Psychosynthesis Courses

Introduction

This hour and a half introduction to the principles of psychosynthesis will have an experiential focus and provide time for questions. It will particularly focus on the importance of will for taking charge of our lives and aligning with deeper purpose, meaning and values. It is suitable for those considering doing the Fundamentals or Foundation Year for personal growth purposes, or for those thinking about undertaking professional training in psychosynthesis as a therapeutic modality.

Fundamentals of Psychosynthesis

This powerful and transformative course covers the basic principles and ideas of psychosynthesis. At whatever stage on your life’s path, this course provides the experience to deepen your inner journey, the understanding to direct it more effectively, and the means to transform obstacles on the way.

The psychospiritual context of psychosynthesis is explored, and the skills to integrate and express this creatively are practised.

The Fundamentals is particularly appropriate for those sensing a critical period in their lives that calls for clarity, direction and change; for those feeling a need to integrate their spiritual vision more in their lives; for those who have achieved a number of goals and are now asking what next; and for those seeking to apply psychosynthesis principles in their own fields.

Each participant has an individual session with a psychosynthesis guide. There will also be opportunities to observe other sessions, in order to understand the methods and practice of psychosynthesis, this being of particular value to professionals working in this area.

Course Content:

• The language of inner experience and the psychosynthesis model of the psyche
• Body Feelings Mind – a dynamic information system
• Recognising and working with subpersonalities
• Disidentification – the art of non-attachment
• Creative thinking and the meditative process
• Opening to superconscious experiences and Self
• Personal crises and spiritual awakening
• Freedom of choice and the process of willing
• Right interpersonal and intrapersonal relations
• The evolutionary process of synthesis
• Grounding and expression – the Act of Will

Application Procedure:

Applicants must be at least 25 years of age, and consider they have sufficient self-capacity to manage the week intensive. Consideration is given to equity, the applicant’s intention to enrol in Tier Two, and limited places.

Please provide the following information:

1. Name, address and telephone number
2. Age and occupation
3. Educational background
4. Other personal development courses attended
5. Are you currently seeing a counsellor or therapist?

Deposit: $100.00 to secure a place, may be part-refundable.

N.B. As well as being a comprehensive introduction to psychosynthesis, the Fundamentals is Tier 1 of the Diploma in Psychosynthesis Counselling, which is NZQA approved.

The Fundamentals is a prerequisite for the Foundation Year.

Foundation Year Programme

There are not often opportunities to participate in a programme that extends over ten months, yet allows you to maintain full commitments to work. Building from the experience of the psychosynthesis Fundamentals, the Foundation Year is a programme of one weekend a month for nine months that culminates in a four day residential retreat.

The course is structured so that each weekend is coherent in itself, as well as building on preceding weekends. The maps and models of psychosynthesis are the framework. Having this structure over this time allows a rich network of relationships to grow over the year. Because participants don’t have to keep adjusting to new people and therefore dealing only with initial dynamics, a lot of safety develops. This encourages and supports the process of experimenting with limiting ways of relating and behaving, it helps taking risks by being both challenging and affirming, and it allows profound depths and heights to be not just experienced, but integrated.

The Foundation Year is for those who wish to make a commitment to discover or reconnect to their creative sense of life purpose and meaning, and to develop and refine their means of expressing it. The weekends are supported by the regular individual sessions and tutorials. Please note that regular individual sessions are an integral part of the Foundation Year, and need to be with a guide who is trained in psychosynthesis and part of the Institute. If you are not already working with a psychosynthesis guide, the Institute will provide you with a list of qualified psychosynthesis guides.

Course Content:

The schedule for the Foundation Year covers:

The Inner Journey

This will be the focus for Friday evenings of each weekend. Symbolic and mythic structures, and the cycles of the year will be used to explore the soul-making journey of Self, and to set keynotes for the weekend.

The Art of Being

This course examines the organisation of personality and its dynamics. The seminars are experiential. Participants explore dynamics and responses within given structures and exercises. The theory base supports these dynamics and responses. In psychosynthesis, any map or model is not to be taken as truth, but as useful only insofar as it adequately describes a person’s process. Awareness of how experience is organised rather than just why, is considered important to develop more open-ended, creative patterns of organisation and expression.

The process and skill of disidentification; holding a point of tension with physical, emotional and mental process; boundaries and developing and protecting psychic space; integrating parts of personality and needs; utilising the creative energies of love and power; and using transforming systems in the psyche are major areas covered. Attention is given to establishing a relatively flexible personal centre of identity which can more consciously cooperate with, and surrender to, the process of Self-realisaton.

