Be Your Own Best Friend with Self-Care

Why, oh why is it so hard to prioritize our own mental, physical and spiritual daily care?

We are seeing more and more how our world was designed to benefit a few and keep most of us distracted from noticing. These top-down societal rules and structures are now rapidly disintegrating around us. Gendlin's philosophy helps us understand that with any problem, there is an implicit solution waiting to be discovered.

Self-care and addiction behavioral patterns are two sides of the same coin. We will look closer at the societal environments that keep us in addictive behavioral patterns that do not support our health and well-being. Changes here involve inviting shame to step forward from where it often hides.

Living forward emerges naturally with self-care when we truly follow our body as our best teacher for what this means for us now. This course emphasizes the skill of holding it all and the small actions steps that bring about long-term change.

This course series is centered around exploring and improving your relationship with yourself from wherever it is now. We will explore how our brain works using current neuroscience concepts. We will use various body awareness, mindfulness and Focusing activities to become familiar with our own individual inner processes around what it means for us to be our own best friend.

Each course consists of five weekly 1.5 hour classes. 

Classes will include time for sensing within yourself, mindfulness exercises to adapt into your daily life, opportunities to become more familiar with how to navigate your inner landscape, Presence language exercises, writing, art and body awareness/movement activities and a few Demonstrations of Focusing-in-action. There will be some reading and handouts provided by email. We will not be partnering with others in the class here, only working individually. Focusing experience is not required, although it will certainly add to what you get from this class. You will be able to go deeper on the themes offered here if you already have experience.

The uses of Focusing that apply particularly to the space we create here are: 
• practicing self-care and compassion
• making clear decisions
• knowing what you really feel and want
• releasing emotional and intergenerational burdens
• transforming inner critics to supportive protectors
• nurturing a sense of self-worth
• being an accepting understanding friend
• improve overall communication skills
• increase patience, intentionality, gratitude and body awareness

A goal of this series is to hold space for ourselves in a way that we experience ourselves as living process. We will find it easier to give ourselves space when we need it. 

Be Your Own Best Friend with Self-Care - Two Offerings

Five Tuesdays 7 - 8:30pm Eastern New York Time or your equivalent

March 17, March 31, April 7, April 14, April 21

Also available: 

Five Wednesdays 12 - 1:30pm Eastern New York Time or your equivalent

March 18, March 25, April 1, April 8, April 15