Embodiment is a life-long commitment. The process of embodiment is an adaptation to a growing and changing body: as a child, adolescent, youth, ‘alpha’ and mature adult. Our changing anatomy and nervous systems, energy levels, experiences, and desires lead to continuing challenges in embodiment. Our constitutional type, our personal history of transitions, crises and traumas, teach us about embodiment as an adaptive survival strategy and a "problem solving methodology" drawing on deep organismic wisdom. All of these formative challenges benefit from having a clear, specific methodology for managing arousal, emotion, deep feeling and relationships, and for providing constructive direction.

Stanley Keleman, developer of Formative Psychology, is one of the great inspirations for Formative Embodiment. His work, in its own way, resonates beautifully with many forward thinking neuroscientists, and provides a unique and elegant approach to working with how people form the shape of their lives out of their experience.

This course will include lecture, demonstrations, small group interactions, and experiential exercises which will provide a felt entry into the possibilities of this approach.

Some selected topics from the Formative Embodiment Curriculum:

• 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 Embryological Foundations of Formativeness and Morphogenesis
  Constitution: an anatomically based character typology built from the three embryological germ layers
  
  
• Boundaries and Form-Building
  
  • Establishing an Inside and Outside, A Center and a Periphery
  • Processes of Organizing, Disorganizing, Reorganizing Structure and Form
  • Growth and Development
  • Managing the Transitions of Life Stages and from Shape to Shape. Our many adults – young, alpha, mature, older

• The Power of Narrative and Story-Telling – Building Coherence
  
  • Story-telling as a fundamental human activity – the socialization of experience.
  • Attunement and Resonance – Wide spectrum listening
  • Methods of supporting the discovery, unfolding and emergence of deep stories
  • Stories as soma’s way of organizing a language to talk to itself – the mechanics of physiological self-talk.

Formative Embodiment (FE) offers interesting tools for therapists of all kinds to add depth and nuance to their present work. This list includes psychotherapists, trauma therapists, body therapists such as Craniosacral and Polarity Therapists, among others