This training is based around completion of modules. These modules have built in assessment functions that allow the student to take control of their own learning. These modules will be mastered through the use of four different learning approaches:

1. Theory
2. Memory tasks
3. Personal Insight
4. Skills
5. Theory

This learning approach is designed to help the student develop a deeper understanding. This is designed to increase the student’s capacity to think logically, systemically and intuitively about the issues related to mindful representations.

Broad areas covered will be:

• Systemic theory especially as covered in family therapy such as the work of Salvador Minuchin, Virginia Satir and Murray Bowen.

• The theoretical work of Family Constellation therapists such as Bert Hellinger, Hunter Beaumont, Gunther Weber, Jakob Schneider, Bertold Ulsamer and Ursula Franke, Marianne Franke-Gricksch and Francesca Mason Boring.

• Mindfulness theory and practice: with the writings of practitioners such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mark Williams, Pema Chodron, Thich Naht Hanh, Shunryū Suzuki and Chogyam Trungpa.

• There will also be material written specifically for this integrated approach of mindful Representations.
• Memory tasks

When working on a mindful representation we engage intimately with the family system. That takes the practitioner into a mildly  altered state of consciousness that contains the energy of that family. That family energy can carry a lot of dissociation or confusion.

When students start facilitating representations they often get so caught up in following the energy of a representation that they forget the principles that support the flow of love and lose connection with simple facts that are important in that particular representation. This is a fundamental and necessary skill all practitioners need to develop and sustain. Once mastered it makes the rest of the learning so much easier.

Two resources help us to navigate these difficult waters skillfully:

• A strong mindfulness practice which helps us to see through the fog. A strong mindful presence allows us to observe such difficult energies like confusion and dissociation  without being overwhelmed by them.

• The other is having the basic principles of mindful representations well memorised. That is like having a map that can guide us even when we are in the middle of the confusing fog.

For this reason, there is an emphasis on memorising the simple systemic principles that help to guide us as we facilitate a representation.

• Development of personal insight

This is about learning to use yourself, your own life experience, your own family system and your own reactions more effectively as an instrument of this work. In that way you can better channel your strengths and also compensate better for your weaknesses and blind spots.

This is equivalent to a ballet dancer learning how to best use her own body. It is an exciting and challenging process of getting to know yourself and of self-development.

• Practical skills

Skills that are important for the practice of representation facilitation are identified. Experiential exercises will be given to help with the development of these skills. Self-evaluation templates will be given so that the students can assess both their own strengths and weaknesses. These same templates will be used to assess mastery of skill.

At the end of basic training, students should have basic competence in the fundamentals with some fluency in the application of mindful representation work.

At the end of Integrated practice training, the students should have enough fluency in the core skills that they can manage difficult cases. They will also form a meaningful integration with other therapeutic approaches they have learnt

With advanced skills the students’ abilities and integration will further deepen and they will be able to apply the principles of mindful representations in a wider range of settings. This level will also involve training and support in setting up and running workshops. the aim is that the student will develop the capacity to recruit their own workshop participants and run their own workshops independently.

Some students will choose to work in different ways to this such as working with individual clients. We will support students as they explore their own ways of developing the work as long as there work remains consistent with the basic principles and processes of Mindful Representations.

The current modules are:

Mindfulness Modules

Module 1: Establishing a Mindfulness Practice – Steadying the Mind

People who have done other mindfulness courses are eligible for recognition of prior learning and may be exempt from completing this module

Module 2: Developing the Inner Witness – Even steadier & exploring your mind

• flexibility of attention
• culminating in choiceless awareness
• This is the basis of the phenomenological approach

Module 3: Cultivating the fruits of resilience

• Authentic Humility
• Creativity with spontaneously arising insights
• Integrating being and doing modes
• Directing mindfulness practices

Representation Modules

Module 1:  Principles that support healthy flow in systems.

This includes a review of family therapy approaches and developing the capacity to see how these principles pay out in everyday life as well as in representations

Module 2:  The Therapeutic Stance

Module 3: The Mindful Interview

Module 4: Mindfully working with emotions

Module 5: Working with Solution Focus

Module 6:  Facilitating the mindful representation. This includes but is not limited to:

              Applying mindfulness skills within the representation

              Projecting yourself into the story of a family at different points in its history.

              Working with representatives 

              Working in a balanced way with order, energy and facts

              Working in individual settings

Module 7:  Review of mindful representation skills

The structure of this module is different because it is a review and integration module. To be working on this module a student needs to be facilitating constellations in a workshop setting.

Level 1 – Learning how to connect with the representation

Level 2 – Learning skilful interventions

Level 3 – Moving toward Resolution & Wrapping up

Level 4 – Advanced Skills

Module 8: Trauma

Module 9:  Deeper systemic approach that incorporates mindfulness at a visceral level (beyond just principles that support healthy flow in systems)

• eg. Relating to inner images that arise from being with the representation.

Practice Module: Organising Workshops