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Coming to our Senses with Emma Palmer on Sunday May 22nd, 2022
May 22, 2022 @ 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
This workshop will be at Park Place Centre, Wickham. PO17 5HA, max of 16 participants. £50 to hacp members, £60 to non members. This will include lunch. For an application form, please email info@hacp.co.uk
To pay by bank transfer, HACP sort code 090151 account number 43775502
Coming to our senses
During Covid-19 many of us have at one time or another been overwhelmed, unsurprisingly, by the uncertainties of living through a global pandemic. It is a year and a half since we were first becoming accustomed – literally overnight – to phenomena such as: ‘lockdown’, ‘social distancing’, ‘self-isolation’, ‘furlough’, ‘quarantine’, perhaps ‘shielding’ – all alien to us and our bodies until 2020.
This day will be a chance to breathe out more fully, perhaps to digest, and most of all to have the space to simply be as you are, and to re-engage more fully with your senses, in good company. It might also be a chance to acknowledge, moment by moment, the many different things that have happened; bearing witness to what we have endured personally, to watching the unfolding of world events, perhaps remembering people we grieve, and honouring times in this strange limbo. We’ll have the chance to recollect what we’ve discovered about ourselves, and even what we’ve enjoyed and found fruitful about the enforced staying at home.
We’ll be digesting and exploring through being with our senses – our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind – through experiential exercises, reflection, pair work, and whole group work. We might become curious or play with paying attention to senses with which we are less familiar, and, in turn, perhaps have greater access to our full range of senses in a world in which mind and thinking tend to be over-prized.
My hope is that this is a restorative day for self care. I also hope that it might be a useful reminder of the importance and potency of being with the senses and its profound importance in being present with and for clients and supervisees, in the room, in the moment. How that simple to describe yet not always simple to practise awareness, experienced through the senses, can slow things down, create relational space, perhaps cutting through the stories or dramas, helping us to see well-told narratives in a new light, teaching us new things about ourselves through embodied, relational patterns, and letting our senses show us. In times when millions of folk worldwide have struggled to breathe, it’ll be a chance to simply be present and breathing, absorbing being alive and together, with the potential hopes and fears that this might bring, given all that our bodies have gone through since early 2020. You’re invited to come as you are – all parts of you are gently invited.
About Emma
Emma will draw upon her own experience and training in noticing the senses, as a people-watching author, as a meditating Buddhist practising since 1995, as an Embodied-Relational therapist and as a Wild therapist, encountering the other-than-human and more-than-human world.