Category: <span>Wellbeing</span>

Taught by Teresa McGlashan, LMFT and Christina Giammalva, Somatic Counselor

We are offering a life-changing course filled with core teachings that make it easier to understand how to navigate life and find inner wellbeing. We’re teaching what we’ve spent a lifetime discovering and embodying.

This course fosters a community of growth and healing. We are all students and guides. We’ll learn together and laugh together (and maybe cry a little), and you’ll feel like you’ve been given the manual we all wish we’d come with to planet Earth.

The work is personal, so the course is intimate, with 6-8 participants. The group will meet once a week for 1.5 hours. Each participant is also offered a private session. You will receive meditations, tools, and teachings in-between class. The classes will be recorded in case you can’t be there in person every time.

During this course, we’ll work together to:

1. Identify techniques, drawn from Eastern Philosophy, Positive Psychology and the latest neuroscience that grant access to deep feelings of joy, and release limiting and painful emotions and thoughts (even on a rainy day)! See how tiny shifts in our awareness can create powerful and long-lasting transformation in all aspects of our life.
2. Find and understand your own unique personality type. Self-awareness is the key to navigating life with more grace. This kind of knowledge allows us to better flow with life’s ups and downs rather than trying to swim upstream or through rocks. (Ouch!)
3. Explore and address areas in which you feel stuck or contracted. Whether that’s in the area of career, relationship, physical health or meaning, we will identify the cause and the “cure” for releasing the culprits of our “unhappiness.”
4. Come to know some of your core wounds, and some ways that healing becomes possible when we deeply befriend ourselves.
5. Learn how to access compassionate witnessing and true understanding and acceptance. To meet our patterns and stories with love and acceptance, we need to understand who we truly are, and come to know the difference between our thoughts (the voice in the head) and our conscious awareness. (This is like an inner superpower!)
6. Build a sustainable practice of wellbeing that enables you to enjoy the good times more and the hard times with greater perspective, understanding and growth.

WHERE: We will meet online using ZOOM, an easy to master way of seeing everyone in the class simultaneously.

WHEN: Monday, February 24, 2020 from 8:30-10:00am PT/11:30-1:00pm ET

COST: $600 (Scholarships are available. Please ask if it would help you to join the class.)

SIGN UP: Send an email to Teresa at teresa@teresamcglashan.com or Christina at giammalvacf@gmail.com

What is Unconditional Love? Unconditional Love is about loving regardless of the other person “deserving” it. In contrast to conditional love, which is about earning love through one’s behaviors, when we love unconditionally we offer acceptance, respect and kindness to ourselves or another whether or not we like or desire the behaviors or thoughts/ emotions/ feelings we experience.

So what good is this kind of love? From my experience, it is the magical formula of true wellbeing and transformation.

For example, a client (whom I will call Stacey) realizes she has lived with the subconscious core story that she is unlovable. As a child her parents were busy and neglected her, often not meeting important needs for attention and support. She assumed this meant there was something wrong with her. Until now, Stacey has subconsciously believed that if she’d been more lovable, they wouldn’t have neglected her as they did.

It is very common for children to mistakenly assume that the things their parents do and say are a result of their own inherent worth/ character/ loveability.  Once Stacey can meet her younger self with unconditional love and see the grief and fear and anger that have come from this misunderstanding, she is able to viscerally understand how acceptable and lovable this younger self is. She begins to replace a foundational core wound with a kinder and more accepting attitude toward herself.

It seems there is a hidden therapist within all of us that can bring unconditional acceptance to our thoughts and emotions. We all have the capacity to do this. We can step back from our feelings and thoughts and witness them without judgment. This sounds easy but when it comes to our thoughts and feelings, most of us automatically believe the thoughts that pop into our heads and the feelings that follow.

It is a huge step toward freedom when we wake up to the truth that our painful thoughts (and therefore our feelings) about ourselves (and others) simply aren’t true! They are misunderstandings from our childhood experiences or our family’s conditioning or from the culture at large.

Our suffering is directly related to our beliefs about ourselves–the more unloving and critical we are toward ourselves, the more we will suffer. The more we accept and love ourselves, warts and all, the more we will accept others and feel joy and delight in life as it is.

Orienting toward life from unconditional love can be one of the gifts of psychotherapy and counseling. Recognizing our basic lovability and healing the parts of us that don’t see things that way, starts a cascade of goodness. Life becomes a lot more enjoyable when this happens.

If you want to learn more about the healing power of unconditional love or share with me your own story, please be in touch!

Clarity and Wellbeing are ALWAYS present

If you are feeling anxious or depressed, wellbeing may seem entirely hidden. To hear that it is always present but simply veiled may seem like fairy tale. But it is an experientially accurate description that can be tested.

Myth:  We believe getting what we want makes us happy. Believing this means we put all of our energy into the experience, relationship or object that seems associated with feeling a sense of wellbeing. Have you noticed that you/we do this?

Reality:  When we get what we want we feel happy because for a little while we aren’t wanting anything other than what we have.  For a brief moment we are Buddhas, content with the way things are.

Try noticing this for yourself. You’ll see that when you are happy, you aren’t trying to push something away or believing a thought that you need something in order to be happy.

Why it Matters: You can spend your life having brief moments of happiness after working hard to get what you want. Or you can learn to access the contentment that is always present and use the difficulties that arise as the beautiful compost that grows wellbeing.

How do we do that? We need to find our own “bridges” to wellbeing. We need to discover that there is already something in us which is totally content and totally accepting of our situation. We can access this and look at our lives from this wise and accepting perspective.

Accessing this clarity is true freedom.  It feels good.  It sees clearly. We know the next thing to do that isn’t driven by fear or by hurt or by automatic habits. Without access to this natural clarity (another word for happiness), we are stuck trying to make the world cooperate with our plans.  Sometimes it does and often it doesn’t.

This is the rollercoaster ride of life. And like all rollercoasters, you can’t get off in the middle of the ride.  This isn’t a problem if you have access to clarity and wellbeing.  We can accept the ups and downs of life and “enjoy the ride” if we have the manual for accessing our everpresent wisdom.

If you want to work with me to figure out how to reliably access wellbeing or to address patterns that get in the way of it, please give me a call.  This is my passion and expertise.