Somatic Psychotherapy

Just as a child’s neurodevelopment becomes more sophisticated with life experience, somatic psychotherapy and dance/movement therapy, now in their eighth decade, are approaching a more intricate stage of growth. As each discipline grows in complexity, conflicts have risen regarding the concept of identity. The recent debate of whether dance/movement therapy is one of the somatic psychotherapies or its own discipline is a necessary and exciting “growing pain” in the evolution of embodied psychotherapy practices. This paper provides a historic overview and uses a systems theory framework to compare the disciplines with data derived from original and recent literature. Practices, education, and governance of each discipline are presented as they exist in the United States. Findings illustrate the comparison and offer clarity on the current trend toward integration. Suggestions are made for further critical thinking to develop awareness toward an evolved perspective of embodied psychotherapy practices.

The concept of embodiment, or the lived experience of the body, has become an important focus of scholarly attention across psychology, sociology, philosophy, and cultural studies. Addressing the inherent challenges of researching the lived experience of the body, this edited volume brings together experienced scholars who conduct and teach embodied research to and establish effective strategies for exploring experience through nonverbal communication, subjective sensory and proprioceptive states, and body-centered imagery. It represents a thorough and comprehensive resource for students conducting research using an embodied approach and for instructors that teach embodied inquiry.

For more information visit: www.routledge.com/9781138367081
or
https://www.routledge.com/The-Art-and-Science-of-Embodied-Research-Design-Concepts-Methods-and-Cases/Tantia/p/book/9781138367081

Je propose d'aborder la danse comme une parole silencieuse. Pour discuter de cette dénomination d'apparence contradictoire, je définis la danse en tant que parole silencieuse comme un processus  de symbolisation que je nomme métaphore incarnée produisant une énonciation permettant de faire acte. 
Pour discuter ce parti pris je fais les hypothèses suivantes :
1) la danse se situe dans un entre-deux. Elle fait lien entre un indicible, informulé ou informulable et un décible.
2) Le Sensible fait le lien entre ces deux états
3) Le silence es t le marqueur de la dimension Sensible
4) le geste est l'élément visible et signifiant de cette métaphore incarnée

Dans le cadre de cet article je souhaite axer ma discussion sur le premier point à savoir que la danse se situe dans un entre-deux et ce à partir de la fonction symbolique et de l'efficacité symbolique de Lévi-Strauss

Gestalt therapists are uniquely positioned to address issues
of gender and sexuality in authentic and empowering ways.
However, gender has been a relatively neglected territory within Gestalt therapy theory and professional discourse. Drawing on social and somatic theories of gender, this article articulates how Gestalt therapists might harness existing skills and orientations to become significant contributors to the evolving debates on gender and sexuality in counseling and psychotherapy. The author describes a four-step approach to professional development on gender issues focused on application to Gestalt therapy practice.

The drive for a theoretical integration of psychotherapy arises out of is dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of single systems/theories. It has been suggested that there is a need for a 'meta-theory' that provides a framework to integrate different psychotherapy theories in terms of some shared construct. The theoretical integration should take into account behaviour, emotion, cognition, and interpersonal factors. In addition, trans-theoretical considerations should include theory and data from neurology and psychiatry. Some different integrative 'frameworks' are noted, including Clarkson's 'Systemic Integrative Psychotherapy'. Some neuroscience based frameworks for integration are also mentioned. It is proposed that homeostasis could serve as a meta-theory that encapsulates principles in terms of which to 'systematically' integrate aspects of psychotherapy, including trans-theoretical dimensions.

