Beyond Programming 101
International Center for Training and Research in Neurolinguistics and Gestalt Psychology
GRIEF, LOSS AND RENEWAL
A contemplative exploration of how loss reorganises individuals and deepens the practice of therapeutic presence.
21st & 22nd February 2026
New Delhi
A two-day exploration of how we live, love, and transform through endings. It brings together psychotherapy, philosophy, and contemplative traditions to illuminate the art of holding, healing, and rediscovering meaning; where presence becomes practice, and sorrow is met with awareness, compassion, and the quiet understanding of impermanence.
About the programme
This intensive programme invites practitioners and facilitators to engage deeply with the landscape of grief and its movement toward renewal. Drawing from psychoanalysis, Gestalt, systemic, and Buddhist lineages, the workshop integrates contemporary research with enduring understandings of loss, attachment, and transformation. Participants explore advanced frameworks like micro-phenomenology, continuing bonds, ritual design, and the neurobiology of mourning, through dialogue, supervision, and embodied exercises. Literature, myth, and spiritual traditions accompany the clinical inquiry, extending grief beyond pathology into a profound human encounter with impermanence.
Designed for those guiding others through change and transition, 'Grief, Loss and Renewal' offers an academically grounded and compassionate space to refine presence, rediscover meaning, and practise the subtle discipline of accompanying oneself and others through the unfinished conversations of love and loss.
Learning and transformations
that may unfold during this two day workshop
An exploration of how grief teaches us to perceive, to accompany, and to live with what remains.
Encounter grief as an evolving field of meaning rather than a fixed pathology
Deepen perceptual precision, the capacity to discern movement beneath narrative, affect beneath articulation.
Cultivate an embodied presence that can hold complexity, contradiction, and ambiguity without the impulse to resolve.
Integrate cross-disciplinary maps from psychoanalysis to contemplative science, into an eclectic and living praxis.
Engage in self-inquiry through your own losses as portals for reflection and ethical renewal.
Refine the language of enquiry to facilitate dialogues that restore authorship and dignity in the experience of ending.
How You Might Engage with
This Space
Participants arrive with different intentions: some to study, some to heal, and some to refine the art of accompanying others. This gathering holds space for all these movements to unfold side by side
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For Structure and Conceptual Grounding: Deepen your theoretical and systemic understanding of grief through integrated models across analytic, Gestalt, and contemplative frameworks.
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For Self-Work and Personal Reflection: Engage with your own experiences of loss as mirrors for awareness, ethical growth, and renewed capacity to stay present with pain.
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For Supervision, Inquiry, and Skill Development: Bring your clinical or facilitative questions into shared reflection to refine technique, discern stance, and develop nuanced language for complex emotional work.
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For Spiritual and Philosophical Inquiry: Explore grief through the lens of impermanence, interdependence, and meaning.
Module 1
Understanding Grief as a Living Field of Meaning, Emotion, and Human Continuity
We begin by noticing how loss first shows itself in the body, the catch in the breath, the scattered focus, the way memory skips. Participants then trace early autonomic shifts, how attachment signals flare, appetite changes, and the sleep and wake cycle slides out of tune. Next comes language. Some parts speak while others fall quiet, and images hold what words cannot yet carry. We study current accounts of oscillation between meeting the loss and restoring daily life, practices that sustain continuing connection, and methods that help meaning reorganise after bereavement. These are held as working hypotheses shaped by culture and experience, never prescriptions. Through guided micro-phenomenological inquiry, participants learn to follow sequence, sensation, and time without forcing a story to close. Short case fragments and brief measures serve as orientation, not verdict. Excerpts from field notes and literature keep us near lived experience. The aim is careful, humane literacy that recognises structure without confinement and names process without taking authorship from the client.
Module 2
Mapping Loss through Psychoanalytic, Systemic, and Contemplative Frameworks of Renewal and Integration
This module moves from description to mapping. We study loss at three scales, the intrapsychic, the relational, and the communal, and watch how meaning takes shape across them. In the consulting room we consider transferential pull after bereavement, the ways absence recruits substitute roles, and how identity reorganises when a bond continues in memory, place, and dream. In families we trace pattern shifts, who carries which task, where boundaries thin, and how loyalty or secrecy stiffens grief. Participants practise drawing simple maps that show pressure points and resources, then test small interventions that keep movement possible rather than forcing resolution.
The contemplative strand adds steadiness, with brief practices that widen attention and soften grasping at certainty. We work with ritual in modest forms suited to culture and belief, so clients can honour connection without being captured by it. Throughout, measures and case fragments are treated as guides, not verdicts. The aim is a flexible cartography that respects difference and supports renewal without erasing sorrow.
