Four-Week Online Course with David Bullard
Re-Pairing
Practices for Cultivating the Embodiment of Intimacy
Now On-Demand
This practical course highlights obstacles to intimacy in our culture and provides tools to transmute those obstacles into opportunities for deeper intimacy both with our self and with the people in our lives. Buddhist and other spiritual approaches together with Western psychotherapeutic understandings will be examined, in order to remember one of life's most important lessons: we are all connected and embodied in this beautiful energy of life.
Students who take this course will learn:
- Buddhist and other spiritual approaches to forgiveness and acceptance
- Effective and compassionate ways to deal with anger and urges to break away
- Techniques to help talk about subjects that have previously led to dead-ends or to painful arguments
- Powerful new processes to heal old wounds that unconsciously keep us from being able to connect to others
- Buddhist and other spiritual approaches together with Western psychotherapeutic understandings that aid the ability to relate and connect
- How challenges of relationships may illuminate understandings of ourselves and others that are vital for a deeper wisdom and more powerful compassion
- To see all as connected and embodied in the beautiful energy of life
Course Outline
This session looks at seven ideas that can help recover from upsetting conversations that range from small flare-ups to larger arguments. Over time, awareness of these ideas will allow to “re-pair” more quickly, sometimes even before an upsetting conversation ends; they may then help to actually prevent such disruptions in intimacy.
Session two explores getting beyond the struggle of "I'm right, you're wrong". We’ll learn techniques to help talk about subjects that have previously led to dead-ends or to painful arguments, how to heal old wounds that unconsciously keep us from being able to get close to others and approaches to Forgiveness and Acceptance.
In this session, we will learn effective and compassionate ways to deal with anger and urges to break away and notions of the Self and Other that allow for compassionate acceptance of ourselves and others. We will practice a powerful new visualization to be able to heal old wounds that unconsciously keep us from being able to get close to others.
The final session explores nonviolent communication, emotionally focused therapy insights and how to know when a painful part of our relationship is actually an attempt by our deeper selves to heal from earlier relational wounds. We will learn about powerful new processes to heal old wounds that unconsciously keep us from
David Bullard, Ph.D. has enjoyed a private practice of individual psychotherapy and couples therapy in San Francisco for 40 years. He is a clinical professor in departments of medicine and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, where he consults with spiritual care services and outpatient palliative care staff. His work with trauma is informed by advanced training in EMDR and he is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner®. For psychotherapy.net, he has interviewed leading trauma therapists such as Bessel van der Kolk M.D. and Allan Schore, Ph.D.; psychedelic medicine pioneer researcher and clinician William (Bill) Richards, Ph.D.; psychotherapy researcher and UCSF Clinical Professor of Psychiatry George Silberschatz, Ph.D.; and Buddhist thinkers Thupten Jinpa, Ph.D., Robert Thurman, Ph.D., and Mark Epstein, M.D. In addition to his teaching at UCSF, David has done workshops at Tibet House US (New York City), San Francisco Zen Center, and in Israel and Brazil. His latest professional publication is the chapter “Sexual Problems” (co-authored with Christine Derzko, M.D.) in Behavioral Medicine: A Guide for Clinical Practice, 5th edition (in press; McGraw-Hill). He first encountered Zen through the writings of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and Alan Watts, and enjoys the poetry and wisdom of David Whyte.