The lived experience of the body–that is, our bodily sensations, perceptions and behaviors–is the essential ground of human identity. Developmentally, our visceral impulses serve as the foundation for personal agency, guiding us as we move through the world, reaching for some things and refusing others. Our bodily encounters with the physical environment shape and reshape our understanding of the world; we learn about gravity by falling down and discover how our point of view changes when we walk around and encounter new perspectives. Language, often considered a function of our cognitive capacity for abstraction, is laden with meaningful references to the body that hint at its sensorial roots. Indeed, cognition itself is increasingly understood as deeply intertwined with bodily feeling i. When applied to our understanding of the social world, our embodied experience plays an equally important role. As we navigate interpersonal relationships and learn about the characteristics associated with different groups of people, our bodies help to create and maintain the power dynamics that can arise between us–for instance, by signaling dominance or submission through our gestures and eye contact ii. We are categorized into sociocultural groups according to physical traits that are marked as desirable or deficient based on their appearance and functioning. Depending on our social identifications, we may learn to treat our bodies as sexual objects or as instruments of labor. In short, our nonverbal communication patterns, beliefs about body norms, and feelings of connection and identification with our bodies are all deeply affected by our assigned membership in different social groups and the privileges associated with that membership iii. However, despite the research evidence supporting these ideas, existing models of social justice have not been particularly attentive to the body's role in reproducing oppression iv in everyday life. Neither have approaches that specialize in working with the felt sense of the body (often grouped into a field called " somatics " v) offered many strategies for resolving the tension between the information available to us through bodily explorations of sensation and movement and the data grounded in social power and authority. However, it is possible to address the singular experience of the body in a way that does not bypass the political. Conversely, it is possible to work collectively to transform oppressive social structures while fully recognizing the micro-sociological building blocks that maintain those structures. An embodied approach to social justice–one that recognizes the degree to which our bodies are implicated in the reproduction of social power–should not be considered a replacement for working on the macro-sociological level to make structural and ideological changes in social institutions such as education or healthcare, or as a substitute for legislative reform. Rather, it works to support change in the relational fabric of our lives so that structural shifts correspond with authentic transformations in attitude, and where legal rights and freedoms are experienced at the core of our beings and manifested in our everyday interactions with others.

It’s an interesting topic and how I dance with that depends on how I interpret the word ‘drives’ I suppose. I could talk about Freud’s aggression and sexual impulses in drive theory, but I’d rather address one of my main drives; as sharing knowledge of embodied practice towards development, which can result in personal and societal empowerment, communication and healing, as we focus on the integrated body and mind.

Aim: To identify therapists’ views on sexual boundaries and the strategies they employ to manage them in therapeutic practice. Method: In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with a sample of 13 accredited, experienced practitioners of psychotherapy or counselling. A grounded theory approach, informed by principles from Free Association Narrative methodology, was employed, in which team members used debriefing sessions for extending depth of understanding of the interviews. Findings: There is consensus about boundaries at the extremes, but variability about fantasy, flirtation and touch. A core process was generated from accounts of successful management of sexual attraction. We identified four problematic ways of reacting to boundary pressure, each with potential to harm clients and therapy. Discussion: A participant-observer stance was conceptualised as essential for managing threats to boundaries, consistent with the empathic stance. Minor boundary crossings were viewed by interviewees as both potential precursors of more serious transgressions, and as opportunities for understanding the client's difficulties. Implications for practice: These span training, accrediting organisations, supervision and therapy practice.

This paper considers a case study of a woman, Judy, who has a history of childhood sexual abuse, fraught relationships, poor affect regulation, a sense of despair, suicidal thoughts and feelings of hopelessness, emptiness and being invisible to others.  Judy is crying out for help.  The writer attempts to consider the possible aetiology of Judy’s pain and suffering and to determine appropriate assessment questions to inform a treatment path for Judy.  Consideration is given to controversy surrounding proposed changes to the DSM V (American Pyschiatric Association, 2013), few of which came to fruition, and to whether Judy is experiencing a mental illness or personality disorder or both or neither, according to DSM V descriptors.

Research is a crucial element in advancing our collective knowledge of somatic psychology, but body and movement psychotherapists often struggle to engage in meaningful relationships with the psychology research literature and the
community of scholars who typically produce it. This paper elaborates the common ground between research and somatic psychotherapy by linking the values, attitudes and skills of somatic psychotherapists with specific research
methodologies. It traces the similarities between doing therapy and doing research, with a focus on the role of the therapist/researcher, and outlines a research method that somatic psychotherapists might consider as a basic
framework when undertaking their own formal research.

