Dear Practice Facilitator, we really appreciate your collaboration in this training and we are very aware that you are all experienced therapists and facilitators.

To support the flow and cohesive experience for the students on the training we are offering suggestions for how you might facilitate each Practice Circle. We hope that this will be a helpful guide for you.

Sally, Michał, Andreia and the Life Architect Team

General guidelines

• Your role will be to create a warm, welcoming practice environment, where all of the parts of students can be heard.
• Many of the students will not be IFS informed, so there’s no need in using IFS jargon. If you do, please remember to explain what you mean (for example if you say “Self” from the IFS perspective).
• The groups are about experiencing and connecting. You can do some educational bits, but please remember not to “overtalk” it.
• The specific guidelines and scripts related to specific workshops are there to support you. You can just read them to the group. If you prefer to flow with your own way of facilitating experientials, you can first read them closely before the session and then do something similar with your own words.
• Please don’t replace suggested exercises with your own ones.
• Practice Circles are not for responding to content questions. If there is a question and you feel confident to respond to it, feel free to do it. Just keep in mind that it’s important that there is enough time for the exercises and sharing. You can collect any questions and bring them to Andreia, who will share those with the Life Architect team.
• Please keep an eye on people who are dominating the space with their comments. If someone takes too much space, gently let them know that this is a space for everyone to express.
• If there is a “difficult” student who makes the experience of other students less than it could be, please try to address this and if needed, let Andreia know.
• If there is someone who got intensely triggered by the experiential or any other event in your Practice Circle session, depending on the intensity, see if you can briefly help this person calm down. If not possible or if you feel it wouldn’t be appropriate, you can ask Andreia (depending on the availability, because sometimes Andreia will cover for absent Practice Facilitators) through Whatsapp to go into a breakout room with that person. Andreia will let you know which room she is in, and you’ll be able to invite the student to go to that room to get support.
• If there is any feedback from your group about the workshops, flow of the training or Practice Circle format, please share this feedback with Andreia.

Workshop 1 / 17.9 / Vincentia Schroeter / Introduction to Somatic Therapy

• Welcome / 2 minutes
  • Guidelines: Welcome the group and introduce yourself
• Pause / 3 minutes
  • Guidelines: Short Settling / allowing bodies to arrive
  • Script: This will be your practice circle and we will meet, as a group, each week, either before or after the teaching to practice and share our experience together during the training.