The Mystery of Embodiment:

September 15th - October 20th

Course Faculty:
Brian Tierney, PhD, Aftab Omer, PhD, and Melissa Schwartz, PhD

Includes 6 Continuing Education Credits for psychologists and California MFTs and LPCCs

We live in bodies that modernity trains us to override. Acceleration, screens, and the demand for continuous cognitive output have made numbness adaptive and abstraction habitable. Interest in yoga, dance, breathwork, and other somatic practices is growing exponentially in tandem with these very pressures, which suggests the interest is not a fashion but a symptom of something the culture has withheld and the body has continued to require.

Somatic practices have been carried within the local knowledge of traditional and indigenous cultures for millennia, while the professionalization of modern psychology and allopathic medicine steadily marginalized the body as a source of psychological knowing. That marginalization has been reversing for a century. From attention to character and armoring through the formative, bioenergetic, focusing-oriented, developmental, and sensorimotor lineages that followed, Somatic Psychology has accumulated a body of theory, research, and clinical craft that is now substantial enough to be distorted from two directions at once: commodified as wellness content on one side, and treated as adjunct technique by the professions that most need it on the other. Both distortions obscure the field's central claim, which is that the body is not where psychological life registers after the fact but the ground on which experience is organized.

This course provides a historical and theoretical overview of the field and introduces the principles, concepts, and methods underlying its established modalities. The course views the field through Imaginal Process, the approach to cultivating human capacities sourced in more than thirty years of innovation in the theory and practice of transformative learning at Meridian University. In this approach capacities emerge as experience is diversified, deepened, embodied, and personalized, and imagination integrates and amplifies the sensory, emotional, and cognitive dimensions of what is experienced. Embodying experience is one of those four dynamisms, and this course takes it as its subject. Personal, familial, and cultural dynamics gate experience, and the body holds those gates as posture, breath, gesture, and habits of sensation, which is why somatic work is never separable from work with identity, culture, and power.

Participants are offered the opportunity to experience a range of modalities in action, to develop clinical and psychoeducational somatic skills applicable in psychotherapy, coaching, education, and organizational settings, and to practice the frameworks through which practitioners read movement, posture, contact, and the felt sense.

Action sourced in embodiment is also a dimension of leadership, and the capacities this course cultivates — presence, authority, receptivity, endurance, and the ability to stay in contact through conflict — carry into teams and organizations as readily as into the consulting room. The course proceeds through learning activities that engage the whole person rather than through instruction alone, on the understanding that emotion transmutes into capacity under conditions of contained experience. For example, as fear transmutes into courage and shame into conscience. Attention is given throughout to the practitioner's own embodiment, given that the range of a practitioner's somatic awareness sets the tone for what that practitioner can perceive and hold in another.

Continuing Education Credit

This course is approved by the California Psychological Association to provide continuing professional education for psychologists. Meridian University maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

The course provides 6 Continuing Education credits for psychologists and California MFTs and LPCCs.