Pickle Your Feelings: A Guided Pickling and Feeling Group for Therapists

Come together to make something, feel something, share something, and learn something!

Join Emma from A Crowded Table for an afternoon of guided mindful making, therapeutic metaphor for self-reflection, and discussion. Emma will guide us through the process of chopping, seasoning, and canning pickles and facilitate a discussion about making and gathering. All activities will be guided by attendees’ needs and preferences. Participants will decide the vegetables and flavors for their pickles that they take home to savor and share!

The workshop will include the following activities:

⭒ Decolonized mindfulness overview with meditation

⭒ Prompts to invite awareness of physical and emotional experiences

⭒ Guided hot canning pickling experience

⭒ Experiential metaphor overview and personalization

⭒ Dynamic discussion shaped by attendees’ needs and experiences

⭒ Closing process to encourage reflection of concepts, experience, and learning

You will leave the group with:

⭒ A jar of shelf-stable pickles

⭒ Mindful awareness of yourself practicing creativity and connection in community

⭒ A collective feeling experience

⭒ Resources for further mindfulness learning and practice, including the recipe, themes of the metaphor, and reflective prompts

Please note:

⭒ We will be working with wet ingredients, so wear clothes that you are comfortable making a mess in. You are welcome to bring an apron!

⭒ Participants are encouraged to bring a mason jar with a lid to transport their creation. Canning jars will be provided.

⭒ All activities can be done sitting or standing. All accommodation requests will be discussed with the host.

⭒ Masking will be optional, and we ask that participants experiencing symptoms or who have been exposed to someone with symptoms let the host know prior to the event. You may be asked to stay home or wear a mask. Please reach out with any needs related to masking and COVID policy.

Workshop Objectives:

• Enhance awareness of self and community through experiential practice and mindfulness.
• Engage in a creative making process and personalize experiential learning.
• Integrate awareness into personal, community, and therapy care practices.

About the Speaker:

Emma Weinstein, LCSW (they/them) is a white, queer, Jewish therapist, experienced group facilitator, and avid home cook. Emma completed a clinical social work degree and fellowship at the University of Chicago and has practiced in a variety of mental health care roles for over a decade. Emma offers a narrative, relational style to support people in accessing, understanding, and sharing themselves. They received training to incorporate creative, person-centered applications of narrative therapy and Internal Family Systems Therapy for people with historically oppressed aspects of their identities. Emma enjoys supporting the needs of LGBTQIA+ people, therapists, educators, and artists and maintains an active commitment to anti-oppressive and decolonized therapy practices through relationships, training experiences, community organizing, and art making.

Inspired by their experiential cooking practice, Emma founded A Crowded Table in 2022 to create spaces for people to gently connect with themselves and others through food, meal making, and gathering. Emma hopes to provide a space for support to experience and expand this physically and emotionally nourishing, historically human practice in our lives. Emma feels most connected around a crowded table and is eager to meet you there.

Social media:

acrowdedtable.substack.com

https://www.instagram.com/acrowdedtable_/

acrowdedtable.net