Find a Focusing Professional - Annette Dubreuil

Annette Dubreuil is a Focusing Teacher (Coordinator and Certified Focusing Professional) and environmentalist living in Toronto, Canada. She teaches pausing and embodiment practices to catalyze the inner transformation needed for creativity and sustainable change—for communities, organizations, and the planet at large.

With organizations she uses a host of embodied creativity facilitation tools, including Theory U/Social Presencing Theatre, Dynamic Facilitation, and Open Space Technology.

She also teaches Focusing to individuals, one-on-one and in groups, as well as to trainees to become certified. She also uses Focusing specifically with the climate crisis, from processing climate emotions, to finding what is ours to do in the crisis, to creating the space to take that action.

Annette has created a few things by crossing existing work:

• Felt sense body cards to record sessions, including resourcing experiences we'd like to return to, or as a tool to help explicate our parts so we can gain clarity about how they interact and also notice and be with them more skillfully when activated.

• The PUPA process (crossing Focusing/Gendlin's Open Cycle with Otto Scharmer's Theory U and Richard Schwartz's 8Cs of Self-leadership), which ended forming the main framework for my certification program, as well as a framework to catalyze carrying forward by bringing helpful energy in our Focusing attitude. PUPA includes an emphasis on finding what is ours to do in the world (using TAE), and working through the barriers to get into action to effect change in the external world thanks to our inner transformation work with Focusing.

• Our Empathy Circles Focusing on a Topic, that builds on the work of Interactive Focusing, and Theory U practices, to share deeply in a group such that we find our common humanity. As Jacqueline Woodson so beautifully says: "The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn’t resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates." Thanks to Lynn Preston for also having me at Help for Helpers to do a climate change one.

Her previous work was communications for sustainability and climate change research projects, most recently as communications director at Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission.

Annette has completed the Presencing Foundation Program in Theory U at MIT. She has an MBA in sustainability and non-profits from the Schulich School of Business, and an undergraduate degree in environmental science from the University of Waterloo.