WELCOME TO THE BARRAL INSTITUTE OF NEW ZEALAND

I am pleased to welcome you to The Barral Institute of New Zealand’s new website, and to my first blog as the new incoming co-ordinator for New Zealand. It is a privilege to be part of this wonderful community of therapists, which I hope together, we can grow significantly in the coming years.

Firstly, I would like to thank Xanthe Ashton who is my predecessor in the role. Xanthe has put so much hard work into introducing the Barral curriculum to New Zealand, and facilitating its growth and development. She will now focus on growing and supporting the Upledger Institute of New Zealand’s curriculum and working as a CranioSacral Therapy instructor and mentor. I wish her well in all her future endeavours. When I first introduced Visceral Manipulation into my practice back in 2008, Xanthe and I were among the first therapists practicing Jean-Pierre Barral’s incredible work in New Zealand.

At the start, I was driven purely by my desire for knowledge, and to utilise this to help my patients. I later became a Teacher Assistant at every class that came to Australia and New Zealand, which led to me becoming the first Australasian teacher. Through my teaching work I’ve been able to reach out to more and more therapists, which ultimately means more patients benefiting from this life-changing practice.

These results have been a key driver for me taking on this role with The Barral Institute of New Zealand – to spread the word about Visceral Manipulation and to continue to help grow and build a supportive, co-operative community of practitioners in this country.

To me, Jean-Pierre is brilliant in his approach to the body and his understanding of anatomy. He remains a practitioner at heart, but has shared his clinical work with therapists worldwide. For this, I am incredibly grateful, as there are many days in my clinic when I think that I would never have been able to help certain patients if it wasn’t for Barral’s work.

We have some exciting classes coming up in 2019 and 2020, starting with VM1 in Auckland from 7–10 February. You can find more details about the class HERE. As those of you who have attended VM courses before will know, it is recommended that therapists take the same classes more than once, in order to absorb the information taught and practice the techniques you will learn.

Did you know there are actually Four Stages of Learning for any new skill, according to a theory developed at Gordon Training International in the 1970's?

These are:

Unconscious Incompetence– where we ‘don’t know what we don’t know’, and are unconscious of our incompetence;

Conscious Incompetence– where we recognise the deficit as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit;

Conscious Competence– where we have been practicing what we’ve learned and understand how to do something, however demonstrating it requires concentration;

Unconscious Competence– where we have had so much practice with a skill that it has become ‘second nature’ and can be performed easily.

The fastest way to reach the Unconscious Competence state when it comes to Visceral Manipulation is to repeat the seminars, participate in Study Groups, and work towards becoming a Teaching Assistant at the seminars.

For those of you who have already completed a VM1 class, we are pleased to advise we have restructured our pricing to offer a Discounted Repeat Rate for subsequent classes. We have also maintained the Early Bird Rates for any therapists booking early so don’t delay. This course won’t be back in Auckland for a year, so we would love you to spread the word and inspire your colleagues to join us!

We are so excited to announce we will be holding the first ever VM5 (Manual Thermal Evaluation and Introduction to VisceroEmotional) class in New Zealand in November 2019, along with VM3 (the Pelvis). VM1 and VM2 classes will be held in Christchurch in June. We will also be starting the NM curriculum again in March 2020, with NM1 and NM2 classes on offer. More information will follow in subsequent newsletters.

I look forward to connecting with many of you at upcoming courses, and wish you all a very Merry Christmas and safe and happy festive season.

Rosie Greene