Thinking in Movement Studio

Focusing and Dreams classes with Katarina Halm are an in-depth study of how to integrate the Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin Inner Relationship Focusing practice and theory with the philosophy in Gendlin’s Dream book and other relevant books and articles.

Arnold Mindell’s Practical and Theoretical Study of Dreams and the Body,
Inner Relationship Focusing®, and Eugene Gendlin’s Dream Book and the Philosophy of the Implicit

Gendlin’s Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams continues to be our main text. This Focusing and Dreams series will include the supplementary texts by Arnold Mindel listed below.

The first hour of each class is devoted to an experiential development of the theory. A Focusing and Dreams session takes place during second hour, followed by a discussion.

Supplemental text #1: Arnold Mindel 1989, River’s way: the process science of the dreambody: information and channels in dream and bodywork.

This book presents the reader with the theoretical framework behind Arnold Mindell’s two earlier studies of the psychology of body experience, “Dreambody” and “Working With the Dreaming Body”. In bridging divisions between psychotherapy, medicine and physics, it provides both client and therapist with a flexible and integrative approach to the total personality, not simply an intellectual exercise and that successful therapy is the work of the “dreamer” as much as of the analyst.

In the second part of the book the author shows how mythological symbols of energy and time (Oceanos, Aion and the Kundalini) form the roots of modern concepts of process. The final chapter takes up and builds on Jung’s rediscovery of alchemy as the mother of modern medicine, psychology and physics. Mindell suggests that awareness itself might be the gold of the alchemists and that successful therapies are in part a discovery of the river’s way – the process of perception.

Supplemental text #2: Arnold Mindel 1985, Working with the Dreaming Body.

An introductory volume, unfolding Mindell’s worldview of the body as dreaming, flowing essence and its symptoms as doorways to the unknown–to the whole human being.  Mindell says our symptoms of malaise may not be sickness in need of treatment but guides to a “royal road” of meaning and fulfillment.

In other books, he has developed his ideas of the dreambody, the inner voice trying to communicate with us through our dreams, body language, and relationships in order that we might live “as we are.” Here he demonstrates practical applications of this approach in work with clients, saying, “I don’t believe in therapy….I let the dreambody process tell me what wants to happen and what to do next….I do not press people. Their bodies and souls know better than I do.”