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The Body in the Transformation of Consciousness -
Awakening Joy at the Heart of Being.
"Nature never gives up on us. The earth's wild, primal elegance calls deep inside us to explore that sacredness, that untamed beauty and mystery."
Mark Coleman
The rainbow of our experiencing, our psyche, is embedded in the life of our body. Our body is our most immediate home on earth. Here live our stories, our joys, fears and hopes, sculpted in the flesh of our being. Our body is as well the guardian of our insights and intuitions, of our longing-to-become, and of our celebration of life on earth.
When we give a creative voice to the body in the healing of the psyche, our mental-emotional transformation is supported, sustained and shared by our life force and we grow both physically and emotionally into a freer range of motion and emotion, awakening new, cherished possibilities for well-being, serenity and joy.
In this course, you will engage body, mind, emotions and imagination in creative practices such as expressive movement, kinesthetic awareness practices, active imagination as dialogue with the body, poetic writing, enactment and painting. You will reflect on the role of the body in psychotherapy and explore skills and practices to attend empathically to the movement of joyful transformation in self and other.
Dreaming the Soul – Dancing the Dream:
Jungian Dream Work, the Body and Expressive Arts
with Sophia Reinders, Ph.D., MFT
Experiencing dream images as alive, with body, allows the intelligence that is inherent in the living image to become known.
Stephen Aizenstat
For Jung, psyche reveals itself in its creative images which beckon us to befriend the intuitive wisdom they offer, guiding and nurturing us towards greater balance and wholeness. In the images of our night world we witness the mysteries of the soul. Dreams, Jung says, are messengers of meanings that are embodied and inscribed in the images themselves. As we explore dream images creatively and attune ourselves to the imagistic qualities of their shapes and colors, their volumes, movements and rhythms, they disclose new insights and evoke rich intuitive resonances, while they remain rooted in their fertile, imaginal ground.
This course offers a reflective and a creative, embodied exploration of dream work from a Jungian perspective, as a process of befriending the soul. Students will engage the images of their night worlds with creative practices such as movement and painting, enactment, story-making and active imagination through the body. They will dance their dreams to discover, befriend and harvest the dream’s messages for growth, transformation and healing.
Body, Psyche, Creativity: Jung and BeyondThis course offers an academic, experiential and creative exploration of Jungian psychology and its contemporary developments. At the heart of Jung's understanding of psyche, or soul, lies a vision of interconnectedness, of living and inseparable relationships between consciousness and the unconscious, between self and other, psyche and matter, body, psyche and world. Jung refers to this living fabric of relationships as unus mundus, a term borrowed from Medieval philosophy which means "one unitary world".
Participating to the fullest in this organic fabric of inner and outer life is, for Jung, the ground and the intent of human life. At the level of humankind, this capacity is an intrinsic reality of the soul in its transpersonal, archetypal dimension. At the level of the individual, this capacity is a potential, a seed, embedded in our body-mind-spirit organism. As potential, however, it has to be brought to fruition through our own personal life. It has to come into being, Jung says, through our own unfolding and development towards wholeness which he calls the journey towards individuation. This uniquely human journey through the landscapes of the soul, is shared in its destiny, while its path is ever new, traced by the unique itinerary of each individual life. Engaging in symbolic and creative processes such as art, movement and voice, active imagination and enactment, students in this course will give expression to the dynamic unfolding of the individuation process, and will explore the body as an integral dimension of the journey towards wholeness.
This course offers a reflective, experiential and creative exploration of dream work from a Jungian perspective, as a process of befriending the soul. The Greek word for dream is oneiros which means image. In the images of our night world, at once personal and ancient, we encounter the mysteries of the soul. Through the ages, humans have experienced dreams as meaningful or as numinous, imbued with a special power or a special wisdom. Their textures, their imagistic and emotional qualities stir and engage us, while remaining at the same time elusive to our grasp.
Dreams, Jung says, invite an intimate encounter with the soul, an encounter that offers the possibility for expanding and deepening one's sense of self and one's experience of the world. When we entrust our perception to the imaginal mind and approach the dream as an imaginative expression of the soul, this encounter becomes a celebration at once of meaning and of mystery. As we engage these images through imagistic, kinesthetic and symbolic perception, sensitive to their sensuous elements and their feeling tones, they release new insights in our intuitive mind and evoke rich resonance in our soul, while remaining rooted in their imaginal ground. Throughout this course, students will keep a dream journal which may include drawings and poems. Engaging their dreams intuitively and creatively, they will explore metaphoric, symbolic, process-oriented, body-based and artistic ways of encountering their own dreams and experience the dream's potential to nourish, guide and heal.
Yoga as Psychospiritual Practice I:The Art of Awareness
Ancient Eastern Wisdom Traditions see the body as a sacred instrument of the Spirit and a vessel of transformation. The tool for this transformation is yoga, revealed and sanctified by Lord Shiva. At the center of this course lies the practice of asanas (yoga postures), breath work (pranayama) and meditation. These yogic disciplines will be approached as an embodied practice of attention, awareness, mindfulness and kindness. This practice, in turn, leads to an embodied process of transformation resulting in a greater degree of integration of the experience of body, emotions, mind, and spirit. The asanas of the practice sessions will cluster around different aspects of the body mind, such as exploring and extending the spine, opening the hips, opening chest and heart, releasing the shoulders, exploring the energy flow within the body, and encountering the emotions as they are released from the body.
The practices of this course will bring greater presence, flexibility, strength and spontaneity to the body as felt and greater awareness of the body as instrument of the spirit. In practicing yogic postures with awareness, students will experience a shift in attitude towards - and consciousness of - the body as both personal and transpersonal dimensions of our life through which we give form and expression to the shared mystery of being.
The Art of Breathing
In the Indo-European languages, the words for "breath" often also denote "spirit" or "psyche". In the sacred scriptures of Hinduism, the breath is an external aspect, a form of manifestation of prana , the universal life force that interpenetrates and sustains all life. To the yogin, the breath is a constant reminder of the truth that we are identical with the great Life of the cosmos.
At the center of this course lies the academic, meditative-reflective and experiential exploration of the breath and the experience of breathing. The ability to concentrate on the breath and to engage in breathing with full awareness is supported by and embedded in the practice of asanas (yoga postures) which open chest and back, tone the diaphragm and the abdomen and create greater flexibility in shoulders and upper spine. The practices of this course will increase the ability to develop and sustain the embodied awareness of different dimensions of experience. They will enliven the felt sense of presence and spontaneity, of flexibility and strength. Students will enhance their ability to direct their attention, to explore the energy flow within the body, and to encounter and integrate the emotions as they are evoked through the practices and brought to awareness.
The ability to sustain a centered breathing pattern fosters the experience of attunement to the life force as it circulates in the body. It strengthens, calms and balances the body-mind as it is subjectively experienced and brings awareness to the body as instrument of the spirit.
This course is at once appropriate for students who wish to deepen and expand their practice as a sequel to "Yoga as Psychospiritual Practice I - The Art of Awareness" and for students who wish to begin their personal exploration of this psychospiritual practice.
Yoga as Psychospiritual Practice III:
Posture and Poise - The Art of Stillness
At the heart of every movement in body, thoughts and emotions lies a vibrant stillness.When we come home into our body, let the attention settle in the breath and immerse ourselves in a sensate, felt mode of discovering and exploring the patterns of our movements, we can experience a deep sense of vibrant stillness. In this open awareness, we can explore patterns of movement within the breath, the body and consciousness.
Practicing asanas within this spacious stillness allows the body to be alive with its own intelligence, its own ways of knowing, and transforms every asana into a dance of internal motion which radiates from the inside out as we yield to it. At the center of this course lies the academic, experiential and meditative-reflective exploration of stillness as the dynamic quality at the heart of movement in body, mind and spirit, given form and deepened through the practice of asanas, breath work and chanting. Cultivating stillness as vibrant presence leads to a mind which is spacious and peaceful, and a heart which is wide and joyous.
This course is at once appropriate for students who wish to deepen and expand their practice as a sequel to ãYoga as Psychospiritual Practice I and II and for students who wish to begin or continue their personal exploration of this psychospiritual practice.
Sophia Reinders, PhD, MFT, REAT
(415) 931-9507
Contact: sophia@wisdombody.com