8 Week Inner Empathy TeleCourse Starting

January 11th, 4:00-6:00 pm (EDT)

 

The Inner Empathy Course is an experiential course that is specifically designed for depth awareness work using Nonviolent Communication (NVC), Internal Family Systems parts work (IFS ). The structure and content of the course is oriented to support people in learning to stabilize and maintain their awareness when difficult inner objects emerge in their experience. The Inner Empathy work was designed to efficiently negotiate the inherent challenges of holding unconditioned awareness and/or empathetic awareness towards different aspects of ourselves that arise moment-to-moment.

You will experientially learn:

• What is presence for you.
• How to connect with and cultivate presence for different parts of yourself and enjoy abiding in the centeredness that comes with this powerful way to connect with yourself.
• How to step-back and dis-identify with emotionally challenging aspects of yourself that arise in daily life. By learning to lead with compassionate presence, your intense feelings will be acknowledge and felt, but you will not be consumed by them.
• How to safely invite deeper aspects of ourselves that want to be heard.
• To reveal and hold compassionate awareness of the disowned core beliefs parts of ourselves may hold that have impacted your life in more ways than you know.
  

Course Content

• Getting To Know Our Inner Cast Of Characters
• Deepening And Expanding The Inner Map By Using Parts Psychology
• Becoming Aware Of The Particular Way You Connect With Your Parts
• Process Language Options In Naming Parts
• Gaining An Experiential Understanding Of Empathetic Awareness
• Contrasting “Empathetic Awareness” And “Responding From Our Parts”
• Setting Intentions For The 9 month Course
• Cultivating Empathetic Awareness For Our Parts
• Discovering What In Ourselves Is Aware Of Our Parts?
• Steps In Cultivating Empathetic Awareness
• The Difference In The Depth Of Inquiry Between Self-Empathy and Inner Empathy
• Speaking For or To Our Parts Instead Of From Our Parts
• Allowing, Acknowledging, And Welcoming Your Parts To The Present-Time Experiential Table
• Encountering Difficulties In Welcoming Parts?
• The Form For Practicing Inner Empathy
• Deepening Our Engagement With Parts
• Speaking To A Part And Having An Empathetic Dialogue
• Parts Operating Under The Right/Wrong Paradigm
• Parts Carry The Internalized Voices From Our Past
• What Is Motivating You To Do Better In All Areas Of Your Life?
• All-Consuming Feeling States Parts
• Fulfilling Needs Of Others In Relation To Fulfilling Our Own Needs
• Attachment To Becoming What Is Idealized
• The Futile Ride On The Hamster Wheel
• Keeping Down The Pain
• How Do You Receive From Others?
• The Critical Parts Fundamentally Distrust You
• Parts Will Try To Mutate Into a Pseudo Empathetic or Pseudo-Compassionate Awareness
• Becoming Aware Of The Judgments Our Parts Hold
• How To Enter An Inner Empathy Inquiry
• Creating Emotionally Vivid Connections With Parts
• Seeking Permission And Connecting With Multiple Parts
• Asking Parts To Step Aside Or Connecting Empathetically
• Trying To Banish Parts Only Makes Them Stronger
• Stepping Back And Connecting With The Parts Reacting To Parts
• The Use of Invitational Language In The Support/Listener Role
• Becoming Aware Of The Activity In Our Inner World
• Overview Of The Inner Empathy Dynamic Process
• Basic Inner Empathy Session
• Skills For Speakers and Listeners
• Distinctions Between Inner Empathy Session And
• Forms Of Guided Imagery And Visualization Exercises
• Steps For Doing Solo Inner Empathy Session
• Obstacles In Doing An Effective Solo Inner Empathy Session
• Steps For Being The Supportive Listener In An Inner Empathy Session
• Possible Listener Obstacles To Staying
• Present During Inner Empathy Session
• Using The Inner Empathy Session Sheets
• The Basics Of Connecting With Exile Parts
• Reasons For Creating Exile Parts
• How Our Protective Responses Imply The Pain Of Our Exile Parts
• We Can Know Our Exile Parts By The Intensity Of Our Triggers
• Strategically Connecting With Protective Parts To Access Exile Parts
• Connecting With Personal Growth or Seeker Manager Parts To Disclose Exile Parts They Protect
• Connecting To The Burden And Beliefs Of Exile Parts
• Connecting To Timid Exile Parts Incrementally
• Exile Parts Holding Intense Feelings

