For Latest Updates
Sign up to the
First Expression Newsletter
Note: This link will take you to the Mailchimp landing page to sign up to the First Expression newsletter
PDF COPY
If you would like a PDF copy covering this seminar and about Formative Embodiment and Jim Feil follow this link to download.
COURSE CONTENT
The following is a brief outline of key concepts and practices that form the foundations of FE. Each topic has many layers of meaning and application, which can only be appreciated through personal experience and study. It forms the backbone of the postgraduate course in FE.
1. THE FORMATIVE DYNAMIC – THE RULES OF OUR BIOLOGICAL FORMING
The essential question is not, “What is wrong and how do we fix it?”, but rather “What is trying to form itself in us in this moment and for what purpose?” How do shapes come into being, change over time and disappear? The following topics describe this language of organismic life:
a. Pulsation – The Body’s “Metronome”
This is the organizing principle of the formative process. In some healing traditions it is called ‘The Deep Pulse’, the ‘Long Tide’, or the ‘Pilot Wave’.
b. The Embryological Foundations of Formativeness -
Looking at constitutional types. This is an anatomically based character typology built from the three embryological germ layers:
i. The Endomorphic type: empathic, caretaker, visceral, and related to the metabolic system
ii. The Mesomorphic type: action-
iii. The Ectomorphic type: observer, inhibitor, magician, and related to the nervous and integumentary systems.
c. Boundaries and Form-
i. Establishing a clear sense of an inside and outside, a centre and a periphery.
ii. Processes involving organizing, disorganizing and re-
d. Growth and Development
i. Managing the transitions of life stages and from one shape to another.
ii. Exploring our many ‘adults’ – young, alpha, mature and older.
2. ACTION – THE FUNDAMENTAL IMPERATIVE OF THE ORGANISM
a. Feeling, sensation, emotion and thought as feedback systems in service of action and behaviour.
b. The nervous system and Formative Embodiment; memory and learning.
3. FORMATIVE EMBODIMENT:
ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGING STRESS AND TRAUMA
a. The Polyvagal Theory of Stephen Porges
b. Tensional patterns in the body – the organism’s attempts to create a form to meet its challenges and opportunities. Organizing behaviour for new and different situations
c. Organismic Self-
i. How the organism speaks to itself
ii. Self-
4. THE POWER OF NARRATIVE AND STORY TELLING – BUILDING COHERENCE
a. Story-
b. Attunement and resonance – wide spectrum listening
c. Methods of supporting the discovery, unfolding and emergence of deep stories
d. Organizing physiological, cellular and psychological events into coherent pictures
e. Understanding stories as the soma’s way of organizing a language to talk to itself – the mechanics of physiological self-
5. FORMATIVE METHODOLOGY FOR SELF MANAGEMENT, THERAPY AND COACHING
Transforming reflex, instinctive and programmed human responses into personal, individualized and adaptive expressions and forms.
a. Stanley Keleman’s ‘Five Steps’ and the ‘Bodying Practice’
i. Voluntary Muscular Cortical Effort (VMCE) as the royal road to the unconscious; subcortical man/woman talks to cortical man/woman
ii. Macro and micro-
iii. Working with gestures; a key to the formative process.
b. Connections and resonances with other somato-
c. Formative process as a quantum process
d. The great somatic adventure – soma and soul.
Return to main Post Graduate Four Module course page
Listen to Podcast Interview with Jim Feil