Module 3
The Practice of Holding: Presence, Empathy, and Advanced Facilitation across Stories of Ending and Becoming
The work now enters the intimacy of practice, where presence itself becomes intervention. We examine the alchemy between empathy and structure, the invisible exchanges through tone, gaze, and pacing that stabilise the field without constraining it. The inquiry deepens into what it means to accompany another’s disintegration while staying intact, to sense when contact nourishes and when it intrudes, to speak in language that does not colonise meaning. Participants engage in live supervision that studies micro-moments of rupture and repair, how coherence re-forms in the wake of misunderstanding, and how the body of the facilitator becomes a site of resonance rather than reaction. Philosophical reflections on witnessing and phenomenological writing exercises refine perception, turning observation into art. Across cultures and faiths we ask what it means to attend without rescue. The task is to practise presence that dignifies uncertainty and holds the mystery of becoming without the violence of completion.
Module-wise Syllabus
The syllabus unfolds as a layered inquiry into grief and its structures, meanings, and transformations, inviting participants to study, experience, and practise the movement from loss toward renewal with intellectual depth and human presence.
Module 4
Meaning, Myth, and the Spirit of Renewal: Literature, Philosophy, and Rituals of Human Continuance
The final movement of the programme turns to the deep reservoirs from which humanity has always drawn its strength to survive endings. Participants explore how myth, scripture, and literature hold sorrow as part of wisdom rather than as an interruption to it. Together we study how symbols and collective imagination convert rupture into renewal, how the poetic, the sacred, and the ordinary gesture of ritual keep continuity alive when reason cannot. Guided reflections and collaborative readings open the ground between philosophy and practice, where mourning becomes an act of meaning-making rather than repair. Attention is given to the ethics of ritual, to what may be borrowed and what must be born anew within one’s own culture. The module closes with integrative exercises that translate mythic patterns into contemporary facilitation. The work is to craft ceremonies of presence that allow grief to become lineage, and lineage to become responsibility.
When the Emperor’s mechanical bird breaks, he finally hears the true nightingale’s song—fragile, imperfect, alive. Andersen had written of grief long before the word became clinical. The mechanical song is control, the mind’s effort to perfect what must remain trembling. The real nightingale is awareness itself, fleeting and without guarantee. In Buddhist philosophy, this is anicca, the tenderness that arises from impermanence. In psychotherapy, it is the moment when a person stops rehearsing coherence and begins to feel the raw pulse beneath it. Renewal is not repair; it is the courage to listen again, knowing the song may end at any time.
Adapted from Andersen, 1843/1999; Hans Christian Andersen Centre, University of Southern Denmark.
Who is this for?
This programme is designed for clinicians, facilitators, scholars, and contemplative practitioners engaged with the phenomena of loss, attachment, and transformation. It invites those working at the intersection of psychotherapy, philosophy, and spiritual care to investigate grief as both intrapsychic process and existential inquiry.
Participants include therapists, supervisors, chaplains, educators, and advanced trainees seeking to refine clinical presence, deepen theoretical literacy, and cultivate an integrative approach that honours mourning as a movement of renewal within the human condition.
Certification
Pedagogy as Practice, Practice as Inquiry
Learning in this programme unfolds as a conversation between knowledge and experience, between what is known and what begins to be sensed. The pedagogy mirrors the work itself like, relational, embodied, and reflective. Theory is encountered through dialogue, supervision, and lived practice rather than through instruction. Participants move between intellectual precision and felt inquiry, observing the subtle language of grief in gesture, tone, and silence. Reading and literature provide a vocabulary of resonance, while supervision brings that language into the immediacy of the room. Small rituals, moments of stillness, and shared reflection cultivate the capacity to remain near what is unfinished. The methods draw from phenomenology, Gestalt practice, analytic supervision, and contemplative inquiry, yet remain fluid and responsive to the sensibility of those present. Each session becomes both study and presence, a disciplined exploration where knowledge is discovered rather than delivered, and learning itself becomes an act of care.
"All conditioned things are impermanent. When one sees this with true insight, one becomes weary of suffering. This is the path to purity. Those who remain watchful, who do not seek permanence in what passes, awaken to peace."
- Dhammapada
Upcoming batch in February 2026
Date: 21st and 22nd February, 2026
Time : 9am to 6:30pm(19 hours)
Location: Indian Social Institute, New Delhi
Intake: 40 participants
Eligibility: A background in counselling, psychology or any professional modality like Gestalt, Neurolinguistics, CBT, REBT, Hypnosis, etc.
Medium of Instruction: English
Age: 23 and above
Program Fees & Enrollment
The course fee for two day course on Grief, Loss and Renewal is INR 22000 (all incl.).
Early bird registration fee, INR 18000 (all incl.) check availability.
