Formed before conscious memory, your ways of loving and wanting to be loved, or what Alexis Johnson and Judith Sarah Schmidt call your “love maps,” are written deep in the neural pathways of the brain. As a result, these love maps navigate all of your intimate relationships throughout your life.
Your love maps may be healthy, leading you to form equally healthy intimate relationships. But your love maps may hold traumas and insecurities that can constrict you. All your life, however, your soul waits patiently to transmute your old ways of living into new ways of loving so you can unfold the fullness and freedom of your true self.
Johnson and Schmidt lead this workshop as an intimate circle, combining explorations of early attachment theory, depth psychology, and neuroscience, with personal process, meditation, small group and partner work, explorations of family structures, guided imagery, journaling, and movement. You come to witness your old love maps with compassion and forgiveness, and then follow the intention of your heart to unfold new and creative ways of being and loving.
Upon completing this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Identify childhood and adult attachment styles
- Discuss interpersonal-neurobiology that shapes the neural patterning of relationship early life
- Recognize the plasticity of the human brain and its capacity for form new neural pathways based on positive relational experiences in adulthood
- Discuss the practice of presence in relationship as a psycho-spiritual ground for creating caring compassion and loving kindness between couples, friends, family, clients and those we encounter in daily life
- Practice mindfulness skills in order to develop a witnessing self that can become aware of, contain and integrate body, mind and feeling states in order to live in flexible resonance with self and other
- Apply mindfulness practices in the service of generating new more creative relationship maps and neural pathways, thereby deepening the vitality of living with self and others.
This workshop offers a rich opportunity for anyone devoted to personal transformation, as well as mental health professionals.
