EMBODIED AWARENESS

Embodied Awareness is a workshop with the intention to help you change your relationship to challenging emotions, thoughts and physical sensations. It is the practice of increasing your awareness of emotions and physical sensations that are arising in your body, in the moment.

Often, we develop a habitual tendency to reject or try to avoid uncomfortable emotions. While avoiding uncomfortable emotions might temporarily provide some relief, in the longterm, suppressing our emotions frequently can lead to a build up of difficult emotions, which can feel much more overwhelming and challenging to deal with.

As you learn how to practice embodied awareness to work through challenging emotional experiences, you will begin to radically transform your relationship to uncomfortable feelings and sensations.

Learning to be receptive to and present with difficult feelings can open up the space to allow you to begin to experience increased creativity, productivity and greater joy, the ability to enjoy intimacy and connect with others in a more meaningful way and to make choices in your life that are ultimately guided by your true values.

Embodied awareness is guided by principles that are backed up by years of evidence-based research in somatic-based psychotherapy practices including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Compassion-Focused Therapy and Somatic Experiencing by trauma expert Peter Levine, PhD.

Fundamentals of this workshop include:

• Gaining a deeper understanding of what suppression is and why we often choose to avoid uncomfortable emotions

• Understanding what ‘experiential avoidance’ is and how it contributes to the development and maintenance of emotional difficulties

• Identifying the primary challenges involved in changing our relationship to uncomfortable emotions and physical sensations

• Practice tools to help you respond to difficult emotions, as they arise in the moment

• Understand what primary and secondary emotions are

• Develop an experiential understanding of sensory-based attention

• Practising tools to help you work through uncomfortable feelings and to help you shift your attitude away from habitual tendencies to temporarily escape them

This workshop can be delivered both online and in-person in a one-to-one or in a group setting. Necessary adaptations will be implemented for those who have experienced trauma.