Faculty and Lineage
Anil Thomas
NLP Trainer & Gestalt Practitioner
Anil Thomas is a trainer in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a Gestalt practitioner, and a mentor with the International Journal of Neurolinguistic and Gestalt Psychology (IJNGP). His teaching and writing arise from a lineage that bridges scientific inquiry with contemplative understanding.
His foundational training was under Dr Richard (Dick) McHugh SJ, whose integration of awareness, language, and silence continues to inform Anil’s orientation to both psychotherapy and mindfulness. After McHugh’s passing, he deepened his study with a few of Dick's mentors like Judith (Judy) DeLozier, Robert Dilts, John Grinder, etc., refining his grasp of modelling, relational process, and the ethical dimension of transformation.
His orientation is also shaped by Fritz Perls’ Gestalt philosophy and its dialogue with Zen, by the contemplative work of McHugh and Father Tony de Mello, and by Jung’s study of archetype and psyche within the Mahāyāna understanding of the conditioned mind. These influences converge in Anil’s continuing work on grief, loss, and renewal, where mindfulness, empathy, and presence serve as ways of knowing, an inheritance from teachers who believed that to engage the psyche is to serve awareness itself.
Aarti Asrani
NLP Master & Gestalt Practitioner
Aarti Asrani is a therapist, coach, and facilitator whose work bridges Buddhist philosophy, Gestalt inquiry, and the science of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Her teaching and practice arise from an integration of spiritual insight and psychological depth, grounded in 28 years of Buddhist practice and shaped by 24 international certifications in mind–body healing and energy modalities.
Her formative influence comes from Dr. Daisaku Ikeda and the writings of Nichiren Daishonin, which continue to inform her understanding that awareness itself is both the path and the destination. This foundation is complemented by the transformative philosophies of Louise Hay, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, and Eckhart Tolle…..each illuminating a unique dimension of consciousness, presence, and healing. The living teachings of Abraham and Esther Hicks further deepen her inquiry into vibration, thought, and the art of deliberate creation.
For Aarti, healing is a pause…..a still moment where cognition softens and the body’s innate intelligence restores balance. Her orientation weaves awareness, energy, and body language as natural gateways through which transformation unfolds
Reading & Resources
for reflection, dialogue, and continued study
Reading in this field is a form of participation rather than preparation. These works are to be entered slowly, as one might enter a conversation that has already begun between psyche, culture, and spirit. They do not define grief; they reveal its textures through phenomenology, poetry, and contemplative reflection.
To stay with them is to watch how the mind and body learn to live with change, how memory and impermanence speak to one another. Taken together, they create a meeting ground where intellect and empathy refine each other, asking the practitioner to let understanding become a living presence and study itself a quiet act of care.
The literature that sustains this work spans 'psychology, myth, and contemplative philosophy'. Each text opens a different window into the language of grief, the practice of holding, and the renewal that follows loss. Participants are encouraged to read slowly and relationally, allowing the text to accompany their inquiry rather than instruct it.
Meaning Reconstruction and the experience of loss
Neimeyer, R. A
A foundational work on how meaning, identity, and narrative reorganise after bereavement.
Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
Kristeva J.
A poetic and psychoanalytic meditation on mourning, creativity, and the feminine dimension of loss.
The Tibetan book of the dead
Evans-Wentz
A sacred manual on transition, impermanence, and the continuity of consciousness through death and change.
Second Firsts: Live, Laugh & Love Again
Rasmussen, C.
A practitioner-oriented book grounded in grief theory and neuroplasticity, focusing on identity after loss and the possibility of renewal.
Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy
Wordon J. W.
A gold-standard practitioner text offering theory, case studies, updated DSM-5 implications and intervention models for bereavement.
Principles & Practices of Grief Counseling
Harris D. L. and Winokuer H. R.
Combines research, lifespan developmental grief perspectives, diversity issues, and applied techniques for complex and non-death losses.
The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment
Winnicott D. W.
Introduces the clinical and existential importance of holding as a condition for re-emergence.
The wild edge of sorrow: Ritual of Renewal and the Sacred work of Grief
Weller, F.
This text explores grief as sacred initiation, emphasising ritual and community in the healing of loss.
Each of these works has been chosen not only for its intellectual authority but for its capacity to move the practitioner inward. Together, they form a curriculum of presence: a conversation between psychology, philosophy, and the spirit that endures loss without seeking to master it.
Cancellation / Refund Policy
Grief, Loss and Renewal
1. The early bird discounted fee is Rs. 18,000
2. No refunds against cancellation will be processed 15 days before the course date
Before 21st January
Full refund
Between 21st January - 5th February
50% refund
After 5th Februrary
No refund
Kindly review the course before enrolling
*Only applicable in-case of full fee payment
Frequently asked questions
