Gentle body-oriented and attachment-focused interventions can help stabilize the nervous system and create a sense of safety during the first steps of processing the experience.

Participants will learn how co-regulating bodywork can help prevent dissociation while revisiting a stressful situation. The workshop will introduce simple principles from attachment-oriented body psychotherapy and Emotional First Aid that support grounding, self-relationship, and emotional regulation.

The session will include a short presentation with slides, selected video material from clinical work, and a guided body exercise that allows participants to experience how shock-release work can support regulation and recovery.

Thomas Harms is a psychologist and body psychotherapist and the director of the Center for Primary Prevention and Body Psychotherapy (ZePP) as well as the Crying Baby Clinic in Bremen, Germany. He is the founder of Emotional First Aid (EFA), a body- and attachment-oriented approach to crisis intervention and acute parent–baby therapy, and of Attachment-Oriented Body Psychotherapy for therapeutic work with adults. Harms works internationally as a trainer and supervisor and is the author and editor of several books.

All of life arises through the dynamic interplay of opposing forces: expansion and contraction, effort and ease, control and surrender. Together with a wide range of music designed to inspire and motivate, guided movement, breath and focused awareness, we will meet these polarities directly in the body.

Rather than avoiding or transcending them, we practice moving with them and through them, allowing them to transform us. This is an invitation to inhabit the space where opposites coexist and where true presence emerges

Eileen Murray is a Conscious Movement teacher, therapist, and Medical Qigong instructor with over 30 years of experience in mental health and holistic wellbeing across Australia, Sweden, the UK, and Ireland. Originally trained in nursing, she later expanded into Biodynamic bodywork and psychotherapy training with the Institute of Biodynamic Medicine in the early 90’s. She is also trained with Open Floor International and BISO (Body in Soul) in Conscious and Dynamic Movement Facilitation.

Eileen’s work weaves together movement, embodiment, and deep listening to support healing, self-awareness, and authentic human connection. Her approach is grounded, compassionate, and creates safe spaces for people to reconnect with their bodies, their vitality and authentic presence.

During the workshop participants will be shown a PowerPoint of archetypal images that are often associated with our conception. This will include images from mythology and religious symbology, which are often unconscious expressions of cellular consciousness, or, at least, have an unconscious component to them.

This will be followed by a period of ‘shamanic’ drumming, during which participants are invited to lie down and allow spontaneous movements and images to emerge. We will end with a period of sharing and integration.

Exploring these very formative processes can be very profound and informative. As this is just a short workshop, we are just opening the window to this territory, rather than working in deep regression. It is intended to awaken curiosity and give a glimpse into an aspect of human existence that is often neglected or misunderstood.

Participants are asked to bring an eye mask or some other kind of covering for the eyes (such as a scarf) to wear during the drumming.

Matthew Appleton MA UCKP RCST is a registered Body Psychotherapist and Craniosacral Therapist living and working between Bristol, England and Budapest, Hungary. He is a member of the International Society of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine and has more than 20 years experience of lecturing, facilitating workshops and training practitioners in working therapeutically with babies, children, and their parents.

For ten years he worked as a houseparent at A.S. Neill’s famous democratic school Summerhill.He is the author of more than a hundred published articles, on subjects ranging from democratic education, sexuality, psychotherapy, craniosacral therapy and the effects of pre and perinatal stress on babies and children. He has also written two books; A Free-Range Childhood. Self-Regulation at Summerhill School (2000) and Transitions to Wholeness. Integrating Prenatal, Transpersonal and Somatic Psychology (2020). The former has been published in German as Kindern ihre Kindheit zurückgeben. Selbstregulation in der Erziehung – das Beispiel Summerhill (2nd Edition 2021).

While language can sometimes feel limiting or insufficient for fully capturing our inner experiences, the spoken word remains a powerful way to connect with others and express our inner universe. Each person, as the creator of their own life – its artist, painter, and poet – is capable of feeling, shaping, and expressing their own unique truth through words.

Throughout the workshop, we will connect with our bodies and emotions, engaging in free, intuitive exercises with words, associations and language symbols, to discover what our personal poetry sounds like.