This book describes the theory and methods of an original somatic approach to movement education. Based on the five Elements of ancient philosophical tradition, Elemental Movement integrates somatic and alchemical principles, processes, and practice. It employs movement as the primary vehicle for a wide range of personal explorations, using the Elements both as a framework and as a set of symbolic tools.

In the Gudyargarbha tantra there is this most wonderful verse. Appearances, sounds, and thoughts are the diety, mantra and the state of dharmakaya. What this wonderful language brings forward into our awareness is the amazing understanding that self liberation is the direct experiencing of the appearing of appearances.

Research has established the crucial role of the body in navigating experiences of social difference and mediating the traumatic impact of oppression. Although conceptual frameworks from education, counseling, and critical embodiment studies offer powerful lenses through which
to view these experiences of oppression, existing social justice models (e.g., anti-oppressive education, multicultural counseling and social work) are insufficiently inclusive of the body’s role in navigating oppressive social interactions. Conversely, existing models of working with embodied experience (e.g. somatic education and somatic counseling/psychotherapy) are insufficiently attentive to the role of social power in interpersonal relations. Drawing on current research on the embodied experience of oppression, this paper articulates an integrative model for addressing problematic experiences in relation to the body and social justice.

Growing up traumatized means that survival systems are activated in both our minds and bodies. As a result, our lives become rooted in a different biological and psychological reality. I’ve called this parallel reality a “trauma-world”. At its core are fearfulness, disconnection and shame. If a trauma-world is formed during childhood, it becomes our normality, whereupon we are unconscious of its impact on our lives. However, without consciousness, healing is impossible.

Marion Woodman articulated the dynamics of trauma in a visceral and potent way, helping to bring trauma-worlds into consciousness. As importantly, together with dance educator Mary Hamilton, and voice coach Ann Skinner, Woodman developed BodySoul Rhythms®, an embodied, creative and integrative approach that can make a powerful contribution to healing.

This capstone paper explores the mind-body-spirit connection in relation to treating trauma in the counseling field. Based on this writer’s experiences and work, professionally and personally, with trauma, somatic psychology, and breathwork practices, the paper serves as a template for integrating breathwork into a clinical practice to help support clients suffering from trauma or other severe anxiety disorders. Breathwork is powerful practice that encourages clients to regain control of his or her nervous system and can assist in somatic processing of deep-rooted emotions. The first section of this paper will review the literature of modern trauma and somatic psychology research to provide a foundation of trauma theory. The second half of this paper will explore this author’s synthesis of a breathwork framework that could be utilized in clinical work. The framework consists of utilizing breathwork as a way for emotional regulation, somatic processing, and personal and spiritual development. The goal of this paper is to formulate a foundation for breathwork as an intervention and as breathwork training curriculum for counselors and other mental health professionals.

A person's own inner most awareness and the movements within their awareness field bring forth their direct personal experience of their cosmological archetypal field of awareness. This spontaneous event is given to us within the archetypal realm of awareness. The archetypal dimension manifests itself as us, and reveals itself to us through our experience of its self-manifestation.

Psychotherapists' somatic responses have largely remained an untapped resource of information and healing potential in the field of psychotherapy. This may be due in part to the difficulty of describing and understanding these experiences as well as an educational gap in teaching therapists to recognize and value them. This dissertation asks: What types of somatic phenomena do psychotherapists experience in the context of therapeutic work with clients, and what therapeutic value can be made of these experiences? This study examines the role of the therapist's woundedness in his or her experience and understanding of somatic phenomena, with particular reference to the Wounded Healer archetype.

Utilizing interpretive phenomenological analysis as a research methodology, seven psychotherapists to whom the research questions were meaningful and significant were chosen to participate. They shared their somatic experiences and reflections in an interview. Several different categories of somatic phenomena emerged, which included physical sensations, physiological responses, medical conditions, behavioral impulses, postural shifts, emotions, and conceptual images. The images and themes conveyed participants' conceptual understandings of somatic field dynamics.

