The sympathetic nervous system activation that helps you tense up to take a punch or put on a burst of speed to outrun an unfriendly dog isn’t quite so helpful when you’re bracing to defend yourself against an intangible threat, like, say, admitting you need to change your mind.
Once of CFAR’s instructors will walk participants through the biology of the fight/flight/freeze response and then run interactive practice on how to deliberately notice and adjust your response under pressure. The class is capped at 12, due to its interactive nature.
An iteration of this class was one of the high points of the May 2013 CFAR retreat for me. It was extraordinarily helpful in helping me get over various aversions, be less reactive and more agenty about my actions, and generally enjoy life more. For instance, I gained the ability to enjoy, or substantially increased my enjoyment of, several activities I didn’t particularly like, including:
improv games
additional types of social dance
conversations with strangers
public speaking
It also helped substantially with CFAR’s comfort zone expansion exercises. Highly recommended.
A bit. Most of the techniques were developed by one of the CFAR instructors, and I can’t reproduce his instruction, nor do I want to steal his thunder. The closest thing you can find out more about is mindfulness-based stress reduction. (But the real value of the class is being able to practice with Val and ask him questions, which unfortunately I can’t do justice to in a LW comment.)
CFAR has a class on handling your fight/flight/freeze reaction this Saturday Sept 28th.
The sympathetic nervous system activation that helps you tense up to take a punch or put on a burst of speed to outrun an unfriendly dog isn’t quite so helpful when you’re bracing to defend yourself against an intangible threat, like, say, admitting you need to change your mind.
Once of CFAR’s instructors will walk participants through the biology of the fight/flight/freeze response and then run interactive practice on how to deliberately notice and adjust your response under pressure. The class is capped at 12, due to its interactive nature.
An iteration of this class was one of the high points of the May 2013 CFAR retreat for me. It was extraordinarily helpful in helping me get over various aversions, be less reactive and more agenty about my actions, and generally enjoy life more. For instance, I gained the ability to enjoy, or substantially increased my enjoyment of, several activities I didn’t particularly like, including:
improv games
additional types of social dance
conversations with strangers
public speaking
It also helped substantially with CFAR’s comfort zone expansion exercises. Highly recommended.
For those of us who can’t be in Berkeley in < 1 week’s notice, can you go into more detail on the methods?
A bit. Most of the techniques were developed by one of the CFAR instructors, and I can’t reproduce his instruction, nor do I want to steal his thunder. The closest thing you can find out more about is mindfulness-based stress reduction. (But the real value of the class is being able to practice with Val and ask him questions, which unfortunately I can’t do justice to in a LW comment.)
Would you be able to post a summary for people unable to attend? I find the topic very interesting, but habitually reside in a different continent,.