2021 Online MindBody Therapy Summit Schedule

 DAY 1: Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021

Our host - Dr. Scott Lyons

6am PDT (Los Angeles) / 9am EDT (New York) / 2pm GMT (London) / 3pm CET (Paris) / 11pm AEST (Sydney)

Francesca Maximé, LMSW, SEP, CMT-P, IFOT, RLT, CFP

8am PDT (Los Angeles) / 11am EDT (New York) / 4pm GMT (London) / 5pm CET (Paris) / 1am Thursday AEST (Sydney)

This webinar will support a framework for living a more embodied, balanced, and antiracist life, becoming a more involved global community member, strong ally, and co-conspirator. Becoming an embodied antiracist requires that we understand ourselves as racialized beings, no matter what race or ethnicity.

We’ll use Francesca’s “all my relations” Indigenous lens to demystify “rugged individualism” and explore and deepen our natural interconnectedness. We’ll invite curiosity around our own felt sense and bodily responses to conversations around race while learning supportive ways to stay in the conversation with equanimity, openness, and balance by leveraging basic somatic nervous system regulation techniques. We’ll explore ethical principles and frameworks, look at racialized trauma and shame as a moral injury, and why processing and metabolizing intergenerational grief through collective mourning is critical to healing and shared liberation.

Participants will explore:

• The roots of racialized trauma.

• How trauma lives and presents differently in white and non-white bodies.

• To move from unconscious reactivity to a more enlightened response in situations pertaining to racial and racialized trauma.

• To prepare their nervous systems to participate in conversations around race.

Shiva Rea

10am PDT (Los Angeles) / 1pm EDT (New York) / 6pm GMT (London) / 7pm CET (Paris) / 3am Thursday AEST (Sydney)

Embodying Flow is an offering of slow flow movement meditation for all. Based on the roots of prostrations and evolving into five elemental variations, we will explore the power of moving close to the earth and rising for support, transformation of stress, inner-listening, and whole-body integration.

Arawana Hayashi

12pm PDT (Los Angeles) / 3pm EDT (New York) / 8pm GMT (London) / 9pm CET (Paris) / 5am Thursday AEST (Sydney)

Frances D. Booth, LICSW

2pm PDT (Los Angeles) / 5pm EDT (New York) / 10pm GMT (London) / 11pm CET (Paris) / 7am Thursday AEST (Sydney)

Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy is a brilliant, integrative body of work from Susan McConnell, who brings a somatic approach to the evidenced-based IFS Model, founded by Dr. Richard Schwartz. McConnell integrates her experience and training in various bodywork, movement, body psychotherapy and spiritual modalities culminating in Somatic IFS.

Her book, Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy: Awareness, Breath, Resonance, Movement and Touch, published in 2020, integrates nonverbal processes, spiritual practices, and psychotherapy to embody the internal system and has application in a wide variety of settings.

This workshop will delineate the six practices of Somatic IFS: Awareness, Breath, Resonance, Movement, Touch and Embodied Self. The practices offer a path to a deeper connection to the family within, our parts, and to our alive, essential core, Self. The seminar will be didactic and experiential.

Participants will learn:

• The IFS view of parts and Self.

• The six practices of Somatic IFS.

• A guided exploration of somatic awareness.

Staci Haines

4pm PDT (Los Angeles) / 7pm EDT (New York) / 12am Thursday GMT (London) / 1am Thursday CET (Paris) / 9am Thursday AEST (Sydney)

Somatics understands safety, belonging, and dignity as core humans needs. Trauma, oppression, and privilege impact these, and we have predictable adaptive responses including -- fight, flight, freeze, appease, and dissociate. These survival strategies tend to generalize in us, and we can’t not do them when we face stress again.

We can work with these automatic reactions, though. We can either transform them, or befriend them in ways that give us more choices. We can then respond based on our values, rather than react from our survival strategies.

In this session we’ll explore how survival strategies live in our thinking, bodies, actions, and relationships. We’ll learn embodied theories to understand trauma and healing, our adaptive strategies, and how we are shaped by our personal experiences and social conditions. We’ll explore how to transform this shaping, including; blend and befriend, new embodied skills, and somatic allyship.

Participants will learn:

• An embodied understanding of personal and collective trauma.

• The power of bending and befriending, new practices, and somatic allyship.

