A DAY OF RELATING

The FOCUSING-ORIENTED RELATIONAL COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT (FORCE) PROJECT*

Welcomes you to participate in

A DAY OF RELATING

with Lynn Preston and the Community Empowerment Group

“Here is a new message: Those ['fitting in’ and ‘pouring out’] are not the only alternatives! We do not need to pour ourselves out raw and blind, or go back to fitting in. There is a third alternative, a different way forward, a further stage.”

-Eugene Gendlin from “Fitting In, Pouring Out and Relating”

Relating is what we are, not only something we do. Like breathing, we can take the uniqueness and intricacy of our own particular ways of relating for granted. Sometimes we are filled with the richness and vitality of our interactions; other times we feel tortured by the agonies of our relational struggles.

Gendlin’s work has given us three practices: FOCUSING, a way of finding our embodied experience; LISTENING, responding to the felt experience of the other; RELATING, a new way of interacting in the world and in our lives. What is this “further stage” of relating that Gendlin is pointing to? What does it look like in living conversation? Now more than ever, in these polarized and uncertain times, this third practice of relating is urgently needed.

We will:

• Begin by Focusing, asking inside about our own relational journey (the unique way of interacting that is the fingerprint of our particular relational way).
• Build both group awareness and self awareness, step-by-step, through discussion as well as practice and processing in dyads, small groups and our large group.
• Co-create an atmosphere of openness, curiosity and spontaneity.
• Develop skills to help us have genuine conversation across difference by speaking UP, speaking FROM the felt sense, speaking TO and WITH the others, not AT them.

This workshop will be helpful for therapists of all kinds, group leaders, teachers, coaches and for all who want to relate more fully in their own personal lives.

*FORCE (The Focusing-Oriented Relational Community Empowerment Project) is a grassroots approach to developing models and skills for Focusing-oriented relating. We have been exploring, practicing and developing guidelines and principles for authentic, wholehearted interaction for over eight years.