This course covers essential mindfulness and compassion practices within the relational field. The course introduces participants to current therapeutic and contemplative practices and relational skills, grounded in the practices of relational mindfulness and Mindful Communication. The following seven skills will be presented, discussed, exemplified and explored. These are:

1.   Sensing, Feeling, and Thinking: the building blocks of immediate, tangible experience. We will learn to identify and represent these appropriately as they arise and come into being. We will consider the Buddha’s words, “There is a body here,” as a practical antidote to dissociative strategies so common to the human condition.

2.   Modes of Self: How we hold, perceive and represent ourselves has a major effect on our wellbeing and on our ability to contribute to the wellbeing of others. We will study three self-states and consider their potential uses and abuses in the relational field.

3.   The Mindful Narrative: Mindfulness practice delays the formulation of automatic narratives, thus providing practitioners with a cherished gap between interaction and conditioned reaction. We will consider how to make best use of this valuable repose.

4.   Wise Endurance: staying with it is a central practice in many contemplative practices. We will establish personal guidelines for the ways in which we take things upon ourselves in the clinical setting and in relationships et large. When is it best to sit and observe and what is the value of following impulse?

5.   Relational Impact: somatic countertransference and witness consciousness as pivotal ingredients of the ongoing relational echo. How to know what’s mine and what’s yours? When does such categorization support sanity and when is it an obstacle to establishing contact and deepening trust?

6.   Motivational Insight: What it is that we are striving to experience and what, by all means, are we trying to avoid? Posing this one question, we will learn to identify the atom of motivation in the clinical setting and in our daily interactions.

7.   Compassionate Contact, at the heart of it all: Karuna. The heart’s trembling in response to pain and suffering. We will encounter Trungpa’s image of the Shambala warrior and it’s implications to clinical and interpersonal work.

The joint practice of Mindful Communication transcends and includes projection, transference and projective identification, launching both client and therapist into a mutual field of interdependent processes.

Drawing on decades of personal and interpersonal contemplative practices, Shantam seeks to create a safe container for open sharing and creative self-exploration, in the spirit of the radical transformation traditions.

This course will be of interest to therapists in many fields of practice including psychotherapy, counselling, body-oriented therapies and mindfulness-based practitioners in general.

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