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As well as learning new skills and attitudes, the aim is for you to have a powerful personal experience. These workshops make excellent tasters for the next one year training in ERT. No one will be expected to do anything they don't want to do, and emotional release will be held in a safe setting.
Embodied-Relational Therapy (ERT) has its roots in Reichian body work, process approaches, psychodynamic therapies and earth-centred spirituality. Initiated by Nick Totton and Em Edmondson in the late 80s, ERT continues to grow and develop, especially through Allison Priestman’s contribution.
ERT is an holistic integrative approach focusing on two facts about human beings: we are embodied and in relationship. To be alive we need to be a body, to be alive we need to relate to others; our greatest challenges and our greatest joys follow from these twin facts.
As human beings, we are integrated bodymindspirit; on the whole, we find this condition hard to manage. Our nature seeks to express itself freely, while at the same time protecting itself in conditions sometimes of great difficulty. This double task of expression and protection makes us often subject to contradictory pulls, and offering double messages about what we feel, want and need. Through a relationship which is challenging but supportive and non-invasive, it is possible to disentangle our doubleness and allow our process to unfold.
ERT draws a great deal from other therapies, but brings these ideas and techniques into a new synthesis with its own unique flavour and values, described in terms of seven ‘metaskills’: Awareness, Trust, Contactfulness, Spontaneity, Spaciousness, Relaxation and Wild Mind. Encouraging a deep letting go into what is, ERT seeks a position of profound trust that what ever is trying to happen in someone's life needs to happen, and whatever needs to happen is trying to happen.
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