We are glad to present to you Dr. Gabor Maté, David Elliott, Mia Hetenyi, Eugene Pustoshkin, Jon Skelton Pearson, Nicole Grossen, Reto Sauder, Tim Schneider and Silas Hörler.
Read more to get to know them and the topic of their speech at IEC 2022!
Dr. Gabor Maté
Trauma Healing and World Peace
In this keynote Gabor Maté, physician and author, will discuss the interlocking and mutually reinforcing dynamics of trauma and war. That the latter causes trauma is self-evident; that trauma—individual and collective—can help fuel military conflict is less apparent but also essential to understand. On the most obvious level, people who have worked through their trauma can let go of their attachments to herd thinking and chauvinistic identifications and, as a result, are less likely to be manipulated into warlike sentiments and murderous actions.
On the other hand, traumatized people are more likely to be drawn or impelled into conflictual mind states and disdain for the perceived “enemy” on the individual plane, and this is also true of communities and nations. The healing of trauma, both personally and collectively, is a step towards peace on all levels.
Gabor Maté is a retired physician who, after 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, worked for over a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. The bestselling author of four books published in twenty-five languages, Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship of stress and illness. His book on addiction received the Hubert Evans Prize for literary non-fiction. For his groundbreaking medical work and writing he has been awarded the Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian distinction, and the Civic Merit Award from his hometown, Vancouver. His books include In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction; When the Body Says No; The Cost of Hidden Stress; Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder; and (with Gordon Neufeld) Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. To learn more, join his enews list at www.drgabormate.com.
David Elliott
Attachment Security as a Foundation for Peace
Attachment insecurity is all-too-common and contributes to a variety of difficulties in four-quadrant space. Problems within the personal self, disruptions in relational life, and destructive social system patterns are all more likely if the early childhood relational bond with caregivers is insecure rather than secure. Dr. Elliott will highlight how attachment patterns and dynamics can promote or disrupt peace – individually, relationally, and collectively. He will show how looking at this large field through an integral lens can help us to better promote attachment security and also the resolution of the effects of trauma. He will describe an innovative relational psychotherapy process that includes the healing power of creative imagination, cultivation of metacognitive perspectives, and enhancing effective collaboration with others. Attendees will be given an experiential taste of one of the innovative aspects of this approach.
David Elliott is a Clinical Psychologist who received his PhD in Psychology from Harvard University in 1989. He is former President of the Rhode Island Psychological Association (USA), and is Chair of the Advisory Board of the International School for Psychotherapy, Counseling, and Group Leadership, in St. Petersburg, Russia. He teaches and consults internationally on attachment, metacognition, personality development and disorders, and psychotherapy.
Mia Hetenyi
Cultivating Peace Through Healing Codependency
Codependency is one of the most prevalent symptoms of the modern human condition; a separation from a rootedness in the loving ecosystem of life.
This lack of rootedness has created so much disconnection and polarization leading not only to emotional suffering, but to oppression, domination and strife.
At its core, codependency is rooted in shame, a relational wound resulting from a lack of appropriate care and safety that is later experienced as grief of not having been loved, as well as the fear one will not be loved (belong) in the future.
This can lead to psycho-spiritual projections of these wounds onto God, thus feelings of separation, while projecting God either onto other people or taking on these identities for oneself.
These dynamics are an expression our collective trauma and is infused in many of our cultural institutions, as well as in the transmission of these intergenerational wounds through our ancestral lineages.
This work aims to explore how we might separate our human wounding projected onto God and withdraw our projections of God onto humans so that we can enter into a more loving relationship with ourselves, God, others and ultimately cultivate a sense of belonging to a loving ecosystem of life.
When we feel this deeper sense of belonging as a part of life’s ecology, there is naturally more peace as nature’s genuine state is to flourish.
Dr. Mia Hetenyi is a writer, grief doula, nature photographer and initiated Hungarian-American medicine woman with a PsyD in Clinical Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is the founder of the Dreaming Awake Institute, a school for grief work, codependency recovery and ancestral healing.
Eugene Pustoshkin
Integral Awareness Meditation for Trauma Therapist
Trauma is an all-quadrant affair that seriously impacts the objective organism and its neural system. As van der Kolk notes, thalamus (sensory integration) and dorsolateral PFC (timekeeping) go offline, so flashbacks are experienced in an endless now, without time perspective, as if a person is rigidly stuck in the past. There can also be total dissociation & numbing via parasympathetic shutdown. In most cases amygdala (threat detector) gets affected as well as other neurobiological systems such as anterior cingulate cortex (filtering what’s relevant) and orbital PFC (impulse inhibition), etc. Van der Kolk argues for an integrative approach—fine-tuned to an individual—that enacts body awareness practices to attune to your body; mindfulness meditation & neurofeedback to affect amygdala; etc. These are only few of the remedies proven effective by actual research. Other methods may exist which could also prove effective. I propose a possibility that Integral Awareness Meditation (IAM) could be used as a system that is simultaneously enacting a body-integration process, a mindful-awareness process, and a kind of native “feedback” process that uses shifts in perception (e.g. in the visual field and other fields) to effect change; it’s also an intersubjective-resonance therapy. IAM discloses a spiritually healing space in which all phenomena arise & dissipate moment by moment as felt-witnessed by attuned primordial awareness. We will explore this meditation process experientially.
