The 20-Day Healing Journey Program – Outline
DESCRIPTION
The Healing Journey Program is a holistic, participant-driven, facilitator managed, healing opportunity. It is designed for self-motivated adults who are choosing to heal and grow. It recognizes that we are each our own healer who can benefit from the support, experience and witness of others in a group process. The authority and onus of responsibility for change and growth is determined by each participant’s choices, willingness and determination to complete the necessary work that will make a difference.
The Healing Journey Program is a positive, present-moment focused, action-based process. It acknowledges that we carry hurt and pain from the past. It also acknowledges that although we may not have been responsible for the original hurt and pain, especially if it occurred when we were children, we are responsible for how we deal with it now. This is true, even if we choose to do nothing. The program invites participants to actively share their stories, experiences and wisdom, make plans, act on their plans (or at least the first steps) and report back to the group to celebrate their successes.
A major aspect of the Healing Journey Program focuses on power, authority and responsibility. It also focuses on ways we give our power, authority and responsibility away, through addictive processes. The program invites participants to acknowledge addictive behavior, the sources of this behavior, and the ability to choose to use one’s power effectively. It looks at concrete ways of managing one’s power and addictive tendencies.
PREREQUISITES AND COMMITMENTS
Participants are invited to:
1. Set their intent to heal.
2. Be fully committed to actively participating in the Healing Journey Program.
3. Be present each day and participate as much as possible
4. Be alcohol and drug free during the time of the program
LENGTH OF THE HEALING JOURNEY PROGRAM
This is a 4 week healing program is divided into two parts or 20 consecutive days, pending the organization’s choice.
MATERIALS
- Binder format
- Therapeutic Maps and Handouts
- Work done in session will be prepared by facilitators as material for participants
METHODS OF TEACHING
- Critical Analysis
- Self Reflection Exercises
- Group Discussions
- Role Plays
- Performance Feedback
- Case Studies
- Creating and Utilizing Open Spaces
- Power of Invitation
- Analogies and Metaphors
- Maps
- Demonstrations
- Creative Work
- Writing
- Storytelling
- Music and Art
- Constellation Work
- Humour
- Brainstorming
- Personal Interactions
- Prayer and Meditations
- Play time and games
- Field Trip (On-the-land)
- Traditional Medicines
- Sharing Circles
PROGRAM OBJECTIVES
1. For each participant to heal and grow in ways that serve his or her highest good.
2. For each participant to develop and utilize a tool box of healing and growth strategies and techniques.
3. For participants to use the tools to help themselves first and then to help others in their families and community.
4. For participants to choose and practice a happy, healthy, balanced, productive and abundant life style.
5. For participants to develop a positive regard, responsibility and respect for themselves, their culture, their community and for others.
6. For participants to be able to move forward and utilize their gifts in encouraging healing and growth in their community and in systems (family, education, justice, religions, etc.) and in the world.
7. For participants to acknowledge their power, authority and responsibility, as it applies to their own healing.
8. For participants to challenge their addictive behaviors and look at ways of managing their behavior.
9. For participants to let go of beliefs, emotions, behaviours and thoughts that no longer serve their highest good.
10. For the occurrence of addictions, violence and abuse to be lessened or eliminated from the participants lives.
11. Be able to manage relationships and losses well.
A TYPICAL DAILY SCHEDULE OF THE HEALING JOURNEY PROGRAM WOULD BE AS FOLLOWS:
1. Opening prayer (Pray in your own way.)
2. Welcome and review of work done the previous day.
3. Check in.
4. A specific healing exercise, technique or issue explored and practiced
5. Break
6. A 2nd healing exercise, technique or issue explored and practiced
7. Lunch
8. An activity based healing opportunity practiced
9. Break
10. A 3rd healing exercise, technique or issue explored and practiced
11. A closing exercise
12. Closing prayer
THE HEALING JOURNEY PROGRAM SUGGESTED OUTLINE: The workshop is participant driven. This means that this outline will be followed only if the participants choose not to prioritize or introduce any other issue.
OUTLINE FOR PART I
Week 1: (The Fundamentals of Healing and Growth)
• Welcome and introductions;
• Opening Prayer (Pray in your own way) (each day);
• I am my own healer
• Guidelines;
• Setting one’s intent
• Safety: finding safety within and establishing it on the outside;
• Commitment to Healing, Sobriety and this workshop;
• Communication – Permission to talk about it: the good and the bad;
• Assembling a Medicine Wheel
• Emotions
• Beliefs
• Respecting boundaries: “Whose stuff is it?”