The study found that participants unanimously related to the Wounded Healer archetype, agreeing that their wounding experiences played a significant role in their therapeutic work, including but not limited to their vocational call, countertransference, heightened awareness and understanding, and increased capacity for empathy. The majority of participants made a variety of meaningful connections between their wounding experiences and somatic experiences. Specific types of somatic experiences were related to areas of the body that were either previously injured, ill, or associated with previous emotional traumas. The necessity of self-care was emphasized as it related to their wounds, discernment processes, and perceived demands of the profession.

The findings of this study validate the significance of therapists' somatic experiences, highlight the presence of both personal and interactive field dynamics, and suggest that the therapist's own woundedness deepens empathy and thus predisposes one to somatic experiences. Participants used their somatic experiences to further explore and deepen into the psychotherapeutic work.

Sacrifice, Soma, and Spontaneity: Partners in an Integrative Psychology. Literature review looks at the anthropology of sacrificial process, the phenomenology of sacred space, and the sacrificial dimensions of archetypal psychology. Research examines how gender may impact the construction and expression of sacrifice in establishing transformative space.

Donald Winnicott's radical existential psychoanalytic understanding of transitional awareness and transitional relatedness is an amazing and little used doorway for today's psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. In today's cognitive clinical culture we have become cognitions tampering with cognitions. Life as cognition. Existential Ontology Winnicott's creative understanding of our capacity for transitional awareness and transitional relatedness intertwines both our personal psychology and our innermost experience of our own existential ontology. Transitional knowingness intertwines both our mind and our primordial awareness field. Our field of awareness knows the field of Being since awareness is the field of Being. Transitional awareness intertwines both our mind and our psyche. Donald Winnicott's phenomenological understanding of the self radicalizes our sense of self from being a representational picture or cognitive affective schema or synthesis of disparate psychological part's to a fluid sense of self as a direct experiential felt sense of ongoing continuity of Being. Our knowingness though the medium of awareness, opens for us the direct knowing of the experience of Being. The experience of Being is for us our sense of natural spirituality. Our liminal transitional awareness field opens us into the immediate ongoing intimate experience of Being. This experience of Being is of Being within our very own self and of Being within our very own relational life-world. Ordinary Personhood We, as a most ordinary person, can experience the unfolding movement of the experiencing of Being within our own self as our self, and simultaneously, the unfolding experiencing of our own being as the being-ness of Being which is the Being of the world. As we experience the Being .

This literature review covers research evidence showing the benefits of nature connection for depressive symptoms in Section I, and explores which techniques and interventions have been developed by the field especially as it incorporates mindfulness and somatic modalities in Section II. It seeks to answer the research questions: is Ecotherapy an evidence-based practice with research demonstrating what mechanisms of human psychology it might be operating by to produce beneficial effects? Can Ecotherapy alleviate symptoms of clinical depression? Are there specific modalities, techniques, and interventions developed by the field to implement the research findings in an applied, clinical setting? The gap in the literature this author focuses on is how to integrate nature connection with modalities of Hakomi mindfulness-based somatic psychotherapy, psychodrama experiential drama therapy group work, and Wilderness Rites of Passage.

Keywords: Ecotherapy, ecopsychology, nature-assisted therapy, more-than-human-community, nature connection, connectedness to nature, connectivity with nature, time in nature, green care, green exercise, emotional affinity toward nature, nature relatedness, ecological self, Gaia hypothesis, biophilia, depression, depressive disorders, affective disorders, mood disorders, Major Depressive Disorder, mindfulness, interdependence, interbeing, interpenetration, embedment, somatic, body therapy, embodiment, ecosomatic, experiential therapy, role play, psychodrama, action methods, walk and talk, Hakomi, Focusing, Dance Movement Therapy, Shinrin-Yoku, forest bathing, wilderness rites of passage, rites of passage

