Trauma changes our neural circuitry:  The residue of trauma can leave us without the sense of safety we need to be curious and open to life.  We find ourselves permanently stuck in old familiar patterns of defense, fight, flight or freeze. BodyDreaming offers a way out of the habitual patterned responses that often originate in early trauma. 

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The Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology’s speaker for May 2023, Jungian analyst and author Marian Dunlea, will share her insights on how we can begin to create new neural pathways in the body-mind after trauma.  Her somatically focused therapeutic technique which she calls, BodyDreaming, draws on the findings of neuroscience, analytical psychology, attachment theory, and trauma therapy.  Her work has been influenced by Marion Woodman and Bodysoul Rhythms and her training in Somatic Experience Trauma Therapy founded by Peter Levine. 

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BodyDreaming explores ways to connect with the locked in energy held in the body, by regulating the nervous system and by bringing our attention to the body’s expression in dreams, symptoms, images, movements and gestures. Marian Dunlea explains that slowly we begin to “unblock areas in the body where complexes and trauma are stored and help bring greater coherence and flow to the whole system.”   

 

Assisted by Jungian analyst and art historian Patricia Llosa, Marian will walk us through simple but enlightening exercises which engage the right brain—and can begin the process of changing the body-mind’s neural circuitry.

 

Subtle and incremental steps to rewire engrained neural patterns can have lasting transformational impact. They help expand our capacity to tolerate powerful emotions and create a growing sense of safety in body and soul, even as they open us to receive dream images that contain the seeds of new life. 

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Four Plenary Talk Topics​

• BodyDreaming: An Embodied Jungian Approach.​

• The Universe of the Nervous System:  Parasympathetic and Sympathetic, Inner and Outer Attunement,  Self-Regulation. ​

• Dreaming the Dream on​

• The Numinous of the Living Body from TAO (Titration, Attunement and Orientation) to an  Interconnected field :  The Dance of Three

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 For our Plenary Speakers bios, please click here.