Welcome to Full Body Presence: Grounding and Healthy Boundaries

1. Welcome to Full Body Presence: Grounding and Healthy Boundaries Before we begin, please read pages 1-41 in your study guide ~feel free to read more if you like~

2. Reading Assignments & Reminders • Please put your name on your study guide • Journal your dreams throughout workshop • Day 2:Please read to page 120 • Bring movement mat and wear clothing you can move in • Day 3:Please read to page 132 • Day 4: Please read to page 156

3. Opening Course Schedule • Opening circle – introductions & details • Taking a baseline in sensation awareness • Slide show of conceptual framework • Deepening your internal landscape awareness: “Next Step” exploration • Journaling/drawing your “Next Step” • Guidelines for creating a safe, strong healing community

4. Full Body Presence • The ability to feel all parts of your body, with a good flow of healthy energy moving through you. It also includes a connection to your inner and outer healthy resources and a good sense of healthy boundaries. • Full Body Presence is the foundation of a strong, therapeutic presence.

5. Full Body Presence Full Body Presence allows you access to Present Moment Sensory Awareness and the navigational system of the body

6. Definitions • Grounding:The skill of being able to connect through your feeling senses in a visceral way to the earth underneath you or any other healthy energy resource. The ability to stay centered even under stress. • Healthy Resources:Resources that are life-enhancing and replenishing. • Healthy boundaries: The awareness of where you stop and the rest of the world begins. The power to say yes or no to those that want to cross your boundaries.

7. What is your capacity to listen to and understand the subtle cues your body offers you? How often and how well do you use your body’s innate intelligence Energy Awareness 5 Sometimes Energetically aware

8. What is your capacity to access health resources? How often do you access nurturing and nourishing resources? Energy Resourcing 5 Sometimes Access healthy resources

9. What is your capacity to properly function under stress without negatively affecting your health? How quickly can you “bounce back” after stressful situations? Energy Resilience 5 Sometimes effective, energized during& after stress

10. Therapeutic Presence The More Energetically Aware You Are…and, The More Healthy Resources You Regularly Access… The Steadier You Will Be Under Stress, With More Likelihood For Positive, Creative Outcomes. All of This Increases Your Capacity to Hold a Strong Therapeutic Presence.

11. Discovering Your Inner Landscape • Invite your curiosity, your openness to discovery, to lead the way – this is an exploration • Eyes closed or semi-closed • Feet resting fully on the floor, back supported • Let your judgmental mind take a break – there is no right or wrong way to do this • Everything is simply information • Tracking sensations, adjust to stay comfortable • Go at your own pace – even if it is slower or faster than the person leading this exploration

12. How Do We Do This? • Sensation vs. Emotion • First order sensations involve physical sensations with no interpretations – the alphabet of your inner landscape • Wet, dry, dense, cool, warm, , vibration, tingling, color, smells, spacious, thick, fluid, heaviness, sharp, compressed, stiff, juicy, sparky • Listen to the questions and notice what sensations, hits, and images show up in your awareness within your body – this is not a mental process or something you will yourself to do. It is an explorations so whatever you feel is okay – it is all just information.

13. Journal Your Experience Ask yourself: • What was my baseline experience of my inner landscape? • How did it change as I allowed myself to fill with sensations that felt nourishing? • Blank figure available to put color and texture for expression of your inner exploration experience. • Journal – stream of consciousness, write whatever comes to mind regarding your inner experience.

21. Awareness Pulled Into the Future

22. Disrupted Energy Flow

23. Sensing Disrupted Energy Flow

32. Guidelines for Creating Safe, Productive, Healing CommunityPage 19 Listen without judgment: witness with an open heart Honor confidentiality Share in present time No advice giving: share one at a time Honor healthy boundaries: ask before touching

33. Tools For the SelfPage24 Finding a healthy balance betweenover-responsibility taking and living from a victim mentality, we suggest: Honor your own process and pace Speak your own truth: ask for what you need Say Yes and No where needed Use “I” language

34. Tools for Creating a Healing CirclePage 21 • Please turn off all cell phones & pagers • No side talk when others are speaking • Let someone know if you need to take a break or are not returning on time • Please stay in the circle when we are all gathered and working • Take breaks as needed (bathroom, etc.)

35. Finding Your Next Step • Allow yourself to drop into your inner landscape again • Ground & fill with nourishing sensation • Notice where you are most present, where you can easily feel comfortable • Notice where you would like to have more sensation, more sense of connection, or a better connection (maybe an area of numbness or pain, distant or walled off) • This is your “Next Step”

36. Clarifying Your Next Step • Page 43 • Journal, stream of consciousness, whatever comes to mind from your “Next Step” experience • Draw freehand, or on the blank person, any colors or textures that came with your inner experience

37. Paired Sharing • Find someone you don’t know, or that you don’t know well and partner with them • Sitting across from each other, be witness to your partner’s story about their Next Step for five minutes (whatever they want to say) • Simply listen; witnessing and asking only clarifying questions, no problem solving or advice giving please! • Switch positions and share and listen again.

38. Breath ExplorationPage 49 • Learning to use your breath as a tool to: • Calm your nervous system • Clear your thinking • Help you to feel more connected to deeper parts of yourself

39. Whole Circle Sharing • Please share your direct sensation experience - no story please • (A) Share your experience of the place of your strongest sense of internal presence (most flow, easiest sense of connection) • (B) Share your experience of the place of your “Next Step”- the place that feels less connected, may be painful, numb or distant

40. As a Listener… • This is your first opportunity to: • Practice therapeutic presence - • Listen with the ears of your heart & the rest of your navigational system – including your body • Remain neutral and present without fixing it • Feel what each person is sharing, from inside yourself, without taking it on, just witnessing them.

41. Dreams - Page 33 Understanding a new or forgotten language of your inner landscape Dreams are often under-rated and misunderstood They can provide valuable, profound information – “Deep informing” from within

42. How to Understand Dreams Ask Yourself: • What was the feeling (emotion) during or immediately upon waking? • What do the metaphors/symbols in the dream mean to you? Perhaps as a part of yourself? • What did you learn or recognize that was newinformation or that you had not been paying attention to?

43. The Five Principles of Full Body PresencePage 57 Provide guide posts for navigating in the world from inside yourself Signal to you when you are going in a healing, life-giving direction and when you are headed the other way May be operating simultaneously with each other, and they have many layers

45. Principle 1: Trust the Existence of Nurturing Life Energy Trusting that there is an unlimited source of nourishing life-giving energy in the universe allows you relinquish fear, live from trust, and recognize that you are loved and supported throughout your life.

47. Principle 2: Feel the Presence of Life Energy in your Body Feeling your internal connection to this life energy as a natural state of being opens your awareness to discover a sense of belonging, reclaim your inner wisdom and experience vitality and joy.

48. Ways to Increase Felt Sensation • Grounding and filling • Bodywork /nurturing touch of all kinds • Slowing down and paying attention to your bodily cues • Sensory Integration • Being in nature and drinking it in (feeling a gentle breeze on your skin, warmth of the sun, clean air entering your nostrils)

49. Principle 3: Integrate this Energy Throughout Your Entire System Integrating a felt sense of this nurturing energy throughout your entire body helps you establish a full personal container with strong, flexible, healthy boundaries.

50. Principle 4: Expand Your Perceptual Lens Expanding your perceptual lens enables you to see clearly, release expectations and limiting beliefs and open fully to life.