Bodyspace Bioenergetics Groups

With
Guy Gladstone

at
The Open Centre
188 Old Street
London EC1V 9FR

Tel: 020 7272 6672
or email

Why Bodyspace?

Through bodywork you reach a deeper place in yourself in a shorter time, closing the schizoid gap between mind and body.
See Why Bodywork?

Through groupwork, exploring your wants and needs, hopes and fears, pleasures and pains in the company of others you see, hear, feel and learn through shared experience.
See Why Groupwork?

Potentials For Change

• Tense and strained when you could be relaxed?
  
  
• Anxious and unable to cope when you could be confident?
  
  
• Depressed when you could be lively?
  
  
• Low on self-esteem when you could appreciate who you are?
  
  
• Masking your needs when you could be asking for what you want?
  
  
• Closed off or chaotically exposed when you could be flexibly open?
  
  
• Out of touch with your feelings or bodywise, able to hear messages your body sends.
  
  

	With too little feeling life is toneless. With too much feeling life tends to be confusing. A Bodyspace w/e will help you access a wider range of distinct feelings and reduce confusion.
	Emotional issues are often expressed through physical symptoms and bodily restrictions. Do you breathe, move and use your voice freely? A Bodyspace w/e will help you take possession of your bodyspace.
	How well do you deal with feelings for which you have no words? Through direct work with your body otherwise unavailable memories can be integrated; and conflicts in your present day life that stem from those memories can be eased and clarified.
	Can you communicate honestly and make good contact with others? Much of your body image (private) and body language (public and typically 55% of a communication) has evolved through interactions with others. Through carefully structured interventions, geared to group and individual process, both the inner image and the outer language improve and develop.

Body Reclaimed

In view of the general fear or mistrust of the emotional body a weekend group provides procedures and rituals within a protected space through which participants may encounter the bodily unconscious. As when you dream so here in the group, psyche (soul) and soma (body) are rejoined, meeting in a safe yet challenging convivial mode.

Reversing the order of culture and much psychotherapy* in which words have an exclusive priority over movements, in a Bodyspace weekend sensations and emotions are foregrounded and thereafter your words are more connected and alive, your person more integrated, focused, feelingful and effective. *therapy in which a fleshless and abstracted symbolic body displaces the actual concrete throbbing body.

Bodyspace weekends feature a wide range of bodywork procedures all of which are optional (the range is essential since not everything will work for everyone)

• A catalytic head to foot expressive loosening up
  
  
• Non-verbal body language communications
  
  
• Movement to music and energetic drawing
  
  
• Body visualisations and internal journeys
  
  
• Bioenergetic stress positions
  
  
• Gestalt body dialogue
  
  
• Empathic postural reflection
  
  
• Facing, centering and grounding
  
  
• Structured body contact
  
  
• Four elements embodiment
  
  
• Breath work and guided regressions
  
  
• Body image investigation
  
  
• Biodramas (brief energetic enactments)
  
  
• Verbal and non-verbal voicing (with no noise limit)

Practitioners with a training agenda are welcome provided they are willing to work with their own issues.

Why Bodywork?

1. Bodywork in a group mode builds the group as a safe container providing reassurance, support, solidarity and holding
   
   
2. Bodywork raises the energetic level of the group as a whole, building the inner push needed to work through difficult issues
   
   
3. Bodywork helps overcome the prevalent splitting apart of body, mind and emotions. Closure of these splits may be resisted in the name of an ideal, spiritual or otherwise. Or it may be that your body carries a burden of split-off pain that your mind resists making sense of
   
   
4. Bodywork functions as auto-diagnosis. You may see through the problem and understand the core of it. Then bodywork becomes revelation. You realize what is happening where and why you form yourself that way, prompting the question why not this way?
   
