All programs develop strengths to engage across personal and cultural differences. Programs include communication skills, creative problem solving, negotiation and conflict transformation skills, and are informed by strategies from aesthetics and somatic awareness including perception, self-knowledge, social relations and context analysis.
Each program is uniquely designed to meet specific client needs and is available as half day, one day and multi-day, inter-active seminars and workshops.
The following programs are illustrative of what is possible.
Communication and Conflict Transformation
Numerous programs presented to groups in many professional disciplines
since 2004
Training is available for independent professionals, service providers, managers,
employees, educators and youth to improve one's ability to respond creatively
to communication breakdown and conflict. Participants learn to:
Aesthetic Lessons for Engagement
Pasadena Art Center College of Art and Design, with Hugo Hopping, 2007
Exploring the dialectical relationships between personal and social movements...spatial,
visual, linguistic, ideological, economic, meditative and somatic. How do
we initiate social movements that provide hope to all individuals? How can
we think aesthetically, experientially and ethically to understand both cultural
and psycho-physical-spiritual aspects of subjectivity? Where are the limits
of seeing, being seen and not being allowed to see? How do the social and
the political name, shame and blame our experience of the world, and how
do we internalize those conditions and reproduce them?
The Prisoner's Dilemma: Artist In the Mirror
California Lawyers for the Arts, Los Angeles, California, January 21,
2006
Artists must constantly negotiate their internal capacity for uncertainty
with the culture’s inability and refusal to accept uncertainty. This
workshop guides professionals working in the arts to better understand
the artistic temperament.
On Seeing and Being Seen
Shree Yoga Retreat, Tulum, Mexico, November 2006
Sight engages memory, emotion, visceral feeling, thought and judgment. Understanding
how we see and how we experience being seen allows us to access self-knowledge
and cultural codes, expanding our understanding of being human. We will engage
breath, movement, attention and writing to explore our world of sight.
Body, Memory and History
Universities, Colleges,
businesses and community centers, 1983-to present.
The human body is an arena where social, physical, psychological and spiritual
aspects of identities are acted out. This workshop investigates subjectivity,
history, memory and our body as the site for experiencing and knowing the "world".
Including readings, writing and exploring collected private and public images,
with invited guests from dance and architecture to broaden understanding
of the spacio-temporal world as experienced by the body.
Mediation and the Arts
Southern California Mediation Association, Los Angeles California,
2005
Sessions include improvisational theater to explore intuitive response,
post structural film to explore narrative strategies, classical and contemporary
art to explore perception and literature to explore engagement with conflict.
The Aesthetics of Perception, Communication and Thoughtfulness
Christensen, Miller, Fink, Jacobs, Glaser, Weil & Shapiro, LLP, Los
Angeles, CA, 2005
A specially designed workshop to assist lawyers, mediators, managers, and others
in learning a set of aesthetic lessons, perceptual skills, and intervention
techniques. It will expand your ability to recognize the subtle details of
how you and your clients communicate, assess the physical and social environments,
and read sensorial and cultural codes, including visual, auditory, sensory,
kinesthetic, gestural, spatial and cultural variables.
The Visceral Viewer and the Court
College Art Departments and California Superior Courthouses, 2000-2002
Bridging aesthetics and the law to develop engagement between artists and
justice system professionals. California Institute for the Arts at San Fernando
Superior Court; San Francisco Art Institute at San Francisco Superior Court;
University of California, Irvine at Newport Harbor Superior Court.