What Is A Percept Training?

Our Percept training is usually a 7-day residential experience. Group sizes vary between twenty to thirty participants, depending on the facility. We design the training to allow participants time for rest and discovery. Trainings include indoor activities done individually and as part of the larger group, outdoor activities, meditation, yoga, movement, and dream work. Participants engage to the degree that thery feel is appropriate for them. We hold our trainings at secluded, peaceful, yet expansive resorts, lodges, or retreat centers. All meals are included as part of our community building experience.

All of the experiential activities are designed to encourage participants to move through
their next step in a four-step process that includes:
  1. Awareness: In our Percept trainings we try to stimulate awareness as a full bodied experience, not  just a cerebral glimpse at ourselves. We do this through engaging in multiple sensory experiences-a wide variety of activities intended to stimulate, deepen, and reorganize your sense of yourself.
  2. Acceptance: Our training environments exclude all praise and blame, which makes it much more likely for participants to accept that which they become aware of. The attitudinal environment we create, of openness and curiosity, replaces the more common environment of judgment and certainty.
  3. Awaiting: We design our training as 7-day residential intensives, because this allows enough time for people to await themselves-to be surprised as their internal reorganization takes place. In our culture, waiting is less and less common, as we seek immediate gratification. We believe that in the urgency of our times, something precious is lost-a deeper part of who we are.
  4. Action: The last step in this four-step process, which is never final, is acting in a new way. To do this within a learning community, which is how we view our training, provides a rare opportunity to be witnessed as the distinct individual that you are now.

During a Percept training, we create experiences that are designed to stimulate core issues for the participants; these issues have to do with self-identity, abandonment, and contact. These experiences are gentle in nature, because we believe people discover more when they feel safe. Many of the experiences are non-verbal and there is a good deal of emphasis on movement. The movement is a metaphor, celebrating the idea that we are not really stuck, but that we have temporarily become habituated in our patterns of living.

The processing of these experiences is then done verbally--using the Percept language--in a way that promotes understanding and integration, so that participants step more fully into themselves. Speaking in Percept is a chance to say ourselves in a new way and a chance to construct new meanings for ourselves.


Next... The people behind Percept