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Spring Conference 2025 – IN PERSON

Notice: Booking will open early in 2025

Date: Saturday 17th May 2025 Location: Oxford Quaker Meeting House, 43 St Giles', Oxford OX1 3LW - and online
Start time: 11:30am End time: 4:30pm Type: Conference & Webinar Refreshments: tbc

Talk 1: Allan Frater:
Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life

Image: Book Cover: Waking Dreams by Allan Frater, published by TransPersonal Press, ISBN: 9781912698080

A waking dream sometimes happens upon waking from sleep when a dream continues to feel present. Waking dream practice (also known as ‘active imagination’ and ‘guided imagery’) takes advantage of the spontaneously creative and therapeutic imagination found in this borderland consciousness in-between waking and dreaming. The workshop will present critical developments in this field, drawing upon perspectives from complexity theory, fractal geometry, eco-therapy and transpersonal psychology. Key principles and the basis of a practical method will be given for an image-centric approach to psychotherapy within focused applications such as art-based techniques as well as general therapeutic work with memories and future-fantasies, present moment perceptions and the transference – whether working with individual or groups.

Talk 2: Felicia Matteo:
Active Imagination for the Modern Alchemist

There are many portals to the unconscious. With practice and persistence, we can fortify the bridge between what we know and that which lives beyond the threshold. Utilizing active imagination, art making and alchemy, we will explore and discover practices for enlivening a personal relationship with the living reality of the ego/self-axis.
Please have art material available

Speaker: Allan Frater

Allan Frater is a psychotherapist (UKCPreg), supervisor and author of ‘Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy & Everyday Life’ (Transpersonal Press, 2021). Since 2011 he has been teaching at the Psychosynthesis Trust in London. He has a research interest in the creative and healing benefits of imagination – not just as ‘pictures inside the mind’ but also within normal everyday life, work and relationships. Originally from a small village outside Edinburgh he now lives in London with his wife and a three-legged dog. https://wildimagination.uk/

Speaker: Felicia Matto-Shepard

Felicia Matto-Shepard, M.S. is a Jungian Analyst, artist and a member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco practicing in Petaluma, CA. She works at the threshold where nonverbal experience is transformed into image and language. She facilitates Alchemical Art workshops utilizing creative processes. Felicia holds a Certificate in Psychedelic Therapies and Research from California Institute of Integral Studies and is trained in the use of Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, as well as MDMA Assisted Therapy at MAPS. She is a clinician on the MAPS MDMA Expanded Access team at Temenos Center for Integrative Psychotherapy. Felicia is a past faculty member in the Depth Psychology Master’s Program at Sonoma State University and offers lectures, workshops and analytic training internationally.