While the focus will be on personality and developmental stages and transitions, this is seen always in the wider context that is named as transpersonal, existential, and ultimately, spiritual. It is about Being, therefore, in as full a sense as we can open to.

Will and Motivation

This course explores the nature of Will. As participants deepen their experience of Will, they become more in charge of their lives. This is not through the illusion of being in control, but by becoming more able to respond to life, even when it is wounding, dark and difficult. Development and expression of personal Will is first focused on, then alignment and surrender to Transpersonal Will.

Major topics include the spectrum of Will and Motivation; Superego and free will; the basic peri-natal matrices (based on Stanislav Grof’s work); the evolution of Will and its aspects; the relationship of personal Will, Transpersonal Will and Universal Will.

Right Relations

This is a practical, experiential workshop, which provides a context for individuals to explore intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics. It is a relatively unstructured day each weekend. The keynote is opportunity – to experiment and play, to break habitual patterns of interaction which may no longer be appropriate, and to take risks.

An essential part of the process of right relationship can be characterised by the shift from reactive behaviour controlled by motivation, needs and desires (which can often conflict!) to more responsive interactions where there is an experience of choice about what is expressed.

Rhythms and Crises of Self-Realisation

This residential intensive is essentially a time of retreat. It is a time to focus on the depths and heights of the journey of Self-Realisation. The profound rhythms of living and dying, death and rebirth are entered into and anchored in each person’s unique experience of life. Participants learn how to co-operate more consciously with their process of soul-making, which also, paradoxically, involves surrendering to the unknown and acknowledging the mystery of life. This retreat is also about completion – the group’s year-long journey comes to an end with this course.

Dates

Fees for 2013 (GST inclusive):

N.B. The Foundation Year is Tier 2 of the Diploma in Psychosynthesis Counselling and is a prerequisite for entering Tier 3.

Applicants for Tier 2 need to have demonstrated sufficient self-capacity during Tier 1 to be able to safely undertake personal development in individual and group settings. They also need to disclose any recent or current medical or psychiatric history which could affect the safety and participation of themselves or others on the year long programme.

Psychosynthesis: Self and World

Roberto Assagioli proposed that individual synthesis would lead on to social psychosynthesis. Drawing on a rich mix of contemporary psychological, philosophical, ecological and social thinking, Self and World explores social psychosynthesis through personal experience and meaning-making, deepening the work of the Foundation Year.

Self and World addresses the questions of who we are in our social, spiritual and environmental contexts – what we ask of these, and what these ask of us and for us. The course engages in the dynamics of love and power, and in the evolving processes essential if society and planet are to be sustainable, just and compassionate, while recognising this land’s unique culture, spirituality, history, and ecology.

This course is inspired by the psychosynthesis ideas and work of Assagioli, John Firmin, Anne Gila, Bill Plotkin and the New Zealand Institute of Psychosynthesis, as well as related work by others such as Joanna Macy, Peter Block, Arnold Mindell, Robert Kegan, David Abram, Jorge Ferrer, Ken Wilber, Raul Quinones Rosado and Adam Kahane.

The programme is developed and facilitated by Mark Skelding and Deryn Cooper.

A residential course, it takes place at the Karanga Lodge, a field centre in the Waitakere Ranges, between Swanson and Bethells Beach. The programme runs over 5 mid-month weekends, with a structure similar to that of the Foundation Year. Participants will be facilitated to take on individual or group projects with associated reading.

Applicants who have completed the Foundation Year will be accepted – - and they are welcome to attend with their partner who may not have done the Foundation Year.

Participant feedback 2012:

“I learned heaps, and could see where I was at, and where I was getting stuck. The more different ways to look at things I have, the better I can understand myself and the world, and my place in it. The better I understand things, the more enabled I am to act.”

“I am not a serial ‘course attendee’. I have degrees in physics and in law. I have a wealth of life and world experience. All that is to say, I have a wealth of life resources and nonetheless, this course changed my life, or better yet, enabled me to change my life in ways I had not otherwise been able to achieve. I am very grateful that I was given and took the opportunity to grow in these ways…’

‘Terrific! Especially the follow-up letters with all the resources. It meant that I could relax and not have to write down everything. I’m still working through them now and one link leads to another, which is great. Also the invitations were very welcoming and a way of moving into the weekend. I’ve just had another look at the website and I really like it. No need to improve.’