• Aligning our practices, relations, and actions with what we most care about.

DAY 3: Friday, June 4th, 2021

Dr. Daniel Foor

6am PDT (Los Angeles) / 9am EDT (New York) / 2pm GMT (London) / 3pm CET (Paris) / 11pm AEST (Sydney)

Proactive inclusion of the body and somatic awareness is healthy and corrective; however, without a deeper inquiry into racist, colonialist, and classist assumptions that pervade the field of psychology and related healing arts, practitioners are still at risk of unconsciously enacting cultural harm with their clients and teachings. This type of sustained depth inquiry can be joyful, connective, and liberating for practitioners and clients alike.

A decolonized approach to healing arts foregrounds the reality that humans are not isolated, alone, or somehow above the many others. To the contrary, the ancestors, animals, plants, mountains, rivers, deities, and other powers seen and unseen are not only part of the larger ecology of life here on Earth but relevant players in good diagnoses, treatments, and clinical outcomes. This basic understand is a given for the several hundred thousand years of healing arts that predate the conception of modern Euro-centric psychologies.

Our time will focus on ways to re-enliven the field of psychology and related healing arts with older and returning relational wisdoms. This will include: exploring fears of professional punishment for openly honoring the rest of life, pragmatic strategies to consciously reclaim animist sensibilities, and tangible ways to weave a more relational framework into healing sessions with clients.

No prior experience with ritual arts, the field of mental health, or deep cultural self-examination required. We'll have a good time with the learning! Expect time for some Q&A and an experiential practice.

In this session you will:

• Ways to recognize and start to address colonialist bias in their lives, training, and practice with others.

• Tangible strategies/practices for weaving a more relational framework in healing practices.

• Ways to increase cultural competency when serving clients who are Black, Indigenous, and People and Color, LGBTQ, and otherwise not fitting the normative, English-speaking, Euro-centric model of the field of psychology.
  
  

Dr. Stephen Porges & Dr. Pat Ogden & Dr. Albert Wong

8am PDT (Los Angeles) / 11am EDT (New York) / 4pm GMT (London) / 5pm CET (Paris) / 1am Saturday AEST (Sydney)

Dr. Leanne Campbell

10am PDT (Los Angeles) / 1pm EDT (New York) / 6pm GMT (London) / 7pm CET (Paris) / 3am Saturday AEST (Sydney)

EFIT is an attachment science-based approach to individual therapy that, like the other EFT interventions, EFCT for couples and EFFT for families, offers an integration of humanistic, experiential and systemic interventions focused on reshaping intrapsychic experience and patterns of engagement with significant others. Emotion is given precedence given its powerful role in structuring both inner experience and motivation and key interactional patterns in relationships. Emotion links and organizes core experience and interaction. Although best known as a potent couple intervention, EFT has always, from its inception, been used in clinical practice with individuals, especially with clients dealing with depression and anxiety and the impacts of trauma. This workshop will provide a brief introduction to the theory and practice of EFIT, with a focus on illustrating how the EFIT therapist works with bodily sensations and harnesses the power of the body’s close companion - emotion - in transforming trauma

By the end of this workshop, participants will have an introduction to:

• The key elements of the attachment perspective on personality and its significance in understanding and addressing the impacts of trauma.

• The elements of the EFT Tango and the process of change in EFIT.

• Some of the micro-interventions used by the EFT therapist to gradually move clients into transformative moments where vulnerabilities are encountered in the presence of another, fostering trauma resolution and a stronger sense of balance, coherence and competence.

Dr. Richard Strozzi-Heckler

12pm PDT (Los Angeles) / 3pm EDT (New York) / 8pm GMT (London) / 9pm CET (Paris) / 5am Saturday AEST (Sydney)

We will explore the distinctions and the practices of somatic transformation as used by the Strozzi Institute Somatic Coaching Course.

Dr. Dionne Bates

2pm PDT (Los Angeles) / 5pm EDT (New York) / 10pm GMT (London) / 11pm CET (Paris) / 7am Saturday AEST (Sydney)

Emotional Consciousness: Moving from Soothing to Nurturing will explore the difference between soothing and nurturing emotions. Additionally, this course will examine how emotional awareness can facilitate self-affirmation, self-worth enhancement, improve self-worth mastery, and restore mental and emotional energy.

