Online workshop with Dr. Ruella Frank

Friday April 4 – Saturday April 5, 2025

An aesthetic and phenomenological diagnosis of contacting: The Six Fundamental Movements

By Norsk Gestaltinstitutt Høyskole, with Ruella Frank

TIME
8:00am – 2:00pm Eastern Standard Time (New York)
2:00pm – 8:00pm Central European Time (Norway)

LOCATION
Online workshop: Platform: (Microsoft) Teams.
Participants will receive the event link after they have been registered. Please note that it is not necessary to set up a teams/microsoft account.

FEE
US$370, 4085 NOK

For Participants living in Norway please register online at:
Norsk Gestaltinstitutt Høyskole Event Page

For further information please visit:
Norsk Gestaltinstitutt Høyskole

About the workshop:

An aesthetic and phenomenological diagnosis of contacting:
The Six Fundamental Movements

In this workshop, participants are introduced to a precise phenomenological language for those subverbal interactions that form the foundation of lived-experience; the Six Fundamental Movements.

These patterns emerge through ongoing movement dialogues within the first year of the infant-parent dyad, and are seen to have a functional similarity in the making of meaning within the patient-therapist dyad.

The analysis of these movements, unfolding within therapy, enables therapists to uncover routine inhibitions in contacting, appreciate their important function in the immediate present, and discover how to restore the lively flow to lived experience.

It will be clear how the making and shaping of experience is a creative transaction between oneself and the world of others as intentionality is seen and felt moving through time and space.

Lecture, Movement Experiments, Therapy Demonstrations

Ruella Frank, PhD., has been exploring infant movement patterns and their relationship to the adult since the mid-1970s.

She is founder and director of the Center for Somatic Studies, Fellow at the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, guest professor at Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy, adjunct faculty at Gestalt Institute of Toronto, and teaches throughout the United States, Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and Canada.

Ruella has authored chapters in various publications as well as the book Body of Awareness: A Somatic and Developmental Approach to Psychotherapy, (GestaltPress, 2001, available in four languages), and co-authored the book The First Year and The Rest of Your Life: Movement, Development and Psychotherapeutic Change, (Routledge Press, 2010, available in three languages), and The Bodily Roots of Experience in Psychotherapy, (Routledge Press, 2022, available in seven languages).

The workshop is open to:
Everyone

Friday June 4 & Saturday June 5, 2021

Ruella Frank Online:
Kinesthetic Resonance: The Basis of Social Understanding

By Gestalt institute of Toronto, Canada with Ruella Frank

TIME
10:00am – 7:00pm Eastern Standard Time

FEE
$450, GIT Student and GIT Graduate Rate: $395

For further information and to register
please visit Gestalt institute of Toronto

Or Call: 416-964-9464

About the workshop:

This two-day workshop explores the always ongoing experience of kinesthetic resonance, the bodily feel of our relationships as we engage with the world. Participants learn how to unfold body-to-body communications that often remain elusive to us, hidden and unaware. These interactions generate feeling tones that reverberate from one person to another, allowing us to appraise the situation we are co-creating. Using a developmental lens, we investigate baby-parent dyads in the forming of kinesthetic resonance and consider how our earlier experiences similarly function within the adult therapy dyad.

Continuing Education (CE): 12 hours
Participants will receive a certificate of continuing education hours.

The workshop is open to:
Everyone

Monday, September 14, 2020

Webinar:
Moving into Meaning: Introducing a somatic & developmental approach to psychotherapy

with Ruella Frank

TIME
7:00pm Eastern Standard Time

For further information and to register please visit Gestalt Therapy Brisbane

About the workshop:

In this webinar, we will explore the intricate relational moves of embodied trans-subjectivity that form a basis of communication, initially between parent and baby, but then throughout life.
The movement repertoire that develops in the first year of life is a language that conveys our most pressing desires, intentions and emotions. Expressive movements, acquired in the company of significant others, go on to become the tacit core of adult behaviour in everyday experience and, of course, in the psychotherapy relationship.
This webinar focuses on the details of this somatic expression of affect and relational intent. Participants will be supported in developing an understanding of the meaning and emotional significance of these somatic communications and skills in applying those insights to their therapy work.

The workshop is open to:
Psychologists
Social workers
Psychotherapists
Psychiatrists
Infant educators, as well as movement therapists/educators

Webinar Series:
Embodied Relational Gestalt: A Developmental Perspective
(with Russian translation)

with Ruella Frank

DATES & TIMES
Mondays: 1:00-2:30 Eastern Standard Time
August 17, 2020
September 21, 2020
October 19, 2020

Organized by Center Stupeni

For further information and to register email Rezeda or Julia at Center Stupeni.

About the workshop:

View in Russian.

The workshop is open to all.

Recording of the Webinar Now Available for Purchase:

Friday, June 26, 2020

Moving into Presence:
A Somatic Developmental Approach

A 75-minute experiential webinar
with Ruella Frank, Ph.D.