   
5. The body is often the entry point into grasping the hidden family dynamic. Without understanding this the meaning of your life may be permanently obscured
   
   
6. It is with your body that you make and succeed in or avoid and fail in . . . relationships. Past and present interpersonal dynamics are illuminated through bodywork in a group context
   
   
7. Bodywork is often the essential precondition for the resolution of shocks (actual trauma). Defences formed in response to high impact events are physiologically anchored. Consequently psychotherapy without bodywork can go round and round in circles and the shock remains chronic and unresolved
   
   
8. Bodywork rivals dreams as the royal road to the unconscious conflicts determining your life. While bodywork plus dreamwork and transferential experience utilises the power of three to bring about breakthroughs and syntheses with astounding economy
   
   
9. Bodywork is a catalyst for the recovery of personal imagination. It restores the space for play and phantasy, a space that many forces in todayås world combine to collapse
   
   
10. Bodywork facilitates immediate translation back and forth between biology (body) and psychology (self and ego) with relevant extrapolation to sociology (culture and community). Influenced by family, school and society feeling, thinking and behaviour is often blocked (over controlled) or chaotic (under controlled). The thrust of a Bodyspace weekend is towards balance and equilibrium with acceptance of ambivalence.

Why Groupwork?

1. Most difficulties, disappointments and repeated self-defeating patterns of behaviour, whether of a work, social or intimate kind, involve others and can be most readily resolved by addressing the issue in a group. Whatever issue you bring that issue will be a matter of concern for one or more of the others.
   
   
2. We live in a society that for many people is increasingly stressful. Within the safer and more supportive setting of the group, with the help of an experienced group therapist, distress can be expressed and worked through. Better ways of dealing with stress can then be discovered. Uncovering the influence of the past prepares you to more successfully meet the future. Thereby you get to grips with what you can change and come to terms with what you can't.
   
   
3. Through the way you relate to others in the group and they to you skills evolve that are transferable to your life. You are enabled to respond creatively to pressures, manage transitions better, and clarify relationship dilemmas. Surprising aspects of your life story may surface through contact with other group members. And so your story begins to change . . . and next year life is noticeably different . . . For example where hitherto you were lonely and isolated or compulsively over-social now you find a happier balance between withdrawing and reaching out.
   
   
4. In a group almost everything is grist for the mill. If every expression evokes an impression elsewhere in the group then the chemistry of the encounter between any two group members, with the varying levels of participation of the others present, can move the interaction of the whole group to the level of 'alchemy' (the art of transmuting base metals into gold, metaphorically speaking).
   
   
5. A single moment of group process will often be experienced in astonishingly different ways by between ten and sixteen different pairs of eyes, ears, hands, feet and all the bodies belonging to these. There is a massive potential for relatedness, an intensive appreciation of one's own and other's worlds.
   
   
6. In a Bodyspace group meanings in the plural are discovered rather than the meaning in the singular being pre-assigned and delivered to participants (as typically occurs in seminar groups and teachings).
   
   
7. Groups occupy a position somewhere in between the privacy and containment of the individual session and the relative anonymity and boundarilessness of public places (that just about anybody can enter at any time). Thus the group is a unique combination of safety, through its ground rules and working contract, and excitement, through the unpredictability of the others.
   
   
8. Like Janus, Roman god of the doorway and the first month of our calendar, groupwork faces both inwards and outwards, situated more midway between the psyche and the social than individual sessions can ever be.
   
   
9. Nowadays more than ever people need to meet authentically. Estrangement of people from their own selves and each other proceeds apace under the unreal canopy of millenial public relations and alienating wealth creation. Groupwork grounded in the body brings into focus the tensions between human relatedness and free market forces.
   
   
10. The series of threes in groupwork while representing oedipal themes linked to father, family and society also ensure the representation of more than one helping viewpoint, thus curbing excessive dependency on authority (the group leader) modelling the potentials of "power with" rather than "power over".

Booking Procedure and Registration Form

To discuss attending either the weekend or the introductory evening please ring 020 7272 6672.

Guy Gladstone

GUY GLADSTONE is a body psychotherapist who has been working for twenty years with ongoing and weekend groups at The Open Centre, the long established (1977) independent personal growth centre. He is accredited as a group psychotherapist and bodywork practitioner by the Association of Humanistic Psychology Practitioners and is a graduate of three trainings - The Institute for the Development of Human Potential (2 years). The Institute of Psychotherapy and Social Studies (3 years) and The British Association of Analytical Body Psychotherapy (5 years). He supervises practitioners in a variety of settings.

TO FIND DATES OF UPCOMING EVENTS PLEASE GO TO THE REGISTRATION FORM

If you yourself are not interested in this Bodyspace event kindly pass this information on