Participants will:

• Learn the difference between soothing and nurturing emotions;

• Practice identifying and acknowledging emotions, and where present in the body;

• Learn to recognize the difference between relieving emotional discomfort and nourishing emotional healing.

Steven C. Hayes, PhD

4pm PDT (Los Angeles) / 7pm EDT (New York) / 12am Saturday GMT (London) / 1am Saturday CET (Paris) / 9am Saturday AEST (Sydney)

A vast number of studies have examined processes of change in psychological interventions. Based on a recently concludes comprehensive meta-analysis of these processes, I will describe how therapists can based their intervention work on this entire body of evidence by using an expanded version of the psychological flexibility model that underlies Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or Training (ACT), whether or not they use ACT methods per se. I will also show that the six core processes of change in the psychological flexibility model can be physically embodied, leading to more powerful interventions that are better remembered and used. According to the psychological flexibility model, psychopathology and reduced human functioning can usually be traced to inflexible approaches to affect, cognition, attention, perspective taking, meaning, and over action. Human suffering is marked by experiential avoidance or attachment, cognitive entanglement, attentional inflexibility linked to an excessive focus on the past or future, attachment to a conceptualized self, lack of chosen values, and failure to take needed behavioral steps in accord with core values. Clients can readily display these processes metaphorically using their body, even without any intervention at all, suggesting that they know what is unhealthy even if they are unable to state the problem in words. Transforming human lives pivots on the creation of greater psychological flexibility through acceptance, defusion, flexible contact with the now, perspective taking, values, and effective action. Each of these processes can be fostered by body-focused interventions, suggesting a useful interaction between body-focused interventions and those drawn from contemporary work in processes of psychological change.

Students will learn:

• To describe the six key processes of change in the psychological flexibility model.

• How to identify the underlying human yearnings in psychological flexibility and inflexibility and to link them to body awareness.

• How to use at least one technique for embodying each of the six flexibility processes.

DAY 5: Sunday, June 6th, 2021

Nikki Myers

6am PDT (Los Angeles) / 9am EDT (New York) / 2pm GMT (London) / 3pm CET (Paris) / 11pm AEST (Sydney)

Connecting the Dots, Addiction, Trauma, Race & Yoga Using wisdom from the ancient yogic texts, western psychology, and trauma healing methodologies as a basis, this session explores the connection between addiction and trauma and how yoga philosophy and practices offer insight into healing. With trauma as a through-line, we will also explore the back-breaking cost - for all of us - of living in a racialized society and the liberation that is possible in transforming it.

Students will be introduced to:

• A framework for recovery based in a definition of addiction that extends beyond substance and process

• A lens into the neurobiology and physiology of trauma and the relationship between addiction and racism

• Yogic and embodiment practices that support healing all manifestations of addiction

Lauren Taus

8am PDT (Los Angeles) / 11am EDT (New York) / 4pm GMT (London) / 5pm CET (Paris) / 1am Sunday AEST (Sydney)

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist and founder of Inbodied Life Therapy Lauren Taus will support a deeper understanding of psychedelic experiences (with and without medicine), the importance of integration and the essential role of embodiment in any healing or homecoming journey. Lauren will break down the concept of psychedelics so that you can see how your whole life is one giant trip, and your practice of living is one of both integration - and disintegration. How do we re-member ourselves and engage in daily rituals of self care?

Lauren will share personal and anecdotal stories to teach you about epigenetics, therapy, drugs and yoga. Expect to explore certain areas of your life that feel disconnected, shut down and repressed while learning how to re-member yourself in an embodied way because, my friends, you have to feel it to heal it!

Explore intergenerational, transpersonal and collective content in conversation, and practice feeling with breath, sound, movement and touch. Bring your body, your breath and your imagination.

What you will learn:

• How psychedelics can support deeper levels of integrative wellness

• Basic tools to facilitate healing, embodiment and presence in your life

• How to engage with yourself in a kind and compassionate way

Closing Ceremony & Concert

10am PDT (Los Angeles) / 1pm EDT (New York) / 6pm GMT (London) / 7pm CET (Paris) / 3am Sunday AEST (Sydney)

Join Dr. Scott Lyons and other presenters for the Closing Ceremony, including a sound experience with Amy Thiessen.