New Embodied Imagination Group - Thursday Evenings 

According to a recent survey that I sent out, many of you would like to attend dream related events in the evening.
 
I am pleased to announce that I will be starting a new embodied imagination group in May that will meet on Thursday evenings.

Embodied Imagination Group Description

Embodied imagination is an innovative tool for working with imagery from dreams and memories through the body. Each session will include a check-in, deep relaxation exercise to enhance body awareness followed by a direct encounter with the healing power of imagery through in-depth work with a dream or memory.

I received my Embodied Imagination coaching certification in January, 2010.  

Description of certification program from Robert Bosnak's website

This is a three year training program, leading to an international certification as an Embodiment Therapist or Embodiment Coach, depending on previous training. The first 2 years of the training is general; in the 3rd year, the trainee follows a therapy or a creative arts track.

Embodied Imagination is a technique applicable to psychotherapy, treatment of trauma, medicine (triggering the self-healing reflex,) and creative endeavors such as theater (character embodiment,) film, writing, and research.

Embodiment is the coincidence of body and image preceding separation between body and psyche.

The first principle of embodied imagination is to encounter images from the point of view of dreaming, not waking. From this perspective an image is a live environment that surrounds us and presents itself as self-evidently real and embodied. Images belong to the involuntary imagination and embody their own intelligence.

This program explores images in dreams, flashback memories, perception, active imagination and art, the physical body, and relational fields.

Trainees learn to access images by way of the hypnagogic state of consciousness, which naturally exists in the borderlands between waking and sleeping. In this state, consciousness is capable to re-enter images by way of flashback memory. Since hypnagogic awareness is by its nature highly dissociable, it is possible to identify with personages and elements other than the ego subjectivity. In this way a variety of subjective positions can be explored, leading to a multiplicity of embodied states. Each state can be anchored in the body by way of a sense memory technique. In this way multiple embodied states can be experienced simultaneously leading to bursts of creative intelligence while triggering the self- healing reflex.

• The academic areas covered in the training consist of:
• The neuroscience of dreaming
• The scientific study of the placebo effect
• Complexity theory
• Imagination in gender, race and ethnicity, and in other political issues (e.g. ecology)
• Phenomenology
• Alchemy as a metaphor system of embodied imagination
• A study of mimesis and theater
• Enactment in relational fields
• Trauma and dissociation studies
• A history of dream incubation and intentional dreaming
• A history of psychoanalysis via the Jungian, post-Jungian, and relational schools
• Groups [psychotherapeutic and dream groups that explore the imagination.