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Martial Arts-based Deliberate Practice to entrain therapist courage
Would you like to enhance your therapist self's compassionate courage, distress tolerance and responsiveness? COME JOIN US!
Saturday 14th June & Sunday 15th June
9:30 am - 4:30 pm
Mindfulness & Compassion Therapy Centre
€395
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This two-day experiential embodied enactive workshop will expose you to martial arts-inspired skills and practices to integrate into your personal practice and bring to bear on your psychotherapeutic work. This will help develop and enhance your distress tolerance and compassionate resilience, so as to stay fully present and emotionally available in (difficult) therapeutic encounters.
Through a broad range of martial arts exercises, you shall experience and further develop skills in the following:
Click the register button below to book your place and pay a €100 deposit, you will be contacted to pay the balance after registration.
The workshop is complimentary to therapist/clinicians from any therapeutic modality who wish to enhance their capacities in therapeutic presence, relational mindfulness, embodied self-regulation, compassionate engagement and action, and rupture-repair work.
If you are interested in developing your abilities to remain affiliatively engaged and courageously compassionately responsive under pressure, then this is the workshop for you!
Please be assured that you do not need to be a ninja to participate in this training. If you are able to rise to standing from a seated position on your sofa, and reach into your refrigerator for your milk or vegan alternative, you are able for this training!
The workshop will involve a series of experiential exercises derived from a range of traditional Martial Arts, blended with practices from various mindfulness and compassion-based body-mind trainings, with a focus on how these relate to therapeutic process(es) and can be usefully transferred to the therapy space.
These embodied practices are designed to help you as a therapist/clinician develop the underlying (neuro)physiological capacities, motivational switching abilities and somatic resources to respond compassionately to challenging therapeutic encounters, particularly ruptures in the therapeutic alliance.
If you’re curious to find out a bit more, check out this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffXWbln1qU4 .
Yes! Check out our recent paper, which suggest that our workshops positively impact on therapists’ distress tolerance capacities and abilities, as well as aspects of emotional equanimity:
Hiskey, S., & Clapton, N. E. (2024). Enhancing Therapist Courage: Feasibility and Changes in Distress Tolerance and Equanimity Following Martial Arts-Based Radically Embodied Compassion Workshops. OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine, 9(2), 1-24.
If you want to delve further into the science behind our approach and workshops, please do check out the following:
Clapton, N., & Hiskey, S. (2024). Radically Embodied Compassion Training: Cultivating Psychotherapist Courage, Distress Tolerance and Compassionate Responsiveness via Traditional Martial Arts. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 11(2), 71–87. https://doi.org/10.14738/assrj.112.16285
Clapton, N. E., & Hiskey, S. (2023). The way is in training: Martial arts-informed compassionate mind training to enhance CFT therapists’ compassionate competencies. OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine, 8(1), 1-17.
No, you don't have to have had any personal experience or training in the Martial Arts to attend.
The embodied practices are very accessible and you don’t need a high level of fitness to participate.For more information, please visit www.fiercecompassionmartialarts.com.
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Come and be the most courageously compassionate version of your (therapist and personal) self!
We really hope you can join us in person and experience embodied compassion for yourselves!
Dr Neil Clapton is a Clinical Psychologist working in the NHS within secondary adult mental health services in Swindon and private practice. Much of his clinical work involves providing Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) to people experiencing complex trauma, personality and attachment difficulties. Neil spent much of his early-middle childhood and early adolescence practicing the martial art of Taekwondo, culminating in him being awarded a 1st-degree Black Belt at the age of 13. He is the co-founder of Fierce Compassion Martial Arts (www.fiercecompassionmartialarts.com).
Dr Syd Hiskey is a consultant clinical psychologist in full-time independent practice. Syd is an experienced CFT practitioner with a long-standing academic and clinical interest in this field. He has practised a wide range of martial arts including Karate, Wing Chun Kung Fu, hybrid defence and more recently Urban Combatives. He is the co-founder of Fierce Compassion Martial Arts (www.fiercecompassionmartialarts.com).
