The Basic Facilitator Training In-Person is an intense practicum using the Basic Shadow Work® tools. It consists of 7.5 or 8.5 days of In-Person training (depending on the number or students enrolled). During this time, you will learn and then practice all the BFT processes, like the Pre-Process Steps, Risk Manager, What’s at Risk, Ideal Support, Working in Support, The Switch, the Pull-Out and the Warrior Run. Early in the training, you will practice each process on one of the trainers. At the end of the training you will facilitate two real, live processes on other participants, and be facilitated in a process of you own, facilitated by two other participants, mentored by the trainers. You will also be playing roles in the other processes and participating in group sharing and a detailed discussion of each process.
You will receive the BFT Training Manual after you have put down a deposit and signed the BFT license. This allows you to become familiar with the tools and processes before the training begins.
This training is highly experiential and has a small participant-to-trainer ratio. The focus of this training is to provide participants with a solid base in the use of the basic Shadow Work facilitation tools. This involves a great deal of hands-on facilitation time, both in practice situations and in real processes.
Besides learning to facilitate Shadow Work processes, you will also be shown some of the four basic “Shifts in Perception” we use to illuminate the most difficult shadows you will encounter as a facilitator. Learning to understand what’s really beneath the deepest shadows gives you leverage for dealing with the most difficult participants or clients you will encounter. You will learn how each of the four biggest shadows grew out of a particular set of wounds, and how it can be unraveled and mended by the Shadow Work processes.
It is recommended that you attend at least one Shadow Work Seminar before attending the Basic Facilitator Training. A Shadow Work Seminar is the best preparation for the BFT in-Person. But other options include the ManKind Project Weekend, Woman Within, Woman Revealed, the Crucible Project Weekend, Soul Beauty, the Unleashed Weekend, the Unknown Weekend, the Inner King Training, Women In Power, the Priestess Path, Shadow Work Coaching and other events where Shadow Work is used.
This training is the first step to becoming certified as either a Shadow Work Group Facilitator or a Shadow Work Coach
To learn more about Certification: What Does “Certified” Mean?
For training dates and costs, see the Calendar of Events.
See also Top 20 Things You Can Learn at the BFT.
To understand the vital distinction between the Consent-Based Facilitation you will learn in the Shadow Work trainings and the Initiation-Based Facilitation used in many other workshops, see Initiation-Based Facilitation vs. Consent-Based Facilitation.
BROCHURE FOR BASIC FACILITATOR TRAINING
This is an invitation to learn about the essential Shadow Work facilitation skills and how to use them for yourself, your family, and in your community. The process we invite you to join will be intense, enjoyable and practical and will take you behind the scenes so that you can understand the thinking we employ while facilitating.
Shadow Work provides powerful tools for bringing out of the shadow and into the light whatever parts of yourself you have split off, repressed, denied, or disowned. In this way, you have more capacity, balance, and choice. Our desire is that you will discover how to use the power of these tools for doing that consistently with yourself and others. The scope of what you can expect to get out of this training is enormous and includes:
- A solid grounding in the basic Shadow Work facilitation skills, using the Shadow Work Four-Quarter Model.
- A powerful experience of your own personal growth.
- Insights about facilitation: our “chop wood, carry water” approach takes you behind the scenes. We will show you how we harness our shadows to make us better facilitators.
- A tool kit of skills that you can apply yourself, at home or in your community.
For training dates and costs, see the Calendar of Events.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Persons who want one or more of the following:
- To enhance their own personal growth.
- To learn Shadow Work tools for personal or professional application.
- To start on the path to becoming an accomplished Shadow Work Facilitator or Coach.
This training draws a rich diversity of people, including educators, therapists, group leaders, health workers, organizational development consultants, and others dedicated to their own personal and professional growth.
THE BASIC STEPS OF SHADOW WORK FACILITATION
- How to build a safe, non-shaming container: creating safety in yourself, your facilitation, and your participants.
- How to facilitate processes using the four energies.
- How to put the participant first: Honoring the participant’s desired outcomes and risk levels throughout the process.
- How to get started: Splitting out the parts, getting a triangle, regressing the split, and setting a direction for the process.
- The Risk Manager process: Four steps to honoring the participant who does not trust the process, the facilitator, the container or the group.
