or emotional. This muscular tension limits our movement possibilities and body ease and reducing it gives access to greater postural support and a wider menu in movement. In this it is a powerful self -care tool.
Feldenkrais uses movement done with awareness and staying inside the boundaries of ease and comfort (as it were a window of tolerance place on a physical level) to tap into the neuro-plastic potential of the motor and sensory cortices in the brain (where our available neuronal movement and sensory maps are stored). This encourages those neuronal maps to change enlarging our comfortable movement range and potential.
You will learn how to find a more grounded sitting through clearer contact with your skeletal base in sitting – your sit bones and legs and feet. You will feel what this offers you in terms not just of greater comfort but also potentially in terms of greater access to physical or body sensing during sessions with clients. You will also identify body markers that you can use to notice when you move away from more supported sitting and learn how to use those same markers to re- find your supported sitting. This re- finding can be thought of as a self–regulating tool, a body resource available to you during the therapy session. There will be time to think about how some of this can be useful also to our clients.
There will also be time to think about some of what transmits itself bodily between client and therapist during sessions, how this may show up in your sitting and how this can be useful as well as how to care for ourselves in this.
Anne McGuinness is a member of the Feldenkrais Guild UK and of Feldenkraisireland – the professional bodies for Feldenkrais Practitioners in Ireland. I have been practicing as a Feldenkrais Practitioner since 2010 working with groups and with individuals including with those who use Feldenkrais to help with the body aftermath of emotional trauma. I am also working as a counsellor and psychotherapist having completed a four year training in Integrative Psychotherapy at the Tivoli Institute Dublin in 2016. I am a pre- accredited member of the Irish Association of Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy.
See feldenkraisireland.ie for a full description of Feldenkrais and its benefits and my LinkedIn profile for more information on my training, experience and background.