Case Consultation Group

Description

The first thing to say about this group is that it is rooted in a request made by a group of psychologists, psychotherapists and coaches who have been involved in our work for a long time. The request was simple: please do a consult group where we can discuss the application of intuitive inquiry principles to client work.

This is that group.

It is not a certification, nor is it an attempt to “train people” to do one-on-one work exactly the way we do it.

It is actually trying to do something much more intimate and close-to-home than that, which is to support you in seeing how your own particular flavor of intuitive knowing is already showing up in your sessions with clients, and how to more fully “get out of the way” of that movement so that wisdom-intelligence can really take center-stage in your work. 

This journey will inevitably lead in three directions simultaneously:

First, it will ask that you adopt the understanding that your primary role with clients is as a conduit for wise and compassionate energy and information. This is totally different than claiming some kind of psychic omniscience about their life and circumstances. It is in fact pointing in the opposite direction - the deepest manifestations of your intuition may be what you are told not to reveal or ask. True inner listening leads inexorably in the direction of humbleness, service, and staying in the simplicity of what is revealed to you moment-by-moment.

The process is also not about having your specialness reinforced, nor is it about building up whatever role the ego imagines for you in the therapeutic or spiritual marketplace. Those that make the deepest vow to be a conduit for wisdom and compassion and maintain it daily always have clients. They don’t need Instagram! What they do need is an incredible commitment to sacred attention, sensitivity and inner listening combined with an unshakable vow to say and do only those things that benefit the being(s) in front of them with nothing extra added! It is not that this vow needs to be (or can be) lived “perfectly.” That is what makes it a practice, an art and a life-long commitment all-in-one.

Second, and following from your commitment to being a conduit for energy and information, is the reality that to work from that place, you are likely going to have to pay more attention to your sensory-energetic system during the hours you are doing session work. If you are calling it in, or not really there, the information and the subtle cues of wisdom-intelligence are just going to continue to get skipped over. Your session work basically needs to start feeling like your meditation practice. You are bringing all of yourself to it - all of your attention, sensitivity, and inner listening. You are no longer viewing session work as a glorified exchange of advice, techniques and points of view, or even personality-based empathic listening. This stuff is fine, but if you're doing this case consult group, our assumption is that you are not satisfied with these things being the core operating system of your work.

Third, and following your commitment to attending more deeply to your sensory-energetic system during sessions, is the inevitable dialogue with conditioning (and particularly fear) that spontaneously emerges when we look more closely at these issues. Adopting a more energy-centric way of working has a way of showing you places in your client work where your personality structure is covering over what wisdom-intelligence would have you do. In that vein, we could say that a “successful” version of this consult group will have the following steps:

1. Through intuitive inquiry, you arrive at a more fully formed sense of how/where you specifically are “covering over” or interfering with your emergent wisdom-intelligence in your client work.  

2. Through intuitive inquiry, you receive experiments specifically tailored to your unique answers to #1. Some of these can and will be very subtle (“talk less and don’t fill in the space,” “don’t be afraid to pause when you don’t know what to say or do,” “rather than always trying to answer their questions, give the questions back to them energetically in a slow and deliberate way.” etc.).

3. You do the experiments, record the impacts of them, and report back to the group to process out the energy.

4. You receive the next “breadcrumb” - the next piece of guidance or subtle adjustment to how you are, what you say, and what you do with specific clients.

Format & Confidentiality

We are calling this a case consultation group because we have a vision of folks bringing actual client cases to the group in an anonymized form. 

The same way that our conditioned states are specific, the way our conditioning shows up in the context of client work is also very specific. It is thus in working more slowly, closely and deliberately with the actual energy of specific interactions that things can really open up. What does that feel like? To us, it feels like even though a specific client interaction is still challenging, we recover the sense that the Way is revealing itself. And because the Way is revealing itself in subtle ways that are easily discounted by the personality structure, we use the consult group space as a support for clearly and intentionally validating these subtle energetic signals so that you can prioritize them when you are back in the therapist’s chair. In other words, the group space helps you solidify your spiritual “marching orders” - what is yours to uniquely do and focus on at this time in specific client interactions.

In addition to building class sessions around individual client cases, we will also be doing a significant amount of teaching, inquiry and journey work. Sessions will be recorded, but we will ask that the content of the group be kept in strict confidentiality and not shared with any non-participants.

In terms of attendance, live attendance is obviously preferred because of the nature of the group, but if you are a coach/clinician who has worked with us for a while and want to participate asynchronously via recording, please email us and we can discuss it.

Finally, the initial commitment for this group is 8 weeks. Depending on the vibe and energy of participants, it is possible we might continue to meet afterwards (although likely with more time in between sessions). We will see how things unfold….

Prerequisite

The prerequisite for the consult group is a basic comfort with, and confidence in, the intuitive inquiry skills presented in The Art of Inner Communication. If this material still seems esoteric, very challenging, and mostly inaccessible and/or “shaky,” it is likely a good idea not to join this group but instead to focus on applying the course material to your own process.