LOCATION
Link to the webinar provided upon payment and registration.

DAY and TIME
Friday, June 26, 2020
2:00 – 3:15 pm (Eastern Daylight Savings Time)

FEE
$20 US

This workshop is open to All.
Last Day to Register June 23rd

For further information email
[email protected]

About the workshop:

The capacity for presence is always already part of human experience and unfolds within the relational situation. It is our capacity to fluidly respond, giving and receiving, in order to gain something new from the environment.

This 75-minute interactive webinar will illuminate the moving-feeling foundation required for a developing presence as it emerges or is thwarted within both the baby-parent and patient-therapist dyad.

Therapists learn how to enhance the potentiality for developing presence in themselves and their patients and, in doing so, to clear the obstacles that prevent us from finding each other. Special attention is given to the online therapy situation.

Ruella Frank, Ph.D., is founder and director of the Center for Somatic Studies, NYC, and faculty at Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy and the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. Ruella also teaches workshops and training programs throughout the United States, Mexico, South America, Canada and Europe. She is author of articles and chapters in various publications, as well as the book Body of Awareness: A Somatic and Developmental Approach to Psychotherapy, (2001, GestaltPress, available in five languages) and co-authored The First Year and the Rest of Your Life: Movement, Development and Psychotherapeutic Change (2010, Routledge Press, available in three languages. Her training video Introduction to Developmental Somatic Psychotherapy, now subtitled in French and Russian, is available at here.

Friday, December 13, 2019

Exploring the Root of Developmental Trauma:
A Somatic Perspective

A 75 minute experiential webinar with Ruella Frank, Ph.D.

LOCATION
You will receive the link to the webinar upon payment and registration.

DAY and TIME
December 13, 2019 Friday
2:00 – 3:15 pm (Eastern Daylight Savings Time)

FEE
$35

This workshop is open to
All
For further information and to register email
[email protected]

About the workshop:

According to the traditional perspective on the development of trauma in the first years of a baby’s life, the parent initiates what is thought to become an habitual traumatic reaction in the child. Consequently, the baby reacts to the parent in ways that are rigid and repetitive. This understanding of developmental trauma, however, does not take into consideration the relational dynamics that are part and parcel of any organizing experience.

Observing baby and parent interactions from a relational and contextual perspective and through micro-movements, it can be seen how the baby’s behaviors can powerfully impact their parents and can generate the threat of re-traumatizing for them.

This 75 minute Interactive and Experiential WEBINAR will center on the transaction patterns of both baby and parent that over time create traumatic attaching and the passage of intergenerational trauma. We will also explore how these early patterns influence the unfolding patient and psychotherapist relationship in the here-and-now and how to work through those ongoing and fixed gestalts.

This is an interactive webinar:
During the seminar, participants will be able to send written questions that all of us will see. I will respond to as many questions and comments as possible, allowing time for dialogue among us.

Ruella Frank, Ph.D., is founder and director of the Center for Somatic Studies, NYC, and faculty at Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy and the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy. Ruella also teaches workshops and training programs throughout the United States, Mexico, South America, Canada and Europe. She is author of articles and chapters in various publications, as well as the book Body of Awareness: A Somatic and Developmental Approach to Psychotherapy, (2001, GestaltPress, available in five languages) and co-authored The First Year and the Rest of Your Life: Movement, Development and Psychotherapeutic Change (2010, Routledge Press, available in three languages. Her training video Introduction to Developmental Somatic Psychotherapy, now subtitled in French and Russian, is available at www.somaticstudies.com,

*CANCELLED*

February 7 – 9, 2020

Developmental Somatic Psychotherapy
Introductory 3 Day Workshop with Ruella Frank, Ph.D.

LOCATION
To Be Announced

TIMES
Friday 4:00pm – 8:30pm
Saturday & Sunday 9:00am – 4:30pm

FEE
$275

To register:
Please contact Daniel Donohue, LCSW at
[email protected]

About the workshop:

Ongoing nonverbal interactions with our primary caregivers during the first year of life set a relational foundation that is apparent both in the everyday life of the adult and in psychotherapy. Even though our adult postural attitudes, gestures, gait and breathing patterns have changed over time, the foundations established in our first year remain readily observable and available. Attending to these patterns within psychotherapy is especially powerful.

During this workshop, participants learn how their relational styles originated through affective-movement patterns within the infant-caregiver dyad. Through movement, participants will explore these intrinsic yet unaware primary patterns which are part of present experiences and influence daily life. We then apply this understanding to the here-and-now of the client/therapist dyad.

This workshop is open to psychologists, social workers, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, infant educators as well as movement therapists-educators who wish to better understand the relationship between psychological experience and physical expression.

For further information: email us at
somaticstudies.com

Child-Parent Somatic Psychotherapy:
International Training Program

A new groundbreaking program with Ruella Frank
and the Gestalt Institute of Toronto

Teaching practitioners to intervene at the earliest phases of social
development through an understanding of movement.

