Training

Current MBSC Learning Opportunities

 

In Melbourne Australia, an apprenticeship training program is available

For more information go to Evolution of Mindful Representations Skills Focused Training

Learning Processes

  • Ongoing mindfulness practice throughout the training *
  • Lecture, Reflections and Discussions
  • Experiential exercises *
  • Feedback *
  • Self directed learning between training sessions *
  • Learning self-awareness *
  • Encouragement of evolving a personal style and creativity *
  • facilitating mindful representations with support in a workshop setting*

Prerequisites for students

To be already working in a field in which you can readily apply constellation work e.g. therapist, organisational consulting, teaching.

In these settings, you may draw on your MR training to facilitate mindful representations either in individual work or in a group setting or you may simply use it to enhance work you are already doing eg couples therapy, family therapy, individual therapy, coaching, teaching or consulting.

MBSC Skills Focused Training Overview

To help students navigate their way through the training we have developed learning modules. These modules  each have four components:

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

There will also be associated reading with each module.

Each component of each module includes tasks that enable the students to develop and assess their level of mastery. This, in turn, makes it clearer what learning each student can readily use as a reliable resource and what they need to work on further.

The memory tasks are there because students need to be so familiar with some constellation concepts that they have a working knowledge – to the point that they can easily explain them and so that they can remember them when they need them in the middle of facilitating a representation. When students facilitate constellations they tend to get so caught up in following the energy of a representation that they forget the organic principles that support flow and lose connection with the facts. This is a fundamental skill. Once mastered it makes the rest of the learning so much easier.

Understanding this helps to understand how the training will work with students at different levels. Senior students are pulled back to basics in a good way so that they have more opportunity to develop mastery. As you revise and review, you will notice important subtleties that you haven’t really attended to until now and you will develop more ease with the processes involved with constellations. The junior students will benefit from the way this makes constellation processes more transparent.

When a really adept practitioner facilitates a constellation, it generally flows relatively smoothly. Depending on the point of view of the naive observer, it either looks mysterious and impossible or very easy. The truth is that it requires a lot of skill and that there are understandable principles that underpin the work. It is also true that with the right training a student can develop their skills dramatically. The important factors that determine how much these skills develop are your inherent ability, how hard you work at it and how much you are willing to look at and address your own psychological issues.

Between trainings, the advanced students should be seriously practicing the mindful constellation interview, directing mindfulness and facilitating constellations and will be using the assessment documents to assess performance, so that they can further improve.

MBSC teaching uses solution focus which builds on students’ strengths in order to reach the desired outcome which is to be a proficient constellation facilitator. Feedback focuses first of all on what a student has done right. Then the further feedback is also given in a positive way in terms of what needs to be worked on and how that could be done. Students need to practice the same approach when assessing themselves.

The 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

Module 2:  The Therapeutic Stance

Module 3: The Mindful Interview

Module 4: Mindfully working with emotions

Module 5:  Facilitating the mindful representation (This will probably be subdivided)

Module 6:  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 skillful interventions

Level 3 – Moving toward Resolution & Wrapping up

Level 4 – Advanced Skills

Module 7: Trauma

Module 8:  Deeper systemic approach (beyond just principles that support healthy flow in systems)

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