• Setting boundaries: teaching people how to treat you, and treating others in the same manner;
• Choice
• Freedom
• Power, authority and responsibility – as it pertains to healing and growth, and to addictive behaviors;
• Behaviour and Actions
• Attachment
Week 2: (The things that hurt)
• Losses
• Trauma
• Abuse
• Violence
• Systems
• Empowerment
• Change
• The power of invitation
• Planning
• Walking the Medicine Wheel: releasing the hurt and pain;
• Inner Child Work
• Silence and secrets, and shame;
• The mountain of hurt and pain;
• The shell has to break before the bird can fly;
• The price of holding it in;
• Abandonment;
• Residential School and other systemic disempowerment
• Medicine Wheel Tracing;
• Separating the person from the behaviour;
• Regaining and maintaining balance (Learning to fall and get up again);
• What helps to end abuse and violence at different levels: a) Individual b) Family c) Community d) Nation/World;
OUTLINE FOR PART 2
Week 3: Addictions (Sex, drugs, money and systems)
• Developing Your Geneogram
• Definition of addictions: “giving my power away in an unhealthy, unbalanced, non-reciprocal way”
• Types of addictions
• Signs and symptoms: What does the addiction look like?
• The great motivators
• The cost of addiction
• Lying (denial, self-delusion) and honesty “I am an alcoholic”
• Sabotaging
• Secrets
• The ultimate choice belongs to the individual – How am I choosing to respond?
• Enabling – setting things up to encourage the addict to continue to use
• Addiction as a pattern, habit, compulsion, dependence, need, obsession, and/or craving
• Freedom, from the addiction, of choice, freedom to continue down an unhealthy road or a healthy road
• Balance, imbalance and regaining balance
• The emotions and states” all powerful, powerless, shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, depression, anger, frustration, confusion, impatience, intolerance, pitiful, flat emotionally, not caring, giving up, etc.
• Untangling the addiction complex
• Addictions and how it affects relationships (those I love)
• Understanding Family Systems and dynamics (intergenerational impacts)
• The system: supports or denies, enables or challenges
• Healing from addictions: safety plans, high risk areas, replacement strategies, recovery, relapse, treatment options, discipline, honesty, choosing to do something about it before it gets too powerful, asking for help (support groups, community responses)
• Blocks to healing, growth and abundance
• Problem Solving
• Protection
• Punishment
• Justice
• Systems Constellations Work
• Releasing and Processing
• Where do you go from here?
Week 4: (Relationships, Love and Making My World a Better Place)
• Relationships
• Agreements
• Individual, Family and Community Action
• Making my world a better place, starting with me and reaching out
• Taking Charge of My Life
• Filters through which you view the world
• Values, beliefs, perceptions, assumptions, projections, judgments
• Social masks and roles
• Evaluating your life: with self and others, job/career, family life, emotional, spiritual, social, physical life
• Your positive and negative characteristics and behaviour patterns (ie: emotional patterns/cycles, attitudes)
• Acknowledging and accepting accountability for your life (choosing better so you have better)
• Confronting and understanding your pain and addictions, and finding the addictive payoffs
• The power in forgiveness (of self and others)
• Good words: identifying goodness in self
• Your power to choose to liberate yourself and be the manager of your life
• Taking the path of being accountable, committed, doing what it takes, and having what you want
• Utilizing hands-on exercises and techniques for self-awareness, acknowledgement, growth, spiritual awakening and change
• A time to celebrate life in a healthy way: dance, sing and laugh again!
