Description
What happens when we find the gifts that relational neuroscience reveals about the emotions we most often try to ignore, push down or pretend we don’t have? What happens when we understand the impact of trauma on our brains? What happens when we release some of the contracts that keep us tied in knots?
Do you want to truly take in the world of resonance and unconscious contracts? Do you love this work, but is it hard to do it alone? Would you love to experience the journey to self-warmth with support and community? Would you like to live through a year of healing through the release of self-sabotage?
Join Sarah Peyton for another exciting, rich year-long exploration of the Your Resonant Self Workbook, Integrating the Shadow. Each of the 13 chapters of this book is covered in two classes (three classes for chapter 8), in a series of twenty-nine 90-minute classes including two bonus sessions. Each class will include lectures, Q&A, discussion of exercises, demos, and personal explorations of the abilities and growth that make our brains good and comfortable places to be. This journey will take us from December of 2022 through to October of 2023, and move participants from removing the blocks to self-warmth to claiming joy. The class series also includes a bonus session and the monthly Neuroscience and Resonance webinars during the period of the course plus opportunities for community practice.
As a participant you will:
- Take an extended journey through the brain’s networks and systems
- Integrate shadow work while exploring the fundamental concepts of resonance through the YRS Workbook
- Learn in-depth in community
- Welcome the parts of yourself you’ve never known how to love
- Release the contracts that separate us from self and self-compassion
- Know yourself more fully and compassionately
- Allow for new levels of complexity and paradox in this experience of being human
- Infuse self-care into your everyday life
- Delight in new freedom and access to joy
- Transform your brain into a more comfortable and kind place to live
When?
Thursdays, 10:30am-12:00pm Pacific time, December 8, 2022 – November 2, 2023.
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See below for a detailed list of dates and topics for all 29 sessions
Classes will meet online via zoom.
Each class will be recorded for viewing in different time zones and for review, and for sale after the series is over.
Cost
The course can be purchased as a whole for $750, or each individual two-class series can be purchased separately for $70 ($95 for chapter 8, which is 3 sessions long)
Payment plans are available if needed. Please write to [email protected] to inquire.
Purchase of this class does not include the purchase of the Your Resonant Self Workbook. Please purchase the book separately.
We are delighted to offer up to 42 CEU hours for psychologists and social workers for this course ($30 additional fee). Chicago Counseling Associates has been approved by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation to sponsor continuing education for social workers and psychologists. CCA maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Live attendance is required to receive CEUs.
*PLEASE NOTE:
- In order to secure the early-bird rates, you must register and pay by the date above.
- Your tuition payment is non-refundable and transferrable.
- Some partial scholarships may be available after December 1. Please write to Sarah to inquire.
- The individual events that make up this series are available to purchase as stand-alone experiences, but signing up for the series allows you a much less expensive rate, and includes bonuses. Some bonuses are only available if you sign up within the first weeks of the course
- This work is not therapy and is not a substitute for therapy. If you have a sense that you would be destabilized by yourself or others speaking about difficult events, then this course may not be for you. While we hope that the processes and information that we share can be of use in your journey, we do not have the resources to support extreme psychological difficulties.
Bonuses for those who enroll in the full series:
– Access to bonus Q&A session with Sarah + Closing session
– Access to Sarah’s Monthly Neuroscience and Resonance Webinars throughout the extended journey
– Opportunities to work in small groups and/or with Resonance Partners to develop your resonance skills, learn and transform in community
– Assistant Support during classes – experience resonant support from experienced practitioners when you need it during class times
What You’ll Explore…
- Weeks 1 & 2: December 8 and December 15, 2022: Chapter 1 – Are You Willing to Like Your Shadow?
These two classes investigate the blocks to self-kindness that arise from unconscious contracts against the humanness of having a shadow, and their effect on the Default Mode Network. - Weeks 3 & 4: January 5 and January 26, 2023: Chapter 2 – The Shadow is Not Truth, it’s Trauma – and it’s Life Energy
In these two classes, we bring our learning about unconscious contracts as a tool into relationship with the resonance skill of time travel empathy, demonstrating the integration of these two approaches to healing. - Weeks 5 & 6: February 2 and 9, 2023: Chapter 3 – From Self-Sabotage to Self-Care, Where We Go Astray
These two classes address contracts that have negative results on our daily lives in simple ways. We learn about the instrumental brain and the relational brain and their relationship with the shadow. Links between the shadow and self-sabotage will be explored. - Weeks 7 & 8: March 2 and March 9, 2023: Chapter 4 – Healing Shame and Schadenfreude
These two classes introduce Beatrice Beebe’s work in detail, integrating it with Jaak Panksepp’s Circuits of Emotion and Motivation, which help us understand the nervous system’s drop into shame when we inadvertently break a contract. We discover the interrelationship of shame and shadow, how they fuel one another, and we further our resonance practice with metaphors. - Weeks 9 & 10: March 16 and April 13, 2023: Chapter 5 – Soothing Anxiety and Addressing Pettiness
These two classes explore the connection between anxiety and the emotional circuits of both FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF, and how anxiety can be rooted in the non-acceptance of our shadows. We will start a practice of embracing our pettiness and learning to be bigger than it, and how to bring affection to the experience of self-acceptance. We will experience resonance remedies for anxiety. - Weeks 11 & 12: May 4 and May 18, 2023: Chapter 6 – How Anger is Different from Predatory Aggression, and How to Have Self-Compassion With Both