Clinical psychologist & Integral therapist in private practice. Together with Tatyana Parfenova he co-founded and teaches Integral Awareness Meditation (IAM). Eugene co-founded the Eros & Kosmos (eroskosmos.org) Integral journal and is an associate editor at Integral Leadership Review. Eugene translated nine Ken Wilber’s books and several other Integral works. An experienced facilitator, he has led & co-led 100+ workshops & courses in Integral Psychology, Meditation & Metatheory since 2009.
Jon Skelton Pearson
See Me/Fix Me: healing the therapeutic culture rift
Some clients arrive at a psychotherapists door wanting to be ‘fixed’ and given ‘tools for the toolbox’ whilst others want to be seen, heard and celebrated
This workshop has two aims.
1. Comparing and contrasting Orange and Green approaches to psychotherapy, examining
• The contrasting methodology of cognitive vs relational approaches to therapy
• The ‘Orange’ vs ‘Green’ client
• The ‘Orange’ vs ‘Green’ psychotherapist
• The ‘Orange’ vs ‘Green’ coach.
2. Discussing how a quality Integral Psychotherapy can successfully reconcile these approaches.
Each first-tier developmental altitude tends to experience a value-driven conflict with each of the others; this gives rise to rifts in the field of psychotherapy.
As a Certified Integral Psychotherapist working and living from a second-tier centre of gravity, he embraces both Orange and Green therapeutic approaches and will explain his development-based Integral Psychotherapeutic method which transcends and includes them.
This workshop is open to all interested parties (and you will get more out of these 90 minutes if you have a basic understanding of the terms ‘Orange’, ‘Green’ and ‘Second-Tier here), all genders, all credos.
Jon will use a slide-driven presentation and use anecdotes culled from 25 years as a psychotherapist, after which he will hold space for a discussion on the emerging nature and methodology of a quality Integral Psychotherapy.
Jon Skelton Pearson, BA (Hons), CTA(P), CIP, AIC is a UKCP Registered Psychotherapist, Associate Integral Life Coach and Yoga teacher residing in the UK. He is a member of the Paths of Transformation Teaching Faculty, teaching neotantra, shamanism and bioenergetics internationally and is currently training as an Awaken As Love (Integral Tantra) Facilitator. He fell in love with Ken Wilber’s writings in 1983.
Nicole Grossen & Reto Sauder
Shadow Work as the Way to Inner Peace
As long as we are a society made of people with shadows, we as individuals will not have true peace. True peace that includes emotional freedom. The emotional war within you is the result of your personal shadows. Your only way out of this struggle is an uncompromising and deep shadow work practice.
In this workshop, Nicole and Reto will use vivid examples and various exercises to show how your shadows make you fight inside and how you can achieve your own personal peace. Only then will you be able to play your part in a wholesome peaceful society.
Nicole Grossen has been practicing an intense Integral Life Practice for over six years. Through this transformative process, with the help of radical shadow work, body work, cognitive work and meditation, she has gone through an intense Growing Up. Based on her experiences and insights from her personal work she offers coachings under the brand “StepUp” and further education for teachers.
Reto is a high school teacher and life coach with a scientific background in molecular biology. He started his Integral Life Practice back in 2014 after randomly stumbling over a group of people that shared a kind of emotional connection which he was longing after. In the following years, his own life turned upside down due to the practice. Deeply touched by its profound impact on his consciousness, he is facilitating body and shadow work himself since 2019.
Tim Schneider
Improving Mental Health in a changing World
This is a workshop with a heavy emphasis on practical application. It is based on the PERMA-V Modell and includes practices to cultivate positive emotions in Self and others. With a theoretical background on how emotions can work for us, attendees should leave this workshop with an increased understanding of how to actively shape their attitude towards life.
Tim is a Healthpsychologist whose work specializes in cultivating mental health, rather than dealing with mental illness. Personally finding healing in Meditation and specialized Nutrition, these pillars guide his approach to mental health.
Silas Hörler
Making Development Visible
First you need to understand the map and what it means. Then you need to experience what the map means. Once you integrate those two, your worldview is truly integral and you can apply it naturally. Step one is easy, step three comes automatic. But step two takes quite some effort. Still, with a little guidance, it can be experienced easily.
In this workshop we will show typical developmental lines and how they manifest (as shown in models like the Stages of the Self from IntegralWorks or the ReInv.org maps). Then we will show the participants some examples how to “measure” such a developmental line in other people. To complete the experience we will work in small groups and have the participants make their own first “measurements” with video examples we prepared.
We believe that the ability to sense another person’s stage of development is a crucial tool needed to tackle many of the problems that Wilber and Atkins describe in their book Wicked & Wise.
Silas lives with his wife and two children near Basel, Switzerland. Having gone through a rigorous Integral Life Practice, he started leading groups in body- and shadow work in 2012. He is author of the book ‘Integral Bodywork’. Together with his colleague Kai Mosebach, he developed the Integral Address Indicator, an onlinetool that quickly determines your Integral Address.
Join us for IEC 2022 online or in-person in Budapest! Tickets for IEC 2022 HYBRID are on sale, visit the ticket shop for more info!
The detailed program of IEC 2022 Hybrid is now available, take a look at the program overview!