Sydney Focusing Changes Group in person, Saturday 20 April 2024, 9:45am - 12 noon AEST

If you're in Sydney, or close by, we'd love to see you in person in the hall below St Patrick's Catholic Church, 20 Grosvenor St, The Rocks. 

We meet from 9:45am to 12 noon, and as usual, we will spend some time together at the start, with an attunement and some discussion, then break up into pairs for our Focusing sessions, and then return to share and debrief.

I've had a request to repeat an exercise we've done before, clearing a space with drawing. Let me tell you a little bit about it.

Way back at the start, when Gene Gendlin first began teaching Focusing, he had six steps. The first step was clearing a space. That meant mentally naming all the problems in your life that were occupying your mind at the time, both large and small, and stacking them on the table in front of you, until you could say, “Yes, apart from them, I’m fine.”

You would then sense which problem was calling to you most strongly, and focus on it.

Other teachers took Clearing A Space and developed it as a whole technique in itself. There are wonderful articles about how useful it is for college students – to clear their mind at the start of a class, or cancer patients – to manage all their concerns.

Jenna Chevalier, among others, has taken Clearing A Space a step further by combining drawing with it. She invites us to sense into each item that comes into our awareness, then sense into the best way to represent it on paper - whether by a sketch, or a word, or a symbol, or something else.

I'll have paper and drawing materials with me, and if enough people are interested, we can do it; and if not, we won't, and that will be fine. In either case, we'll still have time for our Focusing sessions.

Please email both Sue and myself if you would like to attend, so we can be on the lookout for you.

And you're very welcome to join us for lunch afterwards.

Focusers of all levels of experience are welcome at a Changes Group, and there is no charge to attend.