It is not uncommon to mistake social norms about bodies as also physically natural, psychologically healthy, and morally right. As a result, it is easy to minimize the cost required to bring the body into compliance with social norms of physical appearance and comportment. Likewise, it can be tempting to dismiss how frequently we judge the worth of others based on the degree to which they conform to prevailing body image ideals. Queering/querying the body provides a means for disrupting social norms of the body; not by expanding the repertoire of socially acceptable bodily expressions, but by working to disable the act of body norming itself. This disabling can be facilitated by a turn toward the lived, felt experience of the body and an intentional cultivation of the body's deep curiosity. By privileging sensation, attending to movement impulses, and honoring embodied intuition, we access a subjective data set that informs (and potentially, transforms) our relationship to objective body standards. In this way, the disruption of body norms becomes not only a strategy for resistance against oppression, but a process of creative, sensual inquiry that each body engages as an ongoing liberatory praxis. Author Bio Rae Johnson, PhD, RSMT is a queer-identified scholar working at the intersection of somatic studies and social justice. Key themes in their work include the embodied experience of oppression, somatic approaches to research, and the poetic body. Rae has held academic leadership positions in several somatic psychology graduate programs, and is the author of three books: Elemental Movement, Knowing in our Bones and Embodied Social Justice.

Carl Jung describes how the human unconscious is the hidden cosmological archetypal dimension of our being in the world. There is the personal unconscious that reflects personal history and experience either forgotten or foreclosed. There is another unconscious that is more primary, pre-reflective and cosmological in origin. In the language of the ancient Phenomenological Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, this existential dimension of archetypal manifestation is called the Sambogakaya realm of experience. This is the subtle realm of lucid forms of light and energy and vortices. These forms of light and energy field configurations become everything and anything. The Sambogakaya dimension manifests the Nirmanakaya dimension. The Nirmanakaya dimension is the actual experience of our self in contextual situations, unfolding through time and space as well as our unfolding of our personal psychological experience. Nirmanakaya is the dimension of our ordinary life world. Nirmanakaya is our being in the world. There is one more dimension. This dimension is the primordial foundational ground of everything and anything. In the ancient tradition of Dzogchen this is named as the Dharmakaya. Dharmakaya is the existential dimension of pure potentiality, pure creativity from which everything and anything manifests. Dharmakaya manifests the Sambogakaya. Dharmakaya is ground awareness, the ground of being. Dharmakaya is Being. Being is not a being but Being manifesting being as infinite numbers of numerous beings. All beings are the manifestation of Being. Dharmakaya is not an entity but manifests infinite numbers of entities.

Embodiment or embodied awareness is a way of understanding the body. The body is not simply the external body, the body is the lived body. Both the 10 th century Kashmir philosopher Abhinavagupta and the contemporary French phenomenologist Merleau Ponty have a similar view of the lived body, or better 'lived' embodiment. A person may have a most beautiful external objective body but minimally lived in. Embodiment allows us to understand and conceive of the body as a way of living, experiencing and of perceiving through the medium of our embodiment. The body is the medium of the field. A person perceives not simply through eyes and ears alone, but through the whole body. Our body is an instrument of perception. Our body is an instrument of knowingness. The embodiment of awareness is the lived embodying of primordial awareness that liberates our being in the world. The embodiment of awakened awareness pulsates in resonance with and within Being itself.

http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-7091-1382-0
Applied conversation analytic research seeks to understand the ways in which conversational practices are modified in order to fulfill institutional aims. Psychotherapy is one such institution, and in recent years, a research literature has developed in which conversation analysis has been applied to psychotherapy interaction. This chapter provides an overview of the five main features of talk-in-interaction of interest in conversation analysis: turn-taking, sequence organization, repair, word selection, and action formation. An extract from psychotherapy interaction is explored in relation to each of these five features of talk. The analytic lens of conversation analysis and its conceptualization of key phenomena are different in many respects to that of traditional psychotherapy research. Moreover, when directed towards psychotherapy, selection of material has been, in the main, in accordance with conversation analytically informed, as opposed to therapy-informed, observations. The result is that conversation analytic research may seem psychologically shallow to the psychotherapy community: too removed from basic assumptions about human subjectivity and mute on questions of experiential change which are likely of interest to therapists. However, this therapy-neutral orientation may be a significant strength in allowing conversation analysis to complement and enhance process research through revealing what psychotherapy may not notice about itself.