 

The Guiding Principles For Inner Empathy Inquiry Work

1) Emphasis On Experiential: The Inner Empathy work heavily favors experiential understandings or insights that occur when connecting to emotional aspects of ourselves as they emerge. This is different than “talking about” or “story about” or having an “intellectual understanding about” or “analytical assessments,” all of which, though useful, can actually be ways to disconnect from feelings. For example, instead of talking about your loneliness or telling an analytical story about why you are lonely or dismissing your loneliness as a only a story or dream material, you can recall a specific time and context when you felt lonely, and really get into the feelings, body sensations, and thoughts that occur while connecting to this recalled experience. This type of connection gives us important emotional insights into our experience. We feel the loneliness, we feel the parts of us that don’t want to feel the loneliness and push it away. This is much different experience than our intellectual stories about loneliness. This emphasis on experiential I believe makes the difference between us spinning around ourselves and getting lost in the intellect and connecting to what is alive in us and allowing our innate wisdom to self-correct the body/mind system.

2) The Principle Of Holding A Nonpathologizing Regard: Many approaches operate under the assumption that something is wrong with us that needs to be fixed. These approaches typically arrange their conceptual models around a diagnostic labels to interpret and describe ourselves which constantly reinforces and feeds what I call a good/bad self system. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of static labels that are used in most personal growth work: negative labels designate that something is wrong with us or something is missing, and positive labels that designate how we should be in order not to be deemed whatever the negative labels are indicating. Instead, I included what is called process language, a language that says what we are doing and what we would like to do differently, instead of saying who we are via dianostic labels. In addition, I choose nondualistic works which start with the premise that it is valuable to practice sitting in the experience of complete fulfillment; a spaciousness characterized by the general sense that there is nothing wrong, nothing to fix, nothing to know, etc.

3) The Value Of Working in The Present: I’ve found what is actively going on with us at any given time as we begin to inquire into our experience is the most useful place to start. In a simple sense, whatever is presenting itself and showing up in the present-time consciousness is meaningful and useful in ways we cannot conceive. In a complex sense, I’ve supported people with complex multiple traumas and have been in awe in how their systems have intelligently and organically unpack and unfurled their interwining levels of experience at the optimal pace the person’s system could handle by presenting to the system what needed attention. There seem to be some greater awareness and wisdom than I brought to the table in the person’s own system. I was smart enough to yield to that innate wisdom.

4) Principle Of Effortless Self-Correction: I strongly believe we all have something in us that can inspire spontaneous self-corrections if we create the conditions for this to occur. For example, when we connect and hold in presence the unsavory aspects of ourselves with empathic awareness, compassion, tolerance, patience, and unconditional regard, we are awakening our self-corrective mechanisms. This is in contrast to some of our self-improvement parts that inspire inner divsion, polarization, and deep identification with thoughts and feelings that want to change, fix, and submerge the unsavory aspects of ourselves using anger, shame, pressure, or dangling carrots of positive outcomes. These self-improvements parts have short term effects and need to be constantly vigilant. On the othe hand, self-corrections are long-lasting, permanent and effortless and are derived from the innate wisdom in our body/mind systems.

5) Honoring The Self-Directive Inquiry: Allowing a person to self-direct I experience as facilitating depth. How deep and where to go internally during an inquiry is under the volition of each person’s comfort level, self-trust and safety. Supporting the inquirer to go beyond comfort levels is permission-based and couched only as suggestions. There is no attempts to break through someone’s egoic structures nor are there any confrontational methods used.

6) Supporting People In Their Self-Guidance: The most powerful way to support someone with inquiry work is to support them in helping themselves. Generally, this means we help a person stabilize their awareness to connect with whatever is emerging in their experience. We don’t need to address the content or make interpretations about the meaning of the content of whatever is emerging in the person’s experience, we simply offer support to the person’s awareness to disidentify from the content of their experience.

7) Non Prescriptive Contributions: Empathy work does not prescribe what people should or should not be believing or what a person should or should not be doing. That is up to each person to decide for themselves based upon their values and needs. Therefore, Inner Empathy work holds no predetermined outcomes for the work other than actively fostering connecting to whatever is emerging in our experience and trusting that such a connection will yield something useful to our bodymind systems. In addition, we will learn to work within, and honor, each person’s own system of meaning and not superimpose our own system of meaning onto the person as we support a person in an Inner Empathy session.