- The What’s At Risk Process: Six steps for helping the participant make a decision in any situation.
- How to recognize a participant who has been wounded in a group process.
- How to facilitate a participant who doesn’t know what he/she wants.
- How to determine an effective direction for the process; whether to choose a specific Sovereign, Lover, Magician, or Warrior process; how to offer a menu of choices, and an experiential rationale for making the best decision.
- How to notice overlays in the participant’s story, and how their first words permeate the whole process.
- How to handle a participant experiencing an overflowing emotion: the steps to a successful Metaphorical Pull-Out process.
- The powerful Switch process: how to move a participant from one body state or emotional state to another.
GETTING TO KNOW YOUR SHADOW AS A FACILITATOR
We believe that being able to recognize and use your own shadows while facilitating is one of the greatest challenges of facilitating and also one of its greatest rewards. In this training you will learn how to recognize your own shadows as they appear during facilitation, how to recognize your co-facilitator’s shadows, and how to use these to help you navigate the process rather than have the shadows in hiding. Other shame-free behaviors you will learn:
- How to symbolically “ritualize” a process out of the here-and-now reality.
- How to distinguish between open and closed questions.
- How to avoid ritually harming a participant.
- How to learn to love yourself in your shadow.
- How to recognize your facilitator shadows in all four Quarters.
- How to facilitate yourself when you are emotionally filled to the brim.
- How to evaluate your instincts: determining what’s for you and what’s for the participant.
- How to get out your own shadowy “hot spot” when facilitating
- How to use your intuition to deepen the process, assess risk levels, and evolve “juicy” part splits.
THE BASIC PROCESSES IN ALL FOUR QUARTERS
In this training, you will learn how to recognize the underlying wounds in each of the four Quarters and how to facilitate the basic Shadow Work processes to address those wounds.
SOVEREIGN TOOLS AND CONDITIONAL LOVE WOUNDS
- How to bring in Ideal Support.
- How to work in support when it isn’t well received.
- Why the participant manifesting Sovereign wounds replicates betrayal in their life.
MAGICIAN TOOLS AND FEAR WOUNDS
- What’s At Risk: why, when, and how to use it.
- How to draw out and bless the participant’s Risk Manager.
- What to do when a participant doesn’t know something.
- How to recap, and when to pause for a teaching moment.
LOVER TOOLS AND BODY-FEELING WOUNDS
- How to know whether to use a Lover or Magician tool.
- How to use “close your eyes and feel it in your body.”.
- How to create a “container within a container” for the Inner Child.
- When to elicit more detail, and when not to.
- When to use the Metaphorical Pull-Out Process to extract toxic energy safely.
- The special use and pacing of words during processes in this Quarter.
WARRIOR TOOLS AND BOUNDARY WOUNDS
- The importance of safety both for the participant and the group.
- How Warrior processes use support from the other Quarters.
- How to use goals, boundaries and safety to create a more powerful process.
- Three ways to bolster a flagging Warrior process using the other Quarters.
- How to get those juicy lines that draw out Warrior energy.
ENDING THE PROCESS
- How to anchor the work in the participant.
- How to use metaphors and affirmations.
- How to celebrate the process.
- How to handle de-roling and grounding the process.
USING YOUR INTUITION
Within the basic recipe for Shadow Work, there is room for using your intuitive skills, once you learn the basics of whatever process you are facilitating. We will teach you how and when to use your intuition, and when it might get in your way:
- Using “What would you like to have happen?” at crucial points in the process.
- Proven tips for getting effective splits and evolving them.
- How to determine the direction, depth and risk level of the process.
- How to help the participant who is foggy, numb or stuck.
TRAINING ACTIVITIES
Didactic sessions: Mini-talks where we present (and welcome your questions on) basic concepts, tools, considerations, challenges, cautions, and tips for successful Shadow Work facilitation.
Centerwork pieces: You can do your own personal issue work in a Centerwork piece facilitated by your colleagues and closely coached by us.
Practice tools: Extended exercises where you practice using the tools or segments of a tool.
Whole Practice sessions: You have the opportunity to facilitate one of your colleagues in a Centerwork piece where you and your co-facilitator decide your strategy based on what your participant wants to have happen.