In these two classes, we trace the development of contracts, that can be made during traumatic moments, to either never be angry, or to punish ourselves or others for getting angry, and learn how to release them. We also learn that when others’ actions cause us to break our own contracts, this can bring about rage. We will also connect our work with Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory and practice resonant language skills. - Weeks 13 & 14: May 25 and June 1, 2023: Chapter 7 – Self-Warmth for Dissociation and Thoughtlessness
In these two classes, we continue integrating Porges’ Polyvagal Theory with the unconscious contract tool to uncover and transform patterns of dissociation, including contracts that keep us from fully entering or inhabiting the body, both in terms of classic dissociation and in terms of the left shift into the instrumental brain and out of relationship. We look at the contracts we make not to feel anything, or to hide from real participation in life. We bring our resonance skills to support exquisite gentleness in the face of immobilization, and track the journey from collapse to immobilization without fear, and we learn to rejoin the real life of relationships. - Weeks 15, 16 & 17: June 8, June 15 and June 29, 2023: Chapter 8 – Claiming Secure Attachment Even When We’ve Done Things We Wish We Hadn’t
These three classes take us into the contracts we make to maximize well-being in response to our parents’ ways of being with us and being with emotion. These contracts are our foundations for every bit of relating that we do. As well as reviewing the basics of attachment, we discover a resonant language practice that holds our connection patterns as “just right,” which is a radical move into secure attachment with ourselves, no matter what contracts we are dealing with, and no matter how much regret we have for our pasts. We look at avoidant patterns and contracts, we have the delight of looking at ambivalent patterns and contracts with special guest teacher Jaya Manske, and we enjoy the signs of the movement into secure attachment. - Week 18: July 13, 2023 **Bonus Q&A Session**
The Q&A session will give you an opportunity to ask any questions you have about resonance, contract work or course content. - Weeks 19 & 20: July 27 and August 17, 2023: Chapter 9 – Away From Hurt, Disgust and Contempt
The use of self-hate, disgust and contempt to manage emotions is an aftereffect of traumatic attachment, and so makes sense in the context of our lives. As we understand this, the root causes of the contracts made in disorganized attachment start to become clear. We learn how we can turn predatory aggression against ourselves and others as a distortion of our SEEKING circuit, and this illuminates an avenue for work. The dissolution of trauma-based contracts is supportive in working with outbreaks of violence and recurrent fights in partnership and parenting. The work we have done to this point in this series supports us in looking at these knots of trauma, and untangling them to move us toward well-being. - Weeks 21 & 22: August 24 and September 7, 2023: Chapter 10 – The Path Out of Depression: Understanding “Laziness”
Contracts that limit our life energy can lead to hopelessness and depression. Without an understanding of the nervous system, people often think these conditions are “laziness.” When this is combined with negative self-talk, it can be toxic. The release of these contracts in these two classes supports the reclamation of movement and agency. Both contract work and resonance skills are needed in this life-changing journey. We also take a look at the attachment contracts that can prevent connection in order to support a movement away from the life-long loneliness that can also be a contributing factor in depression. - Weeks 23 & 24: September 14 and September 21, 2023: Chapter 11 – Working with Layers of Addiction, Greed and Hunger
It has taken a long time for the world to begin to understand that “greed” and addictions are related to trauma. Our deepest hungers are for relationship, and when we can’t have relationship, our emotional starvation leads us to our addictions. Just as our brain makes contracts with us to keep us safe, our brains can be said to make contracts with us on behalf of our addictions. These two classes explore what happens to us in relationship to our addictions and addictive strategies when these contracts are dissolved. Resonance skills will be practiced to support self-compassion during this process. - Weeks 25 & 26: October 5 and October 12, 2023: Chapter 12 – Reclaiming Sexuality and Self from the Definitions of Shadow
The delight of the SEXUALITY circuit is that it carries us from childhood into our full individuation, maturity and authenticity. No matter the level of our sexual interest or activity, this circuit is important for well-being and growth. There are many shadow entanglements that stop us from becoming who we really are, and many of them are connected with our sexuality and our emergence. The contracts that diminish this circuit diminish our life energy and our sense of potential contribution. We will work with these contracts in these two classes and practice supportive resonance skills to help with both personal issues and internalized oppression from the way that society judges and ranks bodies in terms of mattering. - Weeks 27 & 28: October 19 and 26, 2023: Chapter 13: Reclaiming Joy with the Inclusion of the Shadow
In these two classes examining the final chapter of the workbook, we will look at what supports the development and expression of joy, and how the experience of joy becomes deeper and richer when we fully accept and have affection for our shadow selves. We will learn how joy is a dyadic experience (we co-create joy!) and that contracts that block trust and connection also stop joy from happening. We will dissolve these contracts and celebrate and practice the resonance skills which support the feeling and expression of joy. These classes include a look at false Bodhisattva vows, contracts made when children first perceive that there is pain in the world and commit their whole beings to a better world, no matter the cost. Commitment and contribution are very important and life-serving when they do not cost us everything. - Week 29: November 2, 2023: **Closing Session**
During this class, we will close our year of work together and make time for questions and celebrations.