These are a few thoughts, written fairly quickly, on my misgivings with the currently fashionable attempts to (re-)include the body into psychotherapy. As a Body Psychotherapist, I am supposed to be all in favour of that re-inclusion. However, "how can we seriously imagine that bringing the body back after 100 years of disembodied 'talking therapies' is just a question of a few new techniques?" After spending 20 years making noise, trying to get the body noticed in psychotherapy, we now have the opposite problem: we have reason to discourage all kinds of well-intentioned strategies of 'using' the body in psychotherapy, as we now need to be precise and principled about how to include it. Are we doing justice to the body (the spontaneous, vibrant, alive body that we had in mind all along, as the embodied ground of a subjective sense of self) when that body is becoming another therapeutic 'tool' ? I formulate some ideas for a 'prologomenon' (an initial critical survey of a topic, before making any fixed claims or drawing any final conclusions) for including the body in psychotherapy -some basic principles to be taken into account. These are some notes, rather than an elaborated argument, and I hope you find them useful as such, as a starting point for further discussion and exploration.

In the pandemic year of 2020, millions of people worldwide have been fighting the coronavirus by withholding touch.
The result is a global experiment in “touch deprivation,” the full outcome of which likely will not be known for years. But touch is an important ingredient in the human experience, and the lack of touch can affect physical and emotional wellbeing.

But as we practice social distancing to prevent the community spread of COVID-19, platonic physical touch among friends and colleagues is off limits. Hugs, high-fives, friendly pats on the back or anything that breaches the 2 meter rule are now taboo.
When physical contact becomes limited—or, in some cases, eliminated—people can develop a condition called touch starvation or touch deprivation.
While nothing can wholly replace the benefits of positive human touch, virtual alternatives can help alleviate the effects of touch starvation.

One Knower: Different Modes of Knowing In all philosophical and psychological traditions knowing has many different meanings. In Tibetan Buddhism there is nondual Dzogchen and in Hinduism there is nondual Kashmir Shaivism. In both these nondual traditions there is profound understanding that there is one knower with two different modes of knowing. My Mind Knowing You and Things One mode of our knowing is the conventional subject object knowing which is the mind knowing as the perceiver and the perceived. This is our ordinary knowing of mind, my mind knowing you and things. This is my mind knowing of all the various forms of otherness. This is my mind knowing of singular aspects of phenomena and my mind knowing, by discrimination, the differences within phenomena. This is my mind knowing of the reality of objects, and the actuality of events and situations. This is my mind knowing the reality of persons and sentient beings as well as non-sentient beings and things. This is my mind's natural mode of dualistic knowingness. My Knowing as Direct Perception As humans knowing we both have and are this wonderful other mode of knowing. In Dzogchen this is the great knowing of awareness and through awareness, and this knowing described as direct perception is often called gnosis, or jnana, or ye she. Kashmir Shaivism names this dimension of knowing of this vast field of awareness/consciousness vimarsa. This vast

For much of my personal and professional life I have had an enduring interest in the distinction between mind and awareness. As my education unfolded over these many years, I have been happy to recognize that this distinction between mind and awareness is of serious consideration in continental phenomenology, in forms of psychoanalytic understanding such as the object relations work of Donald Winnicott, as well as in many forms of the experiential psychotherapies such as Gestalt, experiential focusing, in Ericksonian hypnosis, structural family therapy, archetypal psychotherapy, existential psychotherapy, existential psychoanalysis to name a few. When I began to extend my interest based on continental phenomenology into the eastern wisdom traditions, I found the same distinction within the Hindu Tantric tradition of Kashmir Shavism. Later in my life I found the same distinction within the Tibetan non-dual Nyingma tradition of Dzogchen. In my study of the Qi Gong tradition, I had the good fortune of being able to study for a number of years with Dr. Yan Xin who is a most remarkable healer and who has this same distinction of mind and awareness in his form of Daoist Qi Gong. From an historical view point, this distinction of mind and awareness was central in gnostic philosophy and gnostic theology. In contemporary Jungian archetypal psychology there is a similar distinction between the knowing of mind of ordinary life world of lived experience and the knowing of the archetypal dimension of lived experience, as well as the knowing of the primordial awareness dimension of pure potentiality. I have also had this interest in and through the phenomena of my own knowingness, the knowing of self, the knowing of others and of knowing of the encompassing nature of Existential Being. I have had for as long as I can remember, the sense of the explicit experience of my mind as explicit thoughts, and explicit feelings and explicit sensations and explicit imaginative imagery, and at the same time a subtle sense of tacit or implicate or implicit sense of intuitive knowing. In this way I have always felt I had two ways of knowing.

