Course Overview
Guided meditation will be the main focus of the program. There will be ample opportunity to ask questions and share whatever you feel comfortable with. There will be no pressure to do so; passive participation is perfectly fine.
There will be a few brief lectures on forgiveness, and Q&A. However, the focus of the workshop will be experiential. We will spend 50% to 65% on forgiveness meditations and exercises.
What is forgiveness?
As part of life we accumulate hurts many of which don’t get fully processed. One way of conceptualizing this is as “psychic-splitting”, or areas of non-integration. Forgiveness as we’ll do it in this workshop is an experiential/emotional in which you have emotionally corrective experiences which bring about a re-integration of these splits. There is also a cognitive piece as well. We will also see the larger context understanding how these difficult experiences not personal and that our painful and at times afflictive responses are natural. We come to appreciate a blamelessness of self and others. However, this is seen only after we’ve grieved, and been comforted.
That will be the core focus of this workshop.
Why forgive?
For the purposes of this workshop, we’ll take the view that forgiveness is an important means of healing psychic splits, and helping of coming into wholeness. Forgiveness helps bring about integration and helping someone come into conformity with the way things are.
Who is this for?
This workshop is for people who want to heal and are willing to work for that outcome.
What to watch out for?
Forgiveness is something we do primarily for ourselves, not for the person who hurt us. We give ourselves as much space as we need, and also allow for non-forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a natural process, something that we are not fully in control of. We bring attention to our hurt and welcome it. We then apply meditation techniques that generally move us in the direction of forgiveness. However there is also a quality of mystery. We let this happen at its own pace. We welcome the process of forgiveness but never force it.
How will we do this?
We will use imagined internal parents to help keep us emotionally regulated and console and respond to us in such a way that helps us move into and through forgiveness. This is part and parcel of the MRM technique.
During the exercises, we’ll focus on both processing and forgiving others and ourselves. We’ll develop and deepen compassion towards self and other. Importantly, we’ll give ourselves full permission to feel our suffering, validating any difficult emotions. We’ll also engage in perspective-taking exercises which will help us release ourselves from blame and release others from blame – when we are ready to do so – never rushing the process! Moreover, we’ll see how that which we reject in others we tend to reject in ourselves and we’ll work towards healing these types of psychic-splits, as well.
The material in this workshop has been influenced by Bruce Ecker’s book “Unlocking the Emotional Brain”: “Neuroscience research since 2004 has shown that the brain has a key to locked synapses: a type of neuro-plasticity known as memory reconsolidation, which, when launched by a certain series of experiences, actually unlocks the synapses of a target emotional learning, allowing it to be not merely overridden but actually nullified and deleted by new learning.“
I hope that we’ll develop a sense of community in the workshop. As part of signing up you’ll be invited to the Attachment Repair Slack Group.
We will send out recordings to everyone who signs up. But it is highly recommended to attend live because we will be pairing up participants to do dyad-work.
Miscellaneous
There will be time for Q&A and spot coaching
We will be doing deep work. For that reason please feel free to take a break at any point.