Supportive feedback: Group and trainer feedback on your facilitating, focusing on what you do well and right, and framing improvement areas in loving, honoring ways.
Co-facilitation teamwork: We model co-facilitation issues by openly sharing our own internal process as we facilitate, and you learn to facilitate with a co-facilitator in a synergistic way.
Loving acceptance: Specific check-ins and other activities illustrating the practice of compassionate, respectful support.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Training Manual: 130+-page Basic Facilitator Training Manual full of step-by-step process protocols, teaching from the mentors and explicit examples.
- Container modeling: The training leaders share their internal processes and thoughts as they model safe container-building.
- Shame-free, safe container: Rarely will you experience such loving support for experimenting, practicing and learning.
- Small class size: The small participant-to-trainer ratio enables concentrated, experiential coaching as you practice.
- Chunked-down practice sessions: Practice small chunks of processes before doing a full Centerwork piece.
TRAINING COMMITMENT
After reserving your place in the training, you will be required to sign a licensing agreement, after which you will receive the Shadow Work Basic Facilitator Training Manual demonstrating and explaining the basic Shadow Work facilitation tools. We ask you to study the manual before you attend the training. At the training, we ask only that you focus on learning to honor and love yourself as you participate in both the practice and real Shadow Work processes we will coach. After attending this training, you are eligible for the Masters Training and, in most cases, the Advanced Facilitator Training.
PROGRAM INFORMATION
Maximum enrollment, each training: 8 persons (first come, first served).
Schedule: The training lasts 7.5 or 8.5 days depending on enrollment. Daily sessions are 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. with a break for lunch. Please arrive at 8:15 a.m. on the first day of training to complete your registration. Full details in training packet sent to you upon registration.
For more information: Contact Vicki Woodard at (303) 442-7989, or email shadowork@frii.com.
For training dates and costs, see the Calendar of Events.
A SAMPLING OF RAVE REVIEWS
Bill Isaacs, Ph.D., President, Dia*Logos, Cambridge, Mass. “Shadow Work is a remarkable and unusually potent process for producing transformation, personal and collective. It helped me a great deal personally and it helped in dramatic ways to deepen the capacity of the team of Dialogue practitioners with whom I work.”
Jennifer Gilchrist, psychotherapist, Evanston, Ill. “I loved the intellectual process of breaking down and analyzing the healing process in a container that holds a deep emotional experience. It has greatly facilitated the ease and grace with which I can make the archetypes a practical tool for my clients.”
Robert Hatch, certified insurance counselor, Oshkosh, Wi. “It was great. I loved it! Cliff Barry speaks about the archetypes and the shadow more clearly and profoundly than anyone I’ve ever heard (including Robert Moore and Robert Bly). Listening to him was truly delightful.”
Jim Warner, President, OnCourse International, Boulder, Col. “The BFT is a profound training experience where facilitators, mentors, and counselors work with men and women seeking deeper personal awareness and intimate community. I facilitate community-building retreats for men and women executives in mid-life…. Without question [the BFT tools] have made me a more effective and understanding facilitator.”
Deborah Celestino, minister, facilitator and administrator, Corona, Cal. “The Shadow Work principles have been a cornerstone to the processing work we use in our own workshops. I found the trainers to be well organized and easy to learn from. They created a rare experience: a completely safe container filled with love, understanding and teaching.”
Bob Selig, accountant, Houston, Tex. “Fabulous, wonderful. Indispensable for learning about Self and others.”
Keith Fairmont, consultant, Boulder, Col. “Through my Shadow Work experience, I have been able to understand the fundamental human dynamics we each long to experience: love, ability to communicate, connection, desire to be seen for who we are, support in claiming the lives we desire, and the risks involved in being ourselves. The BFT woke me up, challenged me and assisted me in seeing the world from a much more realistic and expanding viewpoint (giving me new optimism on life both personally and professionally).”
Johana Wells, professional singer and arts administrator, Buffalo Grove, Ill. “Absolutely fantastic experience and I want to do it again! It was intense, clear, well-paced, supportive and effective. The material was presented in a clear, systematic way that gave me a sense of how to do the work, and what questions to ask next. The skill level and effective communication and supportive environment that the trainers create provide an optimum learning experience.”