Four 90-minute live sessions meet every other week on Mondays at 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET (US and Canada): October 2, 2023 October 16, 2023 October 30, 2023 November 13, 2023 3 month payment plan is available on the registration page. We invite you to watch the introductory webinar recording. This course is an invitation to spend time with yourself and with kindred spirits to explore mindfulness in light of Polyvagal Theory. This is an experiential, first-person exploration to find your own way to integrate mindfulness, meaning and purpose in the context of experiencing life as interaction. Beyond traditional mindfulness It’s not that mindfulness is new to you. Even if you don’t have a regular mindfulness practice, such as yoga, meditation, therapy, or playing golf, you have a sense of what it’s like to be mindful rather than mindless. You are not just trying to allocate more time to mindfulness practices. You are curious about what it would be like to live in a way that is more mindful while active and spontaneous. You know something about Polyvagal Theory (PVT). Maybe, you know a lot about it: for instance, you’re a therapist whose work is based on it. Maybe, you only have a vague sense of it having to do with our nervous system and the different ways we react to the interactions of life. This course is suitable for all levels of PVT experience: experts as well as beginners. It is not about technical expertise in PVT. It is about developing an experiential understanding of how PVT profoundly impacts how you think about mindfulness and how this affects your life. A paradigm shift The traditional perspective on the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) is that it controls the automatic functions of our body as it connects the brain to most of our internal organs. Polyvagal Theory adds that the ANS operates within the context of interaction. It is not just that the ANS regulates our heartbeat, for instance, and our heartbeat is faster as the Sympathetic system is engaged when we are in danger. Generally speaking, how the ANS modulates the function of our internal organs depends on its assessment of how safe or dangerous our situation is. Our senses are continuously scanning the environment to detect potential threats. A vital function of the ANS is to process this sensory information about the environment and assess risk. Dr. Stephen Porges coined the term neuroception to describe how our nervous system does it automatically (i.e., at the nervous system level, without conscious perception). Hence, PVT puts mindfulness within a broader context: how we manage interaction. Moment by moment, we implicitly assess our situation. Neuroception takes place below awareness, as much of our functioning does. But it is possible to develop our capacity for mindful awareness of what we sense through neuroception. Inner connection & interconnection This perspective is very different from the notion of mindfulness as something that requires removing ourselves from the hustle and bustle of life, at least temporarily. For instance, when we meditate, we usually face a wall or close our eyes, look inside, and find some distance from life. In contrast, PVT opens up new perspectives on combining inner connection and interconnection. Another key consideration is that much of what happens in interaction is implicit rather than explicit. The relational implicit is difficult, and often impossible, to fully express in logical language. So, mindful awareness is not the same as making explicit what is implicit, and it involves finding different ways of relating to our experience. Dancing at the edge of experience Culturally, we have a bias toward explaining what we experience, which is reducing it to familiar concepts. We need to resist the urge to explain what we experience and instead spend more time exploring it. We practice dancing at the edge of experience. Polyvagal Theory provides a logical, scientific framework for making sense of life as an interaction. However, to put this framework into practice, we must shift from a logical thinking mode to a sensing and feeling mode. As we enter this territory, we discover that self-awareness, artistic exploration, and mindful practices blend into an embodied philosophy of life that we experience freshly, moment by moment. I invite you to explore how it may open new directions in your practice and life. Students have access to the course for 180 days from the date of purchase.