• Closing circle
• Dismantling the medicine wheel
• Feedback and evaluating the work done
• Closing prayer and fire ceremony
If there is time, need or interest, the following may also be covered in the workshop:
• The relationship with your self is unique
• Spiritual considerations. “Pray in your own way;”
• Medicine Wheel. “Telling your own story of the relationship”
• Setting up the helping effort to be successful
• Room blessing and cleansing
• Attachment and loss: “There is no loss without first attachment”
• “Healing is a choice”
• The healing choice can be supported in many ways
• Good words, validations and affirmations
• Truth speaking: acknowledge what is
• Compassion and love
• Entering the healing circle
• Acknowledgement of who is in the circle
• Creating and acknowledging the helping agreement
• Establishing protocols, and ethics
• Support groups
• Witnessing another’s pain without interference or projections
• Breathwork
• Alcohol and drug use and abuse
• Attaching and bonding in healthy and unhealthy ways (clinging)
• Healthy touch
• Food, sleep, exercise and personal hygiene
• Any death or loss can lead us back to our own mortality (I too will die)
• Being actively involved in creating and managing change in our own lives
• Special gifts
• Moving back and forth from the “Big Picture” (beliefs and truths) to the “little picture” (intimate, specific, individual pain and suffering) context
• Each person already knows everything he or she needs to know to heal him or herself
• Expressing emotions in a healthy way
• Creating an opportunity for action or manifestation of what I know and feel
• Asking for help
• The benefits of healing work
• The risks of not completing healing work
• Relearning the World
• A Grieving Process Model
• Trust
• Intimacy
• Traumatic loss
• Written work: “A letter to the one I lost.”
• Meditation exercises. Finding peace and calm within
• Defining self: beliefs, thoughts, feelings, needs. “Who is the one that is grieving?”
• Healing with Music and Literature
• Ceremonies and rituals in healing
• A place for forgiveness and apology
• “Lend a hand” strategy
• What helps me to heal?
• Values exercise
ON-SITE PROGRAM ONLY
To arrange an on-site workshop in your community, please call Elaine Woodward at 1-403-931-1094.
ABOUT LIFE WORKS COUNSELLING AND TRAINING SERVICES INC.
Life Works Counselling and Training Services Inc., established in 1994, is a business specializing in:
i) Therapeutic Assessment, Counselling and Referral Services;
ii) Contracted Face-to-face and Telephone Counselling Services, On-Site in Communities, upon request;
iii) Counselling services for a broad range of issues;
iv) Critical Incident Stress Management Services;
v) Employee and Family Assistance Programs and Services;
vi) Workshop delivery across Canada;
vii) Services utilizing Elders, translators and interpreters of client’s choice, if required.
The Life Works Counselling and Training Services Inc.’s office is located in Millarville (Calgary area), Alberta.
Services are extensively provided to individuals, families, communities and organizations. Their work with Aboriginal people and communities throughout Canada has helped them develop a high level of respect for the diversity of peoples, cultures, languages and traditions.
Life Works Counselling and Training Services Inc. provides the highest possible level of services to their clients. They have a reputation for being mindful of the position of trust, confidentiality, and responsibility in their work with clientele. Integrity, honesty, confidentiality and fairness are essential to the way in which they conduct business.
ABOUT TERRY GARCHINSKI, FACILITATOR
Terry Garchinski, R.S.W, is an experienced and dynamic trainer, facilitator and speaker, in areas such as, (but not limited to): loss and grief, ending abuse and violence, trauma recovery, suicide prevention, life mapping and cycles of abuse, self-harm and healing, conflict resolution. He has designed and facilitated numerous workshops and programs for various client groups: First Nations, governments, non-government, industries, business, medical and educational institutes, in communities throughout Canada. Terry is founder and President of Life Works Counselling and Training Services Inc., and owner of Bag Man Productions.
As a trained professional with education in Social Work, Philosophy and Counselling, he works as a Therapeutic Counsellor and Trauma Specialist, providing services such as: grief and loss counselling; palliative counselling; youth inhalant abuse counselling; comprehensive psycho-social community assessments following suicides and traumatic events; Employee and Family Assistance program services; counselling to children-in-care and to their natural and foster families; working with youth in a secure custody facility; and family counselling.
This work requires him to travel to communities to lead Critical Incident Stress Defusing and Debriefing sessions following suicides, murders, tragic deaths and other traumatic events, and to travel to communities to provide counselling services.
Terry completed the 2007 Facilitator Training: Family, Community and Organizations Constellation Program.
Terry was the Recipient of the 2005 Social Work Distinguished Service Award; recognized by the Association of Northern Social Workers in Northern Canada for his compassionate and creative therapeutic work in counselling and workshop facilitation throughout the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut.
Terry brings with him a life-long passion in music, a deep spiritual base, and an interest in complimentary healthcare.
Terry’s life and cultural experiences include working in aboriginal communities throughout Canada’s North, teaching English in Peru; working as a volunteer for Hogar Belen, a children’s orphanage in Peru; and living the life experience of a homeless person on the streets of numerous cities throughout Canada and United States. Terry is also author of the book “I Believe”, and in 2010, he released his CD “Healing Ground”.
