Holding Space for the Climate Crisis and other Existential Emotions with Focusing

Many of us are struggling. Feelings of anxiety, dread, and even helplessness are at an all-time high. Fire season, catastrophic storms, and the loss of plant and animal species are the new normal. Everywhere we look things seem off the rails. We can no longer escape the impacts of a world in distress and all the intersecting issues of the larger polycrisis.

When it comes to climate change, how can we possibly respond any other way than shutting down. We are both experiencing disasters today and living with the uncertainty or dread about catastrophes to come?

Research corroborates what many cultures have known since time immemorial. In times of crisis, we need practices that move our grief and fear and bring us into connection. It’s only through connection to our bodily wisdom that fosters the clarity to know how best to be of service.

These innate and indigenous practices are largely missing in popular culture – outsourced instead to an overreliance on cognitive reasoning and tools of distraction and dissociation.

Harnessing Gendlin’s embodied Focusing Process, this 8-week course creates a communal gathering place for professionals to learn to hold space for the complex interplay of climate emotions in their work and simultaneously, to also show up as individuals.

Combining current neuroscience, trauma praxis, and embodied practices we will develop an understanding of our patterned threat responses and explore new ways of showing up in the world with the power of our embodied intuition, and a fresh sense of connection to the cosmos and our community.

This course is polyvagal-informed and integrates Jan Winhall's Felt Sense Polyvagal Model™ and elements of Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing approach. Ancient wisdom practices and current neuroscience findings are woven throughout.

Focusing is an evidence-based, somatic, or embodied mindfulness practice that deepens our connection to our inner knowing which Gendlin termed the “felt sense.” Connecting with our felt sense in a Focusing way is one of the most powerful ways of changing how we experience the world. It is most powerfully practiced in partnership; this can be between peers, in groups like this one, or by being included in professional listening/space holding.

Course outcomes

Each session includes an embodied practice, experiential learning, and opportunities for sharing. There will also be optional peer dyads (Focusing partnerships, see below) and readings to supplement your learning between classes. 

Throughout this course you will have the opportunity to:

• Understand habituated stress responses and survival patterns in yourself and others
• Build your own resilience through somatic practices
• Experience a deeper connection to community care
• Enhance your intuition or inner knowing of how to best be of service
• Honour and explore grief in ways that shift us out of shut down or isolation
• Unpack climate psychology to help place ourselves in this particular moment

Who is this for:

This course welcomes diverse identities and backgrounds. We welcome professionals who hold space for climate emotions (mental health professionals, therapists, coaches, climate cafe facilitators), as well as those working on climate issues or in adjacent fields including, education, community organizing, and journalism. We welcome people who have been in this area for years or those just beginning to feel the magnitude of this existential threat.

This course is not appropriate for anyone experiencing an acute psychological crisis.

Timing and other details

Next Groups:

• Mondays, 1-3 pm Eastern, May 12th-June 30th, 2025 (see your local time)

Group size: For the sake of community building and intimacy each group has a cap of 16 participants.

Fees: $799 US/$799CAD
Canadians can use this discount code to access the course at par: CLIMATECAD

Course location: Zoom

Course teachers: Annette Dubreuil (Certifying Coordinator in Focusing and MBA), Jenn Wesanko (Climate Change Communicator, Somatic Psychotherapist, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and Focusing Trainer)

Scholarships: Two needs-based scholarships are available. Please email us to enquire.

Focusing partnerships: involves meeting between classes to practice, in an exchange of Focusing and listening. You can also opt to be assessed for the Proficiency in Focusing Partnership Award provided through The International Focusing Institute (TIFI) in the final few weeks of the course (fees through TIFI apply: you must be a member and there is a processing fee).

Teacher Bios

Jenn Wesanko is a leader in communications and psychology working at the forefront of the climate and broader environmental crisis. She is a certified Focusing Trainer offering personal and group training, Focusing-Oriented therapist, and Somatic Experiencing practitioner. Informed by decades of climate and social change work, somatics, and scholarship in psychology and communication, Jenn holds multiple roles as a communications expert, psychotherapist, group facilitator, organizational advisor, and educator. Jenn’s understanding of climate change, biodiversity loss, and a changing social landscape includes advising federal cabinet ministers on policy, and communications, collaborating with Indigenous leaders and communities in support of Nationhood and land protection, and, more recently, facilitating community healing circles following catastrophic wildfires. Jenn also facilitates group workshops and trainings with organizations working on climate and nature-related issues. Her clients include the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Indigenous Leadership Initiative, and the Smart Prosperity Institute, among many others. She is co-founder of a land based initiative, Ocean Ambassador’s Canada that connects young people with the ocean. Committed to helping others see themselves in the world more clearly, Jenn aims to help people find and revive practices that bring us into connection so we can engage in the world with clarity and heart.

Annette Dubreuil is an Embodied Creativity Facilitator, Coach and Focusing Teacher at PUPA. She teaches individuals and groups, including future Focusing Teachers through her two-year program as a Certifying Coordinator with The International Focusing Institute. Annette trains her students and clients to strengthen their access to their intuition—especially the intuitive knowing that whispers to us in our bodies—before the sensations become emotions, images, concepts, words; in short creativity. Annette uses different tools to access this inner knowing, most notably Focusing. Through Focusing, we can also access our inner resources, to gain the confidence and courage to act on our new ideas. Her clients include academic research projects environmental not-for-profit organizations. Annette developed the PUPA process, a crossing of Gendlin’s Focusing and MIT’s Theory U to help support her students and clients as they undertake transformative change. Annette is especially passionate about working with people who want to transform themselves to change the world—to make it more sustainable and equitable. She has a special interest in climate change, and hosts Climate Circles that enable climate action. Annