The Well Attuned Therapist: Using Body and Breath to Enhance Relationality and Client Outcome
For Mental Health Practitioners, Therapists and Healing Practitioners
3-session live video webinar – Coming soon as an audio program
“Awareness of the body’s state influences how we organize our lives. Knowing your body strengthens your mind.” ― Daniel J. Siegel
What if you had a way of engaging with your client that strengthened resiliency, deepened interactive resonance, helped you maintain maximal attunement throughout the session and took your practice to the next level of effectiveness?
Research on Attachment Theory demonstrates the value of infusing the therapeutic relationship with qualities of close, intense, emotional, and physical attunement; this is the environment we attempt to recreate in therapy by offering an experience to make up for what the client missed in childhood. Now, include awareness and attunement of the breath and body to the formula and you have a holistic approach that brings your practice to the next level.
Teaching people to focus conscious attention upon, deepen and correctly adjust their respiratory movement (breath) is the next evolutionary step in therapeutic effectiveness.
We don’t think much about our breath – most of the time it happens all by itself; and yet with the recent research and positive discoveries in somatic therapies, our social engagement system and interpersonal neurobiology, we have a much greater understanding of just how significant human respiration is in reflecting (in the short and long run) the degree of neurophysiological overwhelm that takes place during traumatic experience.
Working with a client’s attention and body awareness with the breath contradicts the fearful threat messages associated with anxiety, phobia and PTSD. Respiration naturally regulates your autonomic nervous system, and when done intentionally, it can be one of the most powerful tools available to overwrite those old neurological “body-texts” that tell the mind something is wrong. Within a safe therapeutic container, teaching someone to breathe more fully, utilizing breath awareness and technique to manage overwhelm, as well as breathing with them creates an interpersonal resonance that maximizes therapeutic effectiveness.
This 3-part webinar series will introduce you to the most important aspects of conscious breathing, and how it can be used to manage anxiety, depression, overwhelm and trauma by rewiring the nervous system and increasing the therapeutic resonance with your client.
Each evening we will focus on one of these three key areas: Breath Awareness, Breath Technique and Breath Relationality (interconnection), and will explore experientially and didactically these key take-aways:
- How using the breath internally and interactively as a practitioner not only improves attunement and interconnection, but also helps you to retain maximum presence as well as stamina during the session
- How using the breath is a simple way to bring a client into body awareness, helping them to manage overwhelm, defensiveness and dissociation, and learn to feel safe with their internal dialogue and interpersonal space
- How the body and breath can work together to create mental, emotional and physical coherence, leading to a greater willingness for the client to choose to show up and feel empowered
- How interspersing conscious breathing with dialogue helps clients rewrite and tell more coherent stories surrounding past trauma
- How sharing the breath in session creates relational resonance (empathy, understanding and connection)
Each 90-minute live session you will have instruction, practice, and Q&A.
Session 1: BREATH AWARENESS: The Most Important Step to Re-training Attention, Embracing Reality and Healing Trauma
- ATTEND: 4 vital principles to understanding how the breath works
- The two gifts of Consciousness: Focal Attention and Conscious Breathing
- Brief history of conscious breathing and definition of some key concepts
- Client assessment: how/why we work with and develop the relationship between breath, body, emotion & conscious focal attention
- INTEND: how to align consciousness with body-breathing intelligence
- The Reset Breath exercise – clearing away stress energy
Session 2: BREATH TECHNIQUE: Why working with body, breath, heart and mind goes hand-in-hand with create positive leverage for change
- EXTEND: The What-When-Where-How to use breath techniques
- Why we shut down the breath: suppression and the trauma response
- Managing threat: the neurophysiological basis for conscious breathing
- What constitutes an Open Healthy Breath and why are only responsible for ‘half the journey’
- 5 Preparatory Palpations: how to feel the breath in our bodies
- The Relax and Re-center Breath – how to find inner equilibrium
Session 3: BREATH RELATIONALITY: How Uninhibited Respiration is a Perfect Goal for Resilient Health, Coherence and Interpersonal Connectivity
- TRANSCEND: Conscious Breathing as Conscious Evolution
- Breath Relationality – the essence of interpersonal neurobiology
- How conscious breathing inherently relaxes, self-regulates and integrates
- Somatic Breath Therapy: Using breath practices to deepen takeaways and reinforce positive habits
- Where do we go from here: techniques, attunement and resilience
- Coherent Breathing – The miracle of breath/heart/mind coherence
Details:
WHEN: Coming soon