Bodymind Healing in Psychotherapy: Towards an Integral Comprehensive Energy Psychology
Energy psychology is at a key turning point in relation to the field of traditional psychology (Feinstein, 2009; Pignotti & Thyer 2009). This workshop clears a pathway for presenting energy psychology in a way that answers some of the overarching concerns of the wider field of psychology. You’ll learn how to present a comprehensive energy psychology in a way that more clearly embeds energy psychology within the context of a wider and expanded field of psychology (Mayer, 2009).
This workshop will help you bring the healing abilities of a comprehensive energy psychology to your work as a health professional. In addition to the well-known energy psychology methods such as EFT, you’ll learn how to broaden your view so that energy psychology will also be known to include Qigong, depth psychology, Gendlin’s “Focusing,” symbolic process traditions, Kaballistic methods, etc. You’ll learn how all psychotherapy is energy psychotherapy, and by therapists better understanding that, psychotherapy can be enhanced and people in need will be able to use a broad range of energy psychology methods to add vitality, healing, and psycho-spiritual depth to their lives.
Participants will be introduced to an integration of behavioral healthcare, Qigong, and psychotherapy stemming from Dr. Mayer’s thirty years of private practice, and testing this combined approach in an integrated medical clinic that he co-founded. Qigong (of which Tai Chi is the best known system) is a many thousand-year-old method of self-healing practices which can be done with movements or in stillness. In pursuit of creating an integral, comprehensive energy psychotherapy, here you’ll learn how to integrate the essence of Qigong into psychotherapy without using Qigong movements, and without mentioning Qigong. By using Eastern and Western relaxation and visualization methods, state-specific breathing inductions, acu-point self-touch, the transcending/transmuting dialectic, and anchoring a patient’s somatic changes at the moment of “felt shift,” an integral paradigm for bodymind healing is accessible for clinicians and their patients to integrate into brief or depth psychotherapy. Combining theory, case illustrations, and research, this integral energy psychology approach can help alleviate anxiety, hypertension, chronic pain, insomnia, etc.
Dr Mayer will give two invited presentations on this topic at 2:30 PM for 75 minutes and at 4 PM for 75 minutes.