Seminars

Personal Resource Consultants offer these seminars:

The seminar SENSORY AWARENESS is presented by Dr. Michael M. Tophoff as a training in mindfulness.

Sensory Awareness is about what in Buddhism is called The Four Dignities of Man: walking, standing, sitting and lying down.
Sensory Awareness training is experiential in nature, honoring the activities of the intellect while offering a foreground to the immediacy of personal experience. It is a transformation where the natural tendencies of the organism are studied to reveal how we construct our experience from moment to moment.

In Sensory Awareness, discoveries about one self, one's ways of relating to others and to their signals, are realized by mindfully attending to whatever is happening within and around oneself.

Participants explore their own personal path by studying a recursive dynamic that balances autonomy with external support. In experiencing personal autonomy, one considers the symbiotic connection between the external environment and inner consciousness to seek response-able ways to understand and relate these two realms. To experience external support, one first considers that, physically, the earth supports us. Wherever we walk, sit, stand or recline, something is always underneath, lending support by carrying us. Psychological support, however, originates within another person. In Sensory Awareness training, one may experience human support not as a reduction of autonomy, but as a deeply nourishing connectedness with others, an essential antidote to feelings of isolation and stress.

Readiness, another meaningful theme in Sensory Awareness, refers to timing, the very moment that nerve cells are ready to fire, monitored by the awareness of the momentary state internal as well as external to the organism. Becoming aware of the right moment requires liveliness, the awake and alert state of the organism within its given context, and attunement with impermanence, the awareness of perpetual change and the patience to allow that change to happen.

In Sensory Awareness training, one may confront conditioned avoidance responses such as anxieties and fears, memories of a troublesome or traumatic nature, or catastrophic fantasies. In Sensory Awareness, these responses are gradually and patiently sorted out according to what is perception and what is image. We build upon sensations, particularly our proprioceptive sensations (Selver & Brooks, 1966: p. 492). The result of this process may well be a new and mindful re-learning, a trust in the information coming from the senses as the way to inner mastership. It is a process of , in the phrasing of Daoist philosophy, returning to the Source, to the Uncarved Block, to True Nature, in which the point is not to demand from our organism, but rather to heighten sensitivity and experience what our organism asks of us.

The Effects of Sensory Awareness
A recent study incorporated Sensory Awareness training in a managerial setting to determine if, after participating in the Sensory Awareness seminar, an individual:
(1) is more aware of his bodily signals and
(2) feels better as to his bodily functioning.
(Tophoff, 2003)
It was expected that:
(3) he would be more content about his relationships and
(4) experience better functioning at his job. Using psychometrically reliable and valid measuring instruments, results showed that significant improvement in all of the above-mentioned categories.

These seminars take place as in-company training.

For information about the other seminars, please contact Dr. Michael M. Tophoff