PCE Conference in Buenos Aires

-->

Entry for 24 July 2013:

Wonderful PCE conference in Buenos Aires!  I was overwhelmed by friendliness and care of our Argentine hosts. The weather turned cold (3C this morning), but that did not take away from the warmth of our Latin American colleagues.  High points:

• Unstructured large group (150 - 200 people) that inevitably ended up focusing on intercultural issues, some tragic, like the Malvinas-Falkland War and the Fukushima accident, other charming like the young American grad student who said she was going to tell her father how nice all the people she met were.

• The charming conference site (a private primary school with small desks that made me feel like I was 10 again).

• Keynote talks by the likes of Charlie O'Leary (who charmed everyone's socks off) and Shoji Murayama (who reviewed 50 years of building a person-centred community near Kyoto).

• A varied and interesting program that included sessions by Margaret Warner's session on fragile process and fragile relationships (including a very personal and moving account of her own journey) and Sylvia Lombardi's very helpful sessions on doing PCE therapy via Skype (just to pick two idiosyncratic choices)

• Oh, and my two presentations went very well, also:  The Counselling for Depression Workshop was popular enough that many people were very disappointed when they had to be turned away (they asked me to repeat the session on Thursday morning but unfortunately I had to miss the final half day of the conference), while the session on the Personal Questionnaire content analysis study was also well attended and successful, in spite of research not really being the South American PCE therapists’ thing.

I’ve heard many wonderful stories over the past few days, and hope I will be able to remember some of them, because many were very much worth retelling.  The sequential translation in large group and break out sessions provided me with a Spanish crash course, so that by the end of the conference both my receptive and expressive Spanish had greatly improved.  This should be very helpful as we move on to Ecuador today for several days of EFT training in Quito.  I’m looking forward to coming back to South America again before too many more years have passed.