Oceania Focusing Roundtable - Felt Sensing and Creativity

Saturday, 12th October 2024 - 10:00 am - 12:00 pm AEST (Sydney - Australia)

Saturday, 12th October, 2024 - 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm NZDT (New Zealand)

Saturday, 12th October, 2024 - 7:00 am - 9:00 am AWST (Perth, Western Australia)

Friday, October 11, 2024 - 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm EST (New York - US)

Times worldwide: convert to your time zone

Gendlin emphasised the importance of felt sensing skills for creative work in many places, including discussions of writing poetry, modern dance and acting. In the arts, people commonly rely on felt sensing, while describing felt sensing in different language, and perhaps not being able to do much more than point, rather inarticulately, towards it.

For Focusing practitioners, our experience with sustained, deliberate felt sensing gives us a strong platform for contributing creatively to activities of many kinds - professional and personal problem solving, design, art and craft practices, etc. In this Roundtable we will share our experiences with, and explore our questions about, using felt sensing to help us work more creatively.

Greg will share his experiences of using felt sensing to work creatively in professional practice (especially environmental management) and in helping students to develop their skills in this area, and also in the flow of everyday life. Nicole will discuss her current research on felt sensing and creativity in decision-making processes. Unlike traditional analytical strategies that weigh pros and cons, felt sensing broadens awareness to include the unexpected, the overlooked, and, especially, the new.

Who might be particularly interested in attending this Roundtable?  Anyone who is curious about how Focusing, and felt sensing in all its forms, can help us with being creative - in the arts, in professional life, in family life, etc., and who think they might enjoy conversations about this.

CONNECTION>CONVERSATION>COMMUNITY

What to expect from Focusing Roundtables: 

We warmly encourage you to register and settle down with us to join other Oceania Focusers passionate to explore topics of interest and get to know each other better. If you have an area of interest, curiosity or passion you would like to see opened up in a future Roundtable, please let us know.

Each Focusing Roundtable is designed to promote informal peer-to-peer conversation. Rather than acting as expert presenters, the Hosts will serve as conversation moderators to encourage sharing and exploration of the topics from the participants’ own perspectives.  All participants’ sharings are welcome and valuable, no matter what level of experience or knowledge you have on the topic.

To preserve the nature of informal conversation, the program will be offered live only and no recordings will be available. Participants are encouraged to create follow up opportunities for connection among themselves after the Roundtable.

The TIFI Membership Committee is pleased to offer this series of Focusing Roundtables designed especially for members of the Institute. Roundtables will afford members a valuable opportunity to engage in casual peer-to-peer conversation with other members who share Focusing-related interests.  If you are not a member, please join at http://www.focusing.org/membership, then return to this page to register.

About your hosts:

Greg Walkerden PhD is a researcher who designs practices in environmental management and planning, and felt-sense centred reflective practice. He has been a Focusing practitioner for over 35 years, is a Certified Focusing Professional and Teacher, and taught felt sense based decision making at Macquarie University in Sydney for about 15 years. His most recent writing, which is about helping students develop professionally - including as creative thinkers - by expanding their felt sensing skills, is here: Practicing embodied thinking in research and learning. (He also relaxes into felt sensing in flute improv, digital arts and crafts, cooking and more - all playfully unprofessionally!)

Nicole Yeung PhD is researching the relationship between Focusing practices and intuitive decision-making. She designs Focusing-oriented workshops to assist SME entrepreneurs in developing non-linear, holistic understandings of situations. In addition to being an entrepreneur for over two decades, she is also a certified Focusing practitioner working with both private and corporate clients.