Panel 4: The Challenge of Pleasure & Sexuality
📅Saturday, 5 September📍Cork City Hall 🕒11:45 – 13:15
Description:
Pleasure and sexuality bring us to the edge of what it means to be embodied. They touch the places where we long, reach, refuse, hunger, soften, defend, submit, resist, and come alive. They are not separate from the therapeutic field; they move through it, often unspoken, in breath, gaze, gesture, charge, shame, absence, fantasy, fear, and desire.
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Sexuality can carry wounds of violation, silence, repression, dissociation, and power. Pleasure can be feared as much as pain, especially where the body has learned that aliveness is dangerous. Yet these same territories may also hold the possibility of reclamation: the return of sensation, consent, agency, play, erotic intelligence, and a more honest relationship with life itself.
This panel discussion will explore what it means to meet pleasure and sexuality without avoidance, reduction, or sentimentality. How do we work ethically with the forces of desire, shame, inhibition, and vitality as they appear in the body and in the therapeutic relationship?
Together, we will consider pleasure not as a luxury, and sexuality not as a problem to be managed, but as profound dimensions of embodiment, relationship, and human freedom.
Meet The Panel
Christiane Lewin
Since 1981, Christiane has worked as a bodywork therapist, a trainer, supervisor and lecturer. As co-founder & director of the Ecole Biodynamique (Biodynamic School) in Montpellier Christiane is also responsible for the French Biodynamic Psychology Schools’ training program. For the last 40 years, she has continued her own researches around the chanted voice and its clinical use in body work therapy, to go through and dissolve emotional trauma.
Marc Rackelmann
Working with sexual issues and working with men has become an important part of Marc’s therapeutic work. A body-psychotherapist and couples therapist from Berlin., Marc is also a trainer and supervisor for couples therapy and body psychotherapy. Author of ‘Make Love – das Männerbuch’, Marc was also the 2nd chairman of the German Association for Body Psychotherapy (DGK) and a Board member of the EABP.
Carlien van Heel
Trained by Gerda Boyesen – the founder of Biodynamic Psychology and Psychotherapy – and working in the field since 1988, Carlien is still passionate about Biodynamic work. Head of Courses at the London School of Biodynamic Psychotherapy (LSBP), Carlien is a UKCP registered Biodynamic Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Senior Trainer and earned an MA in Body-psychotherapy (Anglia Ruskin University) in 2014.
Nick Totton
With 40 years of experience as a body psychotherapist, trainer and supervisor, Nick has created two trainings – Embodied-Relational Therapy and Wild Therapy – which continue under other trainers. He is a full member of EABP for many years, and has also been Chair of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility, of the UK Body Psychotherapy Network, and of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Union.
Peter Thompson (Moderator)
Peter Thompson MIACP, MIABP, MEABP, MICASA is a Biodynamic and Integrative Psychotherapist and Supervisor. Co-founder of The Well Centre in East Cork, Ireland, Peter has been a full-time practising Psychotherapist since 2005 and has a special interest in Couples Therapy, Sex and Intimacy. He and his wife Caragh, co-facilitate a programme that supports the resolution of Sexual Dysfunction. Having worked at sea for a number of years, and travelled extensively as a surfer, he continues to draw inspiration from the boundless energy of the wild Atlantic!
