Hello community,
Included are a WIDE range of resources for you to peruse. Enjoy. Lots included!
But first, from the last Sunday Pause, how are you doing extending loving kindness and gentleness towards your own parts–your thoughts, feelings, reactions, behaviors? What makes that hard? What helps?
Get curious about that, pause and listen. As often as needed!
Sometimes my system is pretty stubborn and guarded. It often helps me to consider what I would say to someone else suffering. This gives me words my system may long to hear. It’s quite a phenomenon, isn’t it, that it’s often much easier to extend loving compassion and patience towards someone else than it is to ourselves? sigh.
Oh internal critics, thank you for your intentions on my behalf. I hear you. Would you relax just a little bit so that I can be with these parts that are suffering, that are overwhelmed, that feel so alone and judged? I’m not trying to get rid of you. We’re just looking for a little more balance. Thank you.
I forgot to add this wonderful photo of half of my precious Thursday morning women’s group I wrote about last Sunday. This group helped me find mySelf again after my brain injury in 2010. I couldn’t participate in groups for years because it was too hard to interact with people and filter conversations and visual input. Hard to understand if your brain isn’t compromised, I know! In this group, each one of us is welcome to arrive just as we are. No expectation. No judgment. Just come.
We’re celebrating one of the group member’s 70th birthday today! Welcome age; welcome wonder!
My career leading clients to explore external and internal landscapes began in the mid 1990s as an Adventure Therapy Instructor in California with an organization similar to Outward Bound. We backpacked with adults, adolescents, parent/child pairs and families in the Yosemite Wilderness for 3-14 day courses. Students unplugged, wore backpacks, slept under the stars on acres of granite slabs, cooked and pooped outside for the first time in their lives. They were stretched physically and emotionally. In addition to the “hard skill” activities like rock climbing and rappelling, instructors also led reflective discussions and experiential activities.
I initially expected my work as a marriage and family therapist the past 25 years to include the wilderness, but the practical and logistical demands of this endeavor has made that difficult. I recently clarified that I want to collaborate more with colleagues and I want to share how the wilderness can nurture and clarify our internal landscape and the relationship we have to these parts of ourselves.
So, I’m absolutely THRILLED to be joining experienced IFS colleagues and outdoorspeople, Jenny Fiebig, Dana Rosenstein and Aaron Rousseau on a weeklong river journey with 12 lucky participants August 26-September 1! We’ll leave Moab, Utah and float through Canyonlands National Park and the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers, before descending through the exhilarating rapids of Cataract Canyon. Consider joining us and applying below!
(Photos are from a weeklong float with Erik through Canyonlands in 2019. I can’t wait to return to this sacred space.)
Beginners and more experienced adventurers are welcome to a personal growth retreat that will be therapeutic and transformational.
This trip is designed to immerse yourself into your Internal Family Systems (IFS) journey. Each individual will have one on one time with a certified IFS therapist while also engaging in a group process using IFS therapy. This is an opportunity of a lifetime to explore your internal landscapes while being held by experienced guides and therapists in one of the most pristine landscapes left in the world.
Here’s Katherine May’s 3rd book and recent release, “Enchantment.” Oh I hope you can get your hands on a copy right away. Of course I want to sit down with her for a cuppa tea and ask her if she’s heard about IFS.
The book opens with, “Lately I wake in the night and a few panicked seconds pass in which I can’t locate myself. I could tell you my name, certainly, but not which version of me I’m dealing with.”
The sections are entitled Earth, Water, Fire, Air—music to my ears!
I included 2 links recently to singer, Melanie DeMore. Sing with her, Lindsey Scott, Heather Houston and a collection of women from all over the world. We’re all muted so you can just sing your heart out from wherever you are!
Monday, March 6th @ 5:30 pm PT
For Enneagram Enthusiasts: Join the Michigan-Ohio Enneagram Collaborative for an informative, well-organized fascinating Monthly Zoom Lecture and Panel Discussion Wednesday 4-6pm PT (recordings available for one month). This year of 9 meetings focuses on the layering of Subtypes: Social, Self Preservation and Sexual/1:1.
This Wednesday, March 8, the Panel is Enneagram 8s. I’ve attended these monthly panels for over a year and have learned so much. This isn’t IFS specific, but certainly helps us get to know our parts better. Ronda Diegel and Niki Pappas do a wonderful job hosting and organizing.
IFS Lead Trainers, Cece Sykes, Martha Sweezey and Dick Schwartz bring us another fantastic resource for interacting with addictive behaviors and impulses from a non-pathologizing, curious perspective. This book was just released this week, as well!
One of the most powerful aspects of IFS is the process of moving towards a behavior that may have only been demonized and judged in the past. We get curious about its role and intentions. Encountering a destructive, but effective Protective behavior with curiosity and non-judgment is often the only way for for it to soften and relax. Even now, 15 years after discovering IFS, I get goosebumps when I work with parts that have never experienced open-heartedness or curiosity from another. It’s transformational and a life-changing paradigm shift.
A student just shared this link with me. (Thank you, L!) Hear a panel discussion with Bob Falconer discussing entities, parts, unattached burdens, autonomous beings. Learn how to tell the difference between them and how to work with malevolent entities. Bob’s new book, “The Other Within” will be released soon. Congratulations, Bob!
Purchase this 2H recording for only $10! View in Vimeo.
For more information about Robert, visit his website at robertfalconer.us/.
The panel is co-moderated by Brad Adams, Ph.D., founder of the Los Angeles Medicinal Psychedelics Society (LAMPS), and Paul Lisy, documentary filmmaker and LAMPS partner.
Thanks for pausing with me. I hope you’re able to check out some of these amazing sources of support, and maybe we’ll see you on the river in August!
