Being Focusing Together

Being Focusing Together:

Listening and Being Heard in a Larger Group

Six Sessions over 12 months
Beginning - September 16, 2026
2:00pm - 4:00pm New York Time

Times worldwide: convert to your time zone

Free for members.
Online / Live attendance required - no recording

Reflecting on our felt experience of being a member of a larger group, without losing ourselves...

We are continuing with another six sessions to explore our new sense of  "Being Together" and "Being Focusing" this September. This series will build on last year's sessions while always open to new members at any time. Last year we began exploring together a new kind of group culture meeting both purposely and spontaneously, balancing our emerging felt sensing with remaining as relationally open to each other as we can. It is not a therapy group, nor a teaching space or simply a place to have a chat, or even a group where we focus on group dynamics,  but a laboratory for our experience of Being Together in a Focusing way (whatever that might mean to you in the moment). Based on A Process Model, we are here in our animal bodies, with our language and habitual individual and social patterns and from here we can feel into the implicit edge of our Becoming/Carrying Forward. You do not need to have read Gendlin's philosophy to participate as we are staying experiential but a knowledge of it will be helpful for understanding and explicating the process. If you feel interested you have what it takes to join! 

And we will continuing to use the steps identified in Gendlin's more accessible paper, pdf link:  "Fitting In and Pouring Out, and Relating" to organize our thoughts and experiences. 

Loosely we hold these assumptions, 

• Our struggle to speak in large focusing spaces is inevitable, and need not be surprising nor disappointing.  He anticipates that we are so hungry to be listened to, that we fill up the space with heartfelt words, only to find that our listener cannot understand it all.
• Our bodies sense that if we can't "pour out" all our feelings, it means we aren't welcome at all.
• We get stuck between having to choose between "pouring out" all of ourselves (and still not being heard) or giving up on being listened to and "fitting in," to the group, giving up on our hope of sharing ourselves (which can feel extra painful in Focusing spaces).
• The new invitation is to notice how far we've already traveled in our Focusing practice and ask ourselves if we are "strong enough to go further"?  Can we find a more relational way?

As we bring Focusing into culture our individual habits are interrupted and it can feel restrictive or unsettling, yet we are continually challenged to remain as experiencing participants, we realise what might help us to stay with this process and go further, here it is essential to pause, to keep noticing, to make our own decisions on what we are ready to share for the group and those to note for our own process, to differentiate those body-feelings which are habitual, quickly-formed and based on our past experiences from the slower, felt-sensing in which we hold our awareness and curiosity about the more... Utilising the slowing down, pausing and Focusing we established in our dyad practice learning Focusing to the larger group, with challenges and fresh, emergent possibilities.

Here is a link to the article I wrote about our experiences last year: https://focusing.org/news-feed/being-focusing-together-and-finding-real-wanting

Other than membership in The International Focusing Institute (TIFI), the only prerequisites are: an ability to follow your felt sense and an interest in trying on a new perspective.  You can attend any number of sessions.

For each session a new email announcement will be sent and you need to register freshly each time.

Online / Live attendance required - no recording

6 sessions
September 16, 2026 - 2-4pm NY Time

November 4, 2026 - 2-4pm NY Time

January 20, 2027 - 2-4pm NY Time

March 10, 2027 - 2-4pm NY Time

May 5, 2027 - 2-4pm NY Time

July 7, 2027 - 2-4pm NY Time

Please note: After the July 7 meeting there will be a break for the summer. Sessions will resume in the fall of 2027 at 2pm NY Time (the same time). We will share specific dates in the future. 

Rachel Hendron
Rachel is a Therapist, Supervisor and Trainer Certified by TIFI, Accredited by BACP (UK), she helped to organise the most recent TIFI conference for Focusing Therapists and is studying Gendlin’s Philosophy of the Implicit with Rob Parker. She trained with Charlotte Howorth and has been following Lynn Preston’s work with groups for the last few years. She is interested building a new culture of Focusing-oriented togetherness.

You can join TIFI here