Dates TBA

The purpose of this training is (1) to deepen intuitive bodywork skills, and (2) to learn how to more effectively integrate them with psychotherapy (and, to a lesser, extent, awakening practices).

When bodywork and psychotherapy happen at the same time, deeply healing work often results; this training will enhance your ability to facilitate such work.

INTRODUCTION
Bodywork is just that, working with the body.  There are many kinds of bodywork (massage being perhaps the best known), each with its own unique focus and practices, but the bodywork taught in this training belongs to no particular school.  It is intuitive, integral, creative, and connected.  It does not require detailed anatomical knowledge.  What it does require is presence, undivided attention, and an energetically attuned, emotionally literate, therapeutically-skilled connection to one’s clients.  When such bodywork unfolds in fitting rhythm with counselling savvy, emotional release, and spiritual deepening practices, optimal work occurs.

What we are is not “in” a body, but is making an appearance as a body, however gross or subtle.  By not letting the body speak its mind -- and not just speak, but sing, dance, weep, roar, and flow, becoming vividly alive and fully present -- we miss the wisdom that can arise from and through the awakening body, the body that is consciously lived and felt.  Such wisdom does not sit “above” one’s body, but rather coexists with and flows from it -- a fruitful encounter of awareness and feeling/sensation.
 
The insights generated by this are, however, not usually very accessible at first, tending to remain literally imbedded and all but mute until the body shifts from being a concrete, suppressed thing -- held hostage by our framing of it -- to an energetically fluid, largely de-suppressed expression of Being.
                       
The body does not lie, but reveals.
 
Whether or not we listen to its messages -- as articulated through its tensions, aches, leanings, cries, asymmetries, oddities of gesture, and so on -- it is always revealing not just where we have been, but also who we are busy being moment-to-moment.  The damage (and not just physical damage) we have done and have had done to ourselves is eloquently present in our bodies, regardless of the compensatory twists and turns we have taken. 

Intuitive bodywork, in intimate connection with integral counselling know-how, teaches us -- firsthand -- the relationship between our fleshiness and our nonphysical dimensions, giving us a well-grounded sense both of our boundaries and of our multileveled continuity with all that is, again and again creating for us a safe place to let go of being safe.  Such work, whether it’s hands-on or not, is necessarily deep much of the time, creatively and sensitively deep, inviting us to shift, level upon level, from frozen yesterday to fluidly grounded now.

The memory of what crippled -- and still cripples -- us waits in our cells, our tissues, our organs and fascia and skeletomuscular tensions, fresh as at the time it was first imprinted in us.  The trouble is, such memory is not primarily lodged in our everyday “awareness” -- its presence there usually being only spectral or mostly informational, having been stripped of most of its emotional intensity in its “translation” from the depths to the surface -- but rather in “older,” seemingly less accessible zones of our neurological makeup.  Not surprisingly, moving from the translation back to the “original” is far more than a merely cognitive exercise, perhaps most effectively facilitated through skilled bodywork-including psychotherapy.

Such work deepens our sensitivity to our “solutions” to our long-ago problems.  It grounds our investigation of ourselves, keeping it from the jaws of unneeded abstraction.  Such work is about returning to the scene of the crime with an open mind, a willing heart, and the courage to complete what was left incomplete then.

The training will be primarily hands-on, and highly experiential.  It is open to those who have completed a one-year Integral Psychotherapy Practicum with Robert. The maximum number of participants will be 14, so early registration is recommended.

LOCATION: TBA
 
TUITION:  CDN$2950 plus GST.
A deposit of  $750 is required,
payable to Robert Masters,
16133 9th Avenue, Surrey, BC  V4A 1A5.

For more information, contact info@RobertMasters.com