*Each participant is kindly asked to bring their own writing materials – a pen and paper or a notebook.

Daniela Andreeva has a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Theater and Media Science; and Psychology at Friedrich Alexander University in Germany, Nuremberg. Later, she began specializing in Body Psychotherapy in the Bulgarian Institute of Neo-Reichian Analytical Psychotherapy. Daniela currently works with clients individually and in group therapy under supervision.

She is part of the editorial team of the International Body Psychotherapy Journal, published by the European Association of Body Psychotherapy. Her passion includes any creative ways of self-expression as writing, playing on music instruments (keyboard, guitar, hand pan), fire poi dancing.

It’s a powerful form of body-based empathic listening that requires a deep sensitivity, receptiveness and capacity for attunement. It can also bring with it many challenges and questions.

How do we sort out what’s ‘ours’ and what’s ‘theirs’? How do we open ourselves up to be touched by our client’s innermost experiences, while maintaining healthy self-boundaries and proper self care? How do we resource ourselves when encountering potentially overwhelming fragments of client experience? And how do we ‘offer back’ what we are picking up in ways that are digestible for the client?

In this experiential workshop we will come together to explore what it means to tune in deeply to ourselves as a means to tuning in to the other – making embodied explorations individually, in pairs and as a group.

We will also explore and discuss how to translate the information we receive into therapeutically useful interventions, and briefly clarify distinctions between different forms of non-verbal communication in therapy: transference, countertransference, projective identification and somatic resonance.

Robert Harper is a Body Psychotherapist, Martial Artist and Shamanic Practitioner. He’s completed a six year Integrative Body Psychotherapy training at the Cambridge BP Centre, UK, and works in private practice. Creativity, aliveness, presence and curiosity are the threads that unite his work, aiming to support his clients to address their conflicts at a core, existential level – integrating mind, body, heart and soul.

Much therapeutic work focuses on distress and engagement with traumatic experiences. Here the
emphasis shifts toward the somatic experience of safety, comfort, pleasure and ease within the
body.

Through group process and reflective discussion, attention will be given to present-moment
experience and the body’s natural capacities for organisation and regulation. Informed by
perspectives from Organic Intelligence and other body-oriented therapies, the workshop will create
a space for collective inquiry and wisdom sharing on the role of physiological safety in the healing
process.

Stephen Mason is a Trainee Counselling Psychologist at the University of Manchester, originally from Dublin. He has worked in various mental health settings across the UK and Ireland, supporting those
impacted by trauma. He is currently on public sector placements in psycho-oncology and eating
disorder services.

Stephen’s doctoral research explores body-oriented therapists’ understandings and experiences of ‘safety’ in trauma work. Alongside his clinical training, he is undertaking training in Organic Intelligence and hopes to integrate body psychotherapy into his future practice. He also has a deep interest in ecopsychology and Irish indigenous healing practices.

This experiential workshop offers participants a practical and embodied introduction to Qi Gong as a form of movement meditation. Rooted in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Qi Gong gently weaves breath, slow mindful movement, and inner awareness to support nervous system regulation, emotional balance, and embodied presence.

The workshop is suitable for therapists, body oriented practitioners, and anyone interested in embodied approaches to wellbeing, regulation, and self awareness. All movements are gentle, accessible, and adaptable for standing or seated practice.

Embodied psychotherapy recognises that healing and regulation occur through the body, not only through cognitive insight. Qi Gong offers a time tested somatic practice that aligns deeply with this understanding.

Through slow rhythmic movement and breath, Qi Gong supports:

• autonomic nervous system regulation
• interoceptive awareness
• grounding and emotional containment
• increased capacity to remain present with sensation

This workshop provides participants with a lived experience of embodiment that can enrich both personal practice and professional therapeutic work.

Joanne Faulkner is a Qi Gong teacher, Shiatsu practitioner, and Traditional Chinese Medicine educator with over twenty years of experience in embodied health practices. Her work bridges Eastern movement meditation with contemporary understandings of nervous system regulation, embodiment, and emotional wellbeing. She facilitates daily Qi Gong practice online and teaches internationally, supporting thousands of people to reconnect with their bodies through gentle, compassionate movement.

