Focusing Level 1: An Introduction to Focusing

• Creating a space within that welcomes a fresh ‘felt sense’.
• Exploring ways our body might communicate with us through our senses.
• Forming relationships with what comes up.
• Staying in relationship, even when things are tricky.
• Negotiating boundaries within ourselves by getting the ‘right distance’.
• Noticing that things change without effort.
• Being able to check what fits and doesn’t.
• Being with one body sense as you’re sensing something new arising.
• Enjoying positive feelings.

Our work will be safely held in the class by a common understanding of respect for each others process and the unknowable intricacies of our own process. 

Each session will have question periods, group exercises and paired exercises as well as demonstrations and information. There will be an optional reading list for people who have time and want to progress to the Level 2 class. There will be updates as to when this will be offered as our community grows.

It is important to be able to commit to at least 6 of the 8 evening events and to make time for a 45 – 60 minutes call with a focusing partner between each class.

You do not need to be a therapist to benefit from this training, in our paired expertise one person will focus while the other listens, feeling into their felt sense, holding the space with curiosity and presence and simply offering reminders or reflections to keep the focuser company.  It is a time to enjoy being aware of the relational field with no hurry to ‘fix’ or change anything.

People who work in therapeutic or caring roles can expect this experience to help them hold space for those they work with while learning to be with the focuser in a way which is very different than mainstream talk-therapy and counselling roles. Here we trust the inner wisdom of the body to emerge in spontaneous ways which are much more profound and helpful than our thinking mind could devise. Prepare to be challenged and intrigued. For people continuing to Level 2 and beyond the links with Internal Family Systems, Emotion Focused Therapy, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and others will become evident, while non-therapists may see relationships between Focusing and ecopsychology, energy, bodywork, spirituality and intergenerational work. On one session we will reflect on a video of Shirley Turcotte a Canadian First Nations instructor and clinical supervisor who championed aboriginal/indigenous Focusing which is very pertinent to our context in Aotearoa.