Pre-Conference Workshops
Deepening Your Practice
Wednesday - June 16, 2027 – 10:00 – 13:00 & 15:00 – 18:00
To offer an extra layer of focused learning before the main conference begins, we are pleased to host 3 intimate, full-day Pre-Conference Workshops.
A Note on Registration: Pre-Conference Workshops are separate from the main conference pass and require additional registration. To preserve a quiet, reflective, and supportive learning environment, each workshop is limited to 20 participants.
Pre-Conference Workshop 1
Title: Body Presence in an Age of Acceleration: What Remains When Everything Changes?
Description: We live in an age characterized by an accelerating pace of life, hyperconnectivity, an overload of stimuli, and profound changes in the ways we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world. These transformations challenge clinical practice and raise a fundamental question for Bioenergetic Analysis: What remains essential in our approach in the face of new forms of psychological suffering and evolving patterns of personality organization?
This workshop invites participants to reflect on the enduring relevance of the foundations of Bioenergetic Analysis, with body presence as its central focus. Drawing on the classical contributions of Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen while engaging with the demands of contemporary clinical practice, we will explore those elements that remain vital; such as working through the body, grounding, breathing, self-regulation, and the capacity for authentic contact; as well as those aspects that call for expansion, reexamination, or new ways of understanding.
Rather than opposing tradition and innovation, this workshop seeks to foster a meaningful dialogue between them, reaffirming body presence as a transformative force in both clinical practice and human experience.
Facilitator: Ana Silvia Paula (Brazil)
About Ana Silvia Paula: An IIBA International Faculty member, Reichian psychotherapist, and Senior Trainer in Biosynthesis, Ana Silvia serves as a teacher and supervisor at IABSP (São Paulo), as well as Ligare, Vibrare, and Instituto Ânima in Brazil. Her work offers a rich, integrative perspective on somatic energy and psychological structure.
Pre-Conference Workshop 2
Title: The Living Tradition of Bioenergetic Analysis - Appreciation of Classic Techniques - Beyond Techniques
Description: In this experiential workshop, I draw upon the fundamentals of bioenergetic-analytic practice and aim to demonstrate the extent to which its classic interventions remain entirely relevant today. In my view, it is even more important to work directly with the body nowadays to reclaim him as a living home for the soul; especially given, that culture(s) increasingly seem to value the body merely as a functioning object, separated from emotion.
More than seventy years since Alexander Lowen founded Bioenergetic Analysis, these tools have lost none of their therapeutic power and subtleness. Deeper insights into the importance of the therapeutic relationship, affective neuroscience, trauma research, neurobiology and the understanding of self-regulation have expanded our clinical practice. All this helps us understand more deeply why these interventions are effective, tailor them in each case and moment individually, see when they are most helpful, and how they can be applied with greater precision and therapeutic sensitivity.
With all the experiential work I will focus on:
- Increasing tolerance for energetic activation,
- Working with fixed breathing and movement patterns,
- Identifying and engaging underlying emotional processes,
- Focusing on co- and self-regulation,
- Restoring healthy boundaries and containment.
Participants will see how to identify protective survival patterns, understand their original adaptive function, and work with them respectfully rather than against them.
Facilitator: Heiner Steckel (Germany)
About Heiner Steckel: Dipl.Päd. became IIBA faculty member in 1990 and is a member of the faculty who has been continuously active since then. During the past 35 years as IIBA Faculty, he has conducted professional training primarily in various countries in Western and Eastern Europe and South America. This work has taken him to 20 countries and getting to know different cultures. He is in private practice in Germany for 45 years and co-founded the North German Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis in 1978. He is still actively lecturing Bioenergetic Analysis and related concepts in academic and private settings in Germany.
Pre-Conference Workshop 3
Title: Being with You without Losing Me
Description: In this experiential and didactic pre-conference workshop, we will deepen our connection to our bodies, to our feelings, to our resistances and to other people. This is not easy. In a guided series of grounding exercises, we will facilitate our having a “leg to stand on” as we use our eyes to connect to the world around us.
Setting boundaries with our voices and body language will lead us to experience our ambivalence and fear of full self-expression. As Alexander Lowen writes in his book, Joy, the key is to have self-awareness, self-expression and self-possession.
In this workshop we will facilitate dyadic experiences, individual work and short therapy sessions. The goal of the workshop is to gain more self-awareness, to have more comfort with self-expression and healthy containment and to have a stronger sense of a sturdy inner self. With these qualities we can more fully say, “yes” when we mean it and “no” when something is not right for us setting boundaries in a constructive way.
This workshop welcomes everyone from those with no exposure to bioenergetics to those who have been in bioenergetics for a long time.
Facilitators: Susan Kanor (USA) & Thomas Heinrich (Germany)
About Susan Kanor: An IIBA International Faculty member in private practice since 1980 (practicing in Eliot, ME and Arlington, MA), Susan brings decades of relational somatic mastery and warm clinical wisdom.
About Thomas Heinrich: A psychologist and IIBA International Faculty member, Thomas specializes in the anatomical foundations of Bioenergetic Analysis, working attentively with early trauma, non-heterosexual orientations, and non-cis gender identities.
Pre-Conference Workshop 4
There are plans for a 4th Pre-Conference Workshop. We are currently working on the theme and details, and we look forward to sharing more information with you very soon.