Level One:
DATES
April 12-14, 2019 & September 20-22, 2019

FEE
$850 CAD / $660 USD

Level Two:
DATES
January 10-12, 2020 & June 19-21, 2020

FEE
$850 CAD / $660 USD

LOCATION
To Be Announced

TIMES
To Be Announced

This program is recommended for psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, occupational therapists, movement educators and nurses who work with or are interested in working with parents and children from 0-3 years. Graduates of psychotherapy training institutes who are interested in applying early developmental theory to the therapist-client inter-relationship also are welcome.

For further information and to register visit
www.gestalt.on.ca

About the training:

From the worlds of neuroscience, psychiatry, and developmental psychology, it now is clearly known that the earliest phases of a child’s life sets the ground for later relational experiences. Human qualities of respect, empathy and commitment to another are forged during this important period of time.

Although wanting the best for their child, inadvertently and all too often, parents bring emotional challenges and vulnerabilities from their own experiences of being parented into their relationship with their infants and children. Perhaps they were neglected or abused or chronically mis-attuned to and now struggle with how to parent an infant or young child when the model of “good enough” parenting was not available to them. Such unresolved difficulties hamper parents’ abilities to sensitively caretake their child. This creates dissatisfactions on each side of the equation. Working with parents and their children (0-3 years), can ameliorate the kinds of difficulties that diminish satisfying relationships for each member of the family, while preventing the transmission of early psychological wounds passed down from one generation to the next.

Using a movement-oriented approach to analyze and treat the child-parent developing relationship, the CPSP program explores the subtle yet profound movement exchanges that shape and underlie our earliest patterns of attaching and demonstrates how specific movement experiences become self and relation experiences and vice versa.

When practitioners attend to their patients through movement, they are working at a primary and fundamental level that precedes and underlies later developing language and sophisticated cognitive capacities.

Of interest to people of all backgrounds, the CPSP training program will enhance your perception of human movement by revealing how nonverbal patterns, developed in the relationship with significant others, become the implicit core of adult functioning.

A certificate of continuing education will be issued at the completion of the two year program. The practical experience with parents and children will require supervised practice; supervision can be arranged individually with Ruella Frank.

Guest Faculty
Ruella Frank, PhD, founder and director of The Center for Somatic Studies, brings her lifetime of exploration of early infant movements and their relationship to the adult, which has influenced psychotherapeutic approaches throughout the world. She is author of books and articles introducing her embodied, relational and development approach including Body Of Awareness (2001, Gestalt Press). Ruella is introducing this new groundbreaking program (CPSP) in partnership with the Gestalt Institute of Toronto which welcomes her as an ongoing guest faculty.

May 15 – 17, 2019

Open Workshop:
Exploring the Root of Developmental Trauma:
A Somatic Perspective
(Conducted in French and English)

with Ruella Frank

LOCATION
c.off (name of the place)
Körsbärsvägen 9,
114 23 Stockholm Sweden

TIMES
Wednesday – Friday, 9:30 am – 4:30 p.m.

*FEE
$575 (€492) (5019 SEK)*

For further information and to register email
[email protected]

About the workshop:

During this three day workshop, we will explore the roots of ‘traumatic attaching’ – a bi-directional approach – from its inception in the infant-caregiver dyad to its expression in the adult patient-therapist relationship.

Through mini-lectures, experiments, experiential demonstration and discussion, we will learn how to identify patterns of ‘traumatic attaching’ as they emerge within the unfolding therapy session and how to work through them. The aim of this workshop is to continue building an innovative somatic and developmental approach to Gestalt Therapy theory, while remaining faithful to the foundation principles.

The workshop is open to all.

November 16-18, 2018

The Evolution of Subjectivity:
A Kinetic-Kinesthetic Progression

with Ruella Frank

LOCATION
Day 1 – Friday November 16
Lauriston Hall,
28 Lauriston Street, Edinburgh EH3 9DJ

Days 2 & 3 – Saturday November 17 & Sunday November 18
Eric Liddell Centre,
15 Morningside Road, Edinburgh EH10 4DP

They are one mile apart.

TIMES
Friday – Sunday, 9:30 am – 4:30 p.m.

FEE
£395

Further information and to register contact: [email protected]
Or visit Edinburgh Gestalt Institute: http://egi.uk.com.

About the workshop:

In this three-day workshop, we explore the progressions of a developing subjectivity from kinetic-kinesthetic processes during fetal life, where the organism is in a state of “oneness” with its environment, to the newborn child who begins the gradual process of differentiating “me” from “not me” in the first year.

Special emphasis will be given to the functional similarity of this vital experiential shift in relation to the subtle yet profound existential experiences emerging within adult therapy. Attention also will be given to kinetic-kinesthetic processes arising in therapy, which clarify the experience of subjectivity for both the patient and therapist.

The workshop presents my latest thinking in terms of a more complete understanding of the developmental progressions – how we come to be and maintain who we are in relation – from a Gestalt theoretical perspective and a Developmental Somatic Psychotherapy approach.