Dr. Stephen Johnson Addresses GPASC Conference

The 56th Annual Conference

of the Group Psychotherapy Association

of Southern California

October 4, 2009

Doubletree Hotel

1707 4th Street

Santa Monica, CA 90401

On-line registration and online membership application at www.gpasc.org

Questions?: e-mail: groups@gpasc.org Telephone: (323) 960-5143

Conference Overview:

• This one-day seminar will cover strategies and concepts for use of Mindfulness & Meditation in group therapy, including a review of the Buddhist schools of meditation, emphasizing mindfulness, its roots in Buddhist psychology, its relationship to neuroscience and how mindfulness positively affects our brain, and the usefulness of mindfulness processes in contemporary group psychotherapy.

• The day will include two guided group meditations, demonstrating that mindfulness has the power to tame the mind and free the heart through careful, and caring, observation of the continuous changes in our bodies, emotions, and minds.
• Learn practical tools designed to reduce stress, increase relaxed presence, and transform hectic lives from‚“Mind-filled‚” to “Mindful‚” Group members will experience surrendering through resistance and discomfort to greater balance, serenity, expanded awareness, joy, and vitality (as reducing stress, boosts the immune system).
• Learn and discuss how mindfulness meditation can teach us about ourselves in our experience of being in groups, focusing on the personal experience of separation and belonging. As part of the presentation, meditative exercises will be used to explore the here-and-now experience of being with others.

Dan Siegel, MD,
received his medical degree from Harvard University and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child, adolescent and adult psychiatry. He served as a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow at UCLA, studying family
interactions with an emphasis on how attachment experiences influence emotions, behavior, autobiographical memory and narrative. He is currently an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine where he is a Co-Investigator at the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development and is Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center, and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute. Dan is the author of The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience (1999; Co-author with Mary Hartzell, MEd, Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive (2003); and author of The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being (2007).

Ron Alexander, PhD, MFT,
is a psychotherapist and longtime Buddhist practitioner ordained as a lay Zen Buddhist. He is the Founder and Clinical Director of the Open Mind Training® Institute in Santa Monica, offering Mindful Awareness training programs in Integrative Mind-Body psychotherapy,
Transformational Leadership, and Mindfulness Awareness practices. Ron teaches clinical training groups for professionals, nationally and internationally, synthesizing Buddhist psychology, somatic psychotherapy, and Eriksonian mind/body healing. He is the author of
Wise Mind Open Mind: Finding Purpose and Meaning in Times of Crisis, Loss and Change (2009).

Trudy Goodman, EdM,
is Executive Director and Founder of InsightLA, a non-profit organization for secular mindfulness education and Vipassana meditation training, she teaches extensively in the field of meditation and psychotherapy at conferences and retreats nationwide. In 1995, she co-founded the very first Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy in Cambridge, MA, where she lived and taught at the Cambridge Buddhist Association from 1991-98. Trudy has studied Buddhist meditation for 35 years with Asian and Western teachers, and is also an affiliate teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Woodacre, California. Contributing Author: Mindfulness and Psychotherapy; (Guilford, 2005), and Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness (Springer, 2008).

Stephen Johnson, PhD, MFT,
is a psychotherapist, consultant, and educator for over 35 years in Beverly Hills & Woodland Hills. He founded the Center for Holistic Psychology, (1974) and The Men‘s Center of Los Angeles (1988). In addition to his co-ed retreats, Stephen created the Sacred Path Men‘s Retreat and the Call to Adventure Rites of Passage Retreat for fathers and sons, boys and mentors. While at USC, Stephen researched the “Benefits of Yoga Therapy on Self-Concept,
Conflict Resolution, and Emotional Adjustment.” In the mid-seventies he assisted Leonard Orr in his pioneering work with the powerful breathing process called Rebirthing. Stephen‘s new book, Man Up! What it takes to be a Good Man Today will be available in 2010.

Marjorie Schuman, PhD,
is a psychologist who practices psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Santa Monica. Her life-long passion for understanding the nature of consciousness led her to professional training in neural science and psychopharmacology, then to clinical psychology and ultimately to psychoanalysis. Alongside this academic background, she has, since 1974, been a practitioner of Vipassana meditation and student of Buddhism. Marjorie is a member of the faculty at the Los Angeles Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies and is co-founder of the Center for Mindfulness and Psychotherapy in Santa Monica. She practices, teaches, and writes about a therapeutic approach, ‚“contemplative relational psychotherapy,” which weaves together contemporary psychoanalysis and Buddhist psychology.

Participants attending this workshop will learn:

• clinical skills in mindfulness meditation and how to apply

them to group therapy;

• how to develop “Antidote Remedies” and work with unwholesome

and wholesome thought patterns utilizing mindfulness, cognitive

therapy, and methods of Buddhist psychology;

• How to align ourselves with the constant flow of change that is our life.

• how to refocus attention to being present;

• the power of meditative breathing to enhance stress reduction;

• how the Mindfulness practices of non-resistance, patience, stillness,

refraining, simplicity, solitude, and discernment can be the antidote

to “mind-filled-ness.”

• how separation and belonging are understood in psychoanalytic

psychotherapy and how this differs from the view in Buddhist

psychology;

• and discover for themselves how mindfulness meditation can

illuminate the experience of being with others.

Mindfulness is not new. It‘s part of what makes us human—the capacity to be fully conscious and aware. By becoming aware of what is occurring within and around us, we can begin to untangle ourselves from mental preoccupations and difficult emotions. To truly understand mindfulness we have to experience it directly.