Mind Alone For many years psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy was singularly centered on the unconscious mind and conscious mind. There was only mind and the mind could become aware of its own self and its own representational realm. The self itself was representational and the emphasis on the mind was in the light of analytic thinking and analytic observation. There was an emphasis on objectification of mental phenomena and subjectivity itself. Knowing was knowledge by association, by reflection and mediation by linguistic signifiers. Knowing was neither non-conceptual nor pre-reflective, nor was there a place for direct experiential knowingness. Knowing was associated as mind alone and singular mind functions such as thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and imagination. Transitional Space as Space of Awareness With the presentation of the work of Donald Winnicott there was a shift in the psychoanalytic understanding of knowingness. A similar change in psychoanalytic thinking about knowing was also taking place in the Jungian and archetypal analytic schools. In psychotherapy Winnicott emphasizes a focus on the suspension of mind and in the process of suspension of mind, awareness was freed to focus within awareness, free to focus itself on itself. In the suspension of mind (a Winnicottian form of the phenomenological reduction,) the patient relocates themselves. The patient relocates from being located in mind alone or even located in a particular function of mind alone such as: feeling function or thinking function or sensation function or memory function; the patient enters or relocates themselves into the intermediate area of experience. This intermediate area of experience or this in-between space of experience is also described as the transitional area of experience and relatedness. Sometime this place is also described as the place of potential space. The sense of self shifts from being located in the mind or mental function of the mind into the more embodied sense of spacious awareness or as the place of potential space. Winnicott would described this knowing

In becoming aware of we go beyond our mind into the spaciousness of awareness, the great expanse. Going beyond our mind into the spaciousness of awareness the radiance of awareness becomes manifest. Within the radiance of awareness we are opened to experiencethe radiance of phenomena. Experiencing the radiance of our own awareness allows us to experience awareness the radiance of phenomena. Self liberation is experiencing the radiance of phenomena within the spaciousness of phenomena. Radiance and spaciousness are in oneness and are completely indivisible. In being in the field of awareness and gazing into awareness both within andwithout, you and I are able to experience the oneness of spaciousness and appearance, the indivisibility of emptiness and appearance, the indivisibility of radiance and appearance. You can experience the radiance of phenomena. The radiance of your own awareness and the radiance of all phenomena are in non-duality and are indivisible. You can even experience the self arising of radiance as the elements, the light particles, the luminous rays of radiance becoming phenomena. Light appearing as appearance.

Focusing-oriented therapy shows a great sensitivity towards a client’s felt sense and the need to be with that ‘something’ in a special way. Yet where the therapeutic relationship fits in, so important in other therapies, is far less clear. Sometimes it seems as if focusing is merely a subjective process that could be done just as well alone.

I disagree. Using Gendlin’s concept of ‘interaffecting first’ I am developing a focusing-oriented practice where the therapeutic relationship has a pivotal place. I work with ‘addicts’ and ‘substance misusers’, people who seem to absent themselves in so many ways. A strong ‘being-with’, an intersubjective felt sense, seems just the right way to address their ‘being-without’.
This session builds on a presentation made in Awaji in 2009. Alan Tidmarsh is a focusing-oriented therapist in Norwich, UK, working with substance abusers. He is studying for a PhD on focusing-oriented therapy and ‘addiction’.