Body psychotherapy is being overwhelmed by those offering somatic techniques online that claim to work quickly and resolve whatever the problem is.  Neoliberalism is the driving force.  Will we become redundant? Or perhaps subsumed by psychotherapists “bolting on “ techniques to an existing psychotherapy with no experienced understanding of them? 

Whilst the global situation creates a constant background, and sometimes foreground fear, professionally and personally we are likely to feel scared. Conversations can quickly become polarised as various dynamics are triggered, and past and intergenerational traumas activated. And yet, depth body psychotherapy has the potential to sit in all of this and find wholeness. We can find what is “health” enhancing and what is life depleting as palpable experiences in ourselves. By becoming more whole ourselves, we can spread wholeness simply from the way we are with ourselves and others.

We will explore the anxieties and fears that we all live with and that many of our clients find unbearable. The focus of the workshop will be on finding safety, exploring what is life enhancing and life depleting, contacting essential health and love, and taking this into relationships and the wider environment. Inspiration will be drawn from within body psychotherapy and Buddhist psychology.

Gill Westland, is a UKCP registered Body Psychotherapist, a full member of the European Association for Body Psychotherapy, a trainer, supervisor, consultant, and writer. She is the founding Director of Cambridge Body Psychotherapy Centre (CBPC) and co-editor of the journal Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy.

Gill is the author of ‘Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in Psychotherapy’ (Norton, 2015), and has contributed chapters to key texts on somatic/body psychotherapy. She has researched key moments of change in body psychotherapy, and most recently she has written on neoliberalism and remote body psychotherapy. She also has an interest in touch in psychotherapy and earlier in the year CBPC hosted a one day conference “Communicating through touch in psychotherapy”, a dialogue between neuroscientists and those using touch clinically.

In the first half of the session we will be supported in coming more to ground and connecting with the hara and the heart, releasing tension through breath and body. Using movement pair work and witnessing we will be invited to explore, notice and connect through touch and play in order to arrive into more trust in ourselves, each other and the present moment.

In the second half of the session the invitation is to enter play through the magical spirit of clown using games, absurdity, and stage craft. Clown is an ancient and sacred communal shamanic form that invites the childlike freedom, spontanaeity and humility that our mind-dominated culture suppresses: Clown embraces chaos, uncertainty and failure, follows the impulse, and never gives up hope.

This is a touch-based workshop for adventurous spirits. It can be powerfully life-enhancing and joyful, confidence building, and a great antidote to anxiety.

*Please wear comfortable loose clothing and bring any props and costumary if you have anything to hand, random objects, hats, scarves, bright colours etc.

Mo Brown (ISMETA NCPS BAMBA STOPSO) is a somatic-psychoanalytic intercultural psychotherapist. She has a special interest in embodied imagination, play and compassionate mindfulness in running creative workshops for diverse settings. Mo specialises in treating pornography addiction at her practice in West Yorkshire, England.

How does our experience shift when we settle and open into somatic presence? What contributes to deepening an experience of embodied attunement? We will relate with these questions as a living inquiry, staying curious about how the body responds, as we develop receptive presence through compassionate witnessing. Your experience will be your teacher as we move and sense through invitations that span depth and playfulness, perhaps receiving some nourishment as we leave the congress.

Philippe Madec‘s work is driven by an insatiable curiosity to understand the human experience. Since 2018, he has been facilitating international workshops and retreats that integrate mindfulness, embodiment, and relational practices. Having originally received a BSc in Physiotherapy, he is now studying an MSc in Integrative Counselling & Psychotherapy in Athens, as part of his journey in understanding the inseparability of body, mind, and spirit.

In 2025, Philippe completed Gabor Maté’s professional training in Compassionate Inquiry, along with a meditation instructor training grounded in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. He has spent the last decade exploring various embodiment practices, and has most recently become enamoured by contact improvisation dance as a practice of attuning to emergence.