General Principles of the CPD we Offer at INTEGRA …

Features of our courses:

• offering up-to-date, clinically relevant information and skills
• content and process are in line with and drawing on modern neuroscience
• integrating the whole spectrum of therapeutic approaches
• whole-person and experiential learning
• aware of embodiment and bodymind processes
• focussed on working with ‘what is’
• theory emerges from practice and is actually helpful, not just ‘academic’
• entry-level courses are clear, well-structured and accessible
• advanced courses become increasingly less structured, more fluid, like the therapeutic process itself

In many ways, of course, our courses are no different from other reputable CPD programmes and trainings. As all good CPD, our courses and teaching aim to provide solid, up-to-date and clinically relevant information and skills in a clear, accessible way.
Many CPD teachers are good theoreticians or good clinicians - that does not automatically mean they are good teachers, and that they can get material across to you in a way that is relevant to you and your practice.
We have not much interest in abstract knowledge that is purely ‘academic’, and we do not waste much time on that. We do provide concepts and models to the extent that they emerge from your practice and have a bearing on it.
We are more concerned with whether you feel supported by theories and how they are helpful to you as a practitioner or not than whether they are ‘true’ or not (they are all ‘true’ in some ways, and ‘wrong’ in others).
We do not have much time for the ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ of the profession or textbook guidelines, but are focussed on working with ‘what is’, the nitty-gritty struggle of engagement and how it impacts on us as practitioners.
We therefore emphasise topics and focus on issues that are directly relevant to you and we ensure through whole-person and experiential learning that our courses will have an immediate impact on you and your practice.
In addition to these general principles, our courses and events are integrative, drawing on the rich diversity of the whole spectrum of therapeutic approaches. And through our own original training and tradition, everything we teach and practice is based on the long-neglected significance of embodiment.

Developing an ‘impossible profession’ - how does that affect the CPD we offer ?

However, beyond all these elements which you have come to expect from 21st-century CPD, our work is also based on the - to some extent - novel idea, that before we come up with more theories, answers, solutions and techniques, we might be interested in the actual detail of the impossibility at the heart of the work.

An extra ingredient:

• recognising the real impossibility at the heart of our work
• taking it serious and attending to it
• supporting practitioners within it
• exploring the practitioner’s individual experience of it
• understanding the helping relationship as paradoxical
• learning from within the impossibility
• enhances the work, allowing it to become deeper and more flexible, responsive and overall effective

In the same way that you do not follow a client who is ready to rush headlong into a quick-fix supposed ‘solution’, our approach to Continuing Professional Development does not seek to overcome, solve or alleviate the fundamental impossibility which our vocation places us into (over and over again with each and every client). On the contrary, we are interested in the detail of your - and our own - intimate and individual bodymind experience of the impossibility. And, within the limitations of willingness and capacity for exploration, we attempt to pursue that interest. This, we think, is essential to any ‘relational’ work that deserves the name.

Summary: Our work would deepen and its effectiveness increase dramatically, if we took the impossibility at the heart of our profession more seriously. This we consider true not only in our practice, but even more so in training and CPD.