Description

Mindfulness and Somatic Regulation:

A Response-side Approach to Healing Developmental Trauma

We often hear clients say that they feel like their body was hijacked in the face of a triggering event. They can’t think, their nervous system seems to have a mind of its own. They lose their sense of home with their sense of self compromised. Mindfulness and somatic regulation practices can be key factors in returning to a secure experience of their felt-sense, a return home to safety.

The integration of mindfulness and somatic awareness into therapeutic practice is often misunderstood and frequently misused. However, a somatically grounded, neuroaffective and psychodynamically informed perspective can support our clients to transform their adaptive strategies.

Somatic therapies engage cognitive, behavioral, emotional, neurobiological and energetic systems to help clients become more organized and alive. Interventions are bi-directional, moving from cognition to neurobiology and from neurobiology to cognition. As we say, somatic therapists work top-down and bottom-up.

This webinar supports viewers to:

1. Differentiate between mindfulness and somatic awareness;
2. Describe top-down and bottom-up therapeutic interventions;
3. Identify strategies for integrating mindfulness practices into therapeutic process;
4. Identify strategies for integrating somatic practices into therapeutic process;
5. Integrate somatic practices within their current clinical perspective.
6. Describe how somatic practices can enhance awareness of transference-countertransference processes.

Michael Shiffman, Ph.D., is a relational body therapist at the Insight Center in West Los Angeles.  He founded LA Dharma in 1999 and co-founded the Insight Center in 2006. Michael has studied with numerous Western Buddhist teachers and currently studies with Rev. Hye Wol Sunim. He has been meditating since 1994 and teaching mindfulness and insight meditation since 2002.

Michael is a certified practitioner of the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner with substantial training in the use of touch for nervous system regulation and the repair of attachment ruptures.  He is trained in EMDR and is a PACT Level 2 couple therapist.

Michael has an extensive background working with anxiety, panic, traumatic stress, substance abuse and recovery, relapse prevention, and somatic oriented therapeutic practices. He teaches meditation and somatic therapy.  Michael has a private practice in Los Angeles.  You can find more details on his website at https://michaelshiffman.com