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Article Excerpt
An experiential workshop was offered to graduate psychology students at a major university in India. The workshop combined Western group counseling concepts with Yoga and indigenous peoples' psychological understandings to help students connect theory, practice, and personal understanding in a culturally relevant framework. Students shared their experiences of group leadership.
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This article describes a 2-day workshop led by the first author that was offered to all psychology master's and doctoral degree students at a major university in India. This workshop offered students an experiential blend of Yoga, psychology, and Western counseling principles as a means to learn about group process and dynamics. Didactic lectures, small- and large-group discussions, and a variety of experiential activities provided the participants with opportunities to learn and integrate principles of group work. The purpose of this blending was to offer a group experience that included activities relevant to the culture of the students participating so that they could more fully grasp the potential of group work. The particular exercises were chosen because they were not only culturally relevant but also offered paths of potential insight and connected well with established concepts of group counseling and development. This workshop was offered with a strong experiential component because of our belief that people learn best when principles of instruction go beyond didactic talking points to also include personal and meaningful experience. The design of this workshop incorporated culturally relevant activities and offered students the opportunity to learn experientially the functions of group leadership identified by Lieberman, Yalom, and Miles (1973): meaning making, caring, structuring, and emotional stimulation.
Yoga, as a system, can be a means to achieve a deeper understanding of the complexity and functioning of counseling groups (Nurenberger, 1976; Rybak & Deuskar, 2004). Yoga is an ancient system, aimed at the scientific study of human psychology, that offers important understandings about human functioning (Coster, 1972).
In contrast to modern psychology, yoga psychology has integrated the various aspects of human functioning into a comprehensive theory and therapeutic method. This includes techniques for working with the unconscious mind, habits, emotions, the physical body and interpersonal relations. Together these techniques become an integrated therapy. (Ajaya, 1976, pp. vii-viii)
Yoga offers a robust paradigm that can be applied to understanding group process (Rybak & Deuskar, 2004). Yoga encourages the activation of a detached witnessing to one's experience. Calm equanimity of this type can help group members to make the most of the feedback and highly charged interactive experiences that occur within group therapy (Nurenberger, 1976; Rybak & Deuskar, 2004). Thus, yoga, as a system, offers a humanistic and holistic path toward wellness that is not limited to the physical dimension, but also incorporates cognitive, emotional, and spiritual elements.
A central concept of yoga is the notion of yoking oneself to some larger entity. Group work itself can be considered as a type of yoga in the sense that each member is "yoked" to the group for purposes of advancing his or her level of consciousness (Rybak & Deuskar, 2004). The commonalities of yoga and counseling include a personal discipline that also allows one to "let go," clear objectives, and the ability to instill a growing capacity for equanimity (Coster, 1972). These correlates apply equally to the training of group leaders and other counselors. Offering a training experience to budding group leaders gives them the opportunity to identify and integrate these dimensions of group leadership with their ongoing conceptual learning. Energy and experience are key elements to the yoga of group work (Rybak & Deuskar, 2004).
Understanding the concept of energy and how it can be used within group work is an important foundational concept for group dynamics (Chen & Rybak, 2004). One of the central concepts of this learning process involves group leader trainees increasing their awareness of how energy is received, assimilated, and released for individuals within a group setting (Rybak & Deuskar, 2004). Working with energy is a highly creative process that can open the door to self-understanding, personal vision, and individual growth.
Group work typically involves a strong emphasis on the experiential aspects as they appear in the here-and-now interactions of the group (Chen & Rybak, 2004). Experiential therapy involves gaining awareness of the multidimensional elements of being rather than merely talking about such aspects (Friedman, 1976).
The experiential learning workshop described in this article was designed to provide opportunities for graduate students to learn about group work from multiple perspectives. Participants ranged from beginning master's-level psychology students to more advanced doctoral students preparing to initiate their dissertation research. The first author led the didactic and large-group experiences, while advanced graduate students were afforded the opportunity to lead the brief training subgroups through a structured group experience. After the workshop was completed, the group leaders were asked to reflect on their personal experiences and the meaning derived from the leadership experiences.
We conducted the workshop in a traditional classroom setting where the desks could be moved into clusters and to the side as needed for different activities. The students were all in their early 20s, and all came from India with the exception of 3 international students. Approximately 50 students participated, with approximately 40 women and 10 men.
WORKSHOP EXPERIENCE DESCRIPTION
Indian psychology students took part in an interactive workshop conducted over 2 days for about 5 hours per day and designed to highlight key concepts related to the dynamics, process, and techniques of group leadership. This workshop included the use of several alternative approaches to working with groups. Such approaches included working with group process, identifying group therapeutic factors (Yalom & Leszcz, 2005), and using a variety of verbal and nonverbal techniques...
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