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Wild Metaphors: Re-Imagining Change and Creativity (Personal and Professional Development)
22 September 2022 @ 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
£25 – £35Explore how metaphor is not just a poetical way of speaking but a form of perception that shapes how we imagine self and world.
Why this workshop?
Metaphor is the ability to understand and experience something unknown in terms of something known, a famous example from Shakespeare being ‘Juliet is the sun.’
To speak of feeling ‘shut down’ or ‘fragmented’; to talk of needing a ‘reset’ or having ‘blown a gasket’; to consider the personality an assemblage of component ‘parts’, exerting ‘pressures’ and ‘resistances’ – are colloquial ‘mind-as-machine’ metaphors rooted in a common-sense assumption of a mechanical self and world. The workshop will show how this results in an often-painful search for machine like predictability, order and control over our lives, relationships and the environment.
Given that human beings are not machines the workshop will introduce ecological metaphors that better convey the wildness and irregularity of experience ‘as if’ a chrysalis or forest, a cloud formation or a beating heart. A re-wilding of metaphor that enables us to better notice and work with the unruly, unexpected and seemingly chaotic imaginings which often point the way to creative process and transformation.
Who will benefit?
The workshop is for anyone interested in imagination and metaphor.
It is intended for therapists and non-therapists – with examples and exercises that include and go beyond a conventional therapeutic context into everyday life and work. No expert understanding is required.
Workshop aims and learning outcomes:
The seminar will support you to:
- Work with the spontaneously ‘living metaphor’ found in everyday speech, fantasies, feelings, body sensations and gestures.
- Avoid the dangers of ‘dead metaphor’ in clichéd language and concrete or literal minded perspectives.
- Notice how metaphors reveal and conceal aspects of experience.
- Understand the origins of technological metaphors hidden in much of therapeutic theory and contemporary language.
- Work with ecological metaphors in everyday relationships, creative work, self-development and healing.
What to expect:
The online format using Zoom will be a mix of mini-presentations, group discussions and short experiential exercises to try out the material and provide a basis for grounding it in everyday life.
**Please note, not all of our online events can be recorded due to audience participation**
Workshop sources:
The genesis of the workshop is a critical development of Roberto Assagioli’s psychosynthesis, going beyond an understanding of imagination as a merely ‘inner’ or subjective faculty, to provide an experiential and theoretical appreciation of the systemic role imagination and metaphor play in shaping and responding to everyday life.
Particular sources include: the ecopsychologists Theodor Roszak, Jerome Bernstein and Nick Totton; the integration of psychotherapy with complexity theory by Terry Marks-Tarlow and Robert M. Galatzer-Levy; the philosophers Gregory Bateson, Zachary Stein and Bonnitta Roy.
Ticket price:
At the Trust we appreciate that each person has their own unique situation, so we invite you to select the price point that feels like it represents a fair contribution for attending this event.
There are three options to choose from when purchasing tickets: £25, £30, £35.
If you are a current Psychosynthesis Trust student and finances are a barrier to attending this workshop, please contact Kajal at events@ptrust.org.uk
Trainer:
Allan Frater is a psychotherapist and author of the recently published, Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. Since 2011 he has taught at the Psychosynthesis Trust, on the Foundation and Diploma courses as well as CPD events related to his research interests in imagination, ecopsychology and transpersonal psychology.
Read the introduction to ‘Waking Dreams’ here.
Qualifications:-Diploma in Supervision with Soul (2013)-MA Psychosynthesis Psychotherapy (2011)-PGDip Psychosynthesis Counselling (2007)-MBACP(Accred)-UKCP(reg)
Find out more: wildimagination.uk | @wakingdreams20
**Please note: Unfortunately, our insurance does not cover participants residing in Canada and the US. This means applications from these countries take part at their own risk. If you have any questions, please contact events@ptrust.org.uk**
