Thought-provoking ideas, and transformative tools and training for working with individuals, groups, organisations, and communities.
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Dear Reader How are your stress levels? When was the last time you felt not stressed? What are the biggest stressors in your life? How does stress manifest in your body? Yep, in the lead-up to Deep Bodywork in the Stress Epidemic, we’re all about stress! For many people, heightened levels of chronic stress have become the norm. What feels like ever-increasing pressures to perform and achieve and respond are taking their toll, as are increased instability of the economic, political, and environmental kind. There’s little doubt that stress is a factor in most chronic health issues, both physical and mental, around the world. But the way mainstream narratives conceptualise stress is problematic and doesn’t seem to be helping - dominant Western medical systems are hyper-individualistic and keep positioning stress as an issue of the individual but that just doesn’t make sense. It gets worse when we reach for advice about what to do about stress. Google “how to reduce stress” and you get lists of more things to do or buy, things you feel you don’t have time for, things that cost you money, or things that require massive amounts of inner discipline (as if you have access to lots of that when you're stressed). Almost all the tips reinforce the idea that stress is an issue of the individual that should be resolved by the individual, mostly by lifestyle changes. Hmm, really? In Process Work, we think there’s more to it than that. In Working with the Dreaming Body, Arnold Mindell (p 69) says: Illness is a dream; it’s a symptom of the incongruity of the world we live in. No one is sick by themselves; we all live in a field. In our upcoming Melbourne training, Through the Roof – Deep Bodywork in the Stress Epidemic, 22 & 23 March, you can learn the tools you need to work with body symptoms and stress as if they didn’t just belong to you but were part of a process belonging to the whole world. Exploring world processes through your body experiences not only helps you find more meaning in experiences of suffering (always nice) but also helps orient you to how you can best contribute to remedying the troubles of this world. And if you work with other people, either as some kind of therapist or bodyworker, the training will help you see bodies and symptoms in a new way and give you tools to do deeper, more transformative work with your clients. We all sense there’s a collective element to what looks like individual issues but we just get stuck on how to access these meaningful, collective levels. So if you’re frustrated with your own relationship with body symptoms, or long to work deeper with your client’s symptoms, check it out. And if you know anyone who’d be curious about this work, be that awesome friend/colleague and send it on. Warmly ANZPOP P.S. Some relevant Process Work reading on symptoms as a collective process: Dreambody by Arnold Mindell Working with the Dreambody by Arnold Mindell City Shadows – Psychological Interventions in Psychiatry by Arnold Mindell Health in Sickness - Sickness in Health by Pierre Morin Communal Medicine by Pierre Morin Here’s the workshop link again ;) |
ANZPOP
Thought-provoking ideas, and transformative tools and training for working with individuals, groups, organisations, and communities.
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