1. Welcome to our study of the phenomenology of awareness and the power of the awareness field. Edmund Husserl, who was the father of phenomenology, would always say at the beginning of each lecture… "What is the wonder of all wonders? Pure consciousness; and the doorway is our own subjectivity." 2. As we know from our last meeting, phenomenology influenced both western philosophy and western psychotherapy. Western phenomenology is very similar in both view and method to Dzogchen meditation which is a form of eastern meditative practice. Both phenomenology and Dzogchen are interested in the power of becoming aware of awareness itself…where the object of awareness becomes its own self. Moreover, in both phenomenology and Dzogchen, when one becomes aware of ones own awareness, the person experiences that their mind is not their awareness, awareness is not a thought, or affect, or sensation, or fantasy or even memory, but rather awareness is simply open knowingness….a non conceptual knowingness….a gaze of direct perception. And if one is able to stay with this knowingness of knowingness there appears the next discovery…when one becomes awareness of awareness itself. This awareness is a field……this field goes beyond the body boundaries…goes beyond the mind. 2c. Then if one wishes, or if one desires, the person can make one more reduction, or one more suspension and one suspends the inside and outside, one suspends their awareness of objects of mind or objects outside the mind, one suspends everything and one turns the gaze back on itself, one gazes into the gaze…one gazes into awareness itself...and in doing so one enters into awareness and even becomes awareness itself…in gazing into awareness the qualities of awareness begin to manifest…including spaciousness, energy, light and oneness….the oneness of the field…One discovers that this awareness has field characteristics, opens and closes, contracts and expands, it has depth and breath and the perception of this field can be extended and extended and this field is completely multidimensional. Ultimately, this field is direct perception, perception of the manifestations of awareness…manifestation in ones own self, manifestation in the other and also the manifestation of the field of awareness in this world. 3. This field has great power. The first power of the awareness field is that it becomes the base of experience, rather then our mind or a particular function of the mind. The awareness field and the qualities of the awareness field which are spaciousness, energy, lucidity and oneness become the base of our experience, and the mind and functions of the mind can be integrated into this base of oneness. Thus the mind or ego begins to experience itself in the oneness of the field, and the functions of the mind become infused by awareness field. One begins to live in and through the field. 4. The second power is that besides having the power to integrate ones mind functions

In his later life Maurice Merleau Ponty changed his understanding of how human beings know Being and how human beings know phenomena. His mature understanding went far beyond the early phenomenology of Husserl. His understanding and intellectual position about the subjectivity of mind alone with its corresponding subject object duality dissolved into a experience of non duality within appearance. His dualistic understanding about Being changed to the vast nondual awareness of Being as the source of both subjectivity and objectivity. Before his work on the Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty's thought was contained by equating subjectivity with mind alone and with object alone. His view was dualistic and the source of knowing was located in mind alone. Mind means the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, memory and fantasy.

The past year has witnessed the passing of many friends, including two of the iconic pioneers of humanistic and transpersonal psychology, Michael Harner and Stanley Keleman. Both men were highly original and innovative thinkers, major contributors to the field, and widely acknowledged co-creators of the Human Potential Movement whom I've had the distinct pleasure of knowing as mentors, colleagues, and personal friends for many decades.

This paper compares the analytic and experiential approaches to dreams in order to illuminate the intrinsic and necessary relationships between the two understandings. It describes how dream work reflects the bimodalness of symbolism, thought and ultimately human consciousness. An extended example of dream work reflecting both analytic and experiential modalities is presented.

Consciousness-expanding psychoactive substances have been used for thousands of years in ritualistic applications by many cultures to enhance and assist healing, such as known in Siberian, South-American, and African Shamanism. After three decades of worldwide prohibition, in the last few years, clinical treatments with entheogenic substances have again become possible within strictly controlled scientiific studies, including the application of LSD and psilocybin with terminal-ill cancer patients, and of MDMA with individuals with posttraumatic-stress-disorder , and ibogaine and ayahuasca for individuals with drug addiction.
In this lecture, a transpersonal psychotherapeutic approach, integrating interventions with different psychotropic substances will be presented. Non-ordinary spiritual/mystical and/or overwhelming experiences cannot be reached with ordinary states of consciousness. Methods such as breathwork, drumming/shamanic journeying, or journeying with psychoactive inducing altered states of consciousness might support the healing work and integration of such experiences. Examples of  authentic cases will be provided along with evidence from research findings. The possibilities and limits of a transpersonal psychotherapy with psychotropic substances will be discussed, and the importance of a safe setting will be outlined. Further space will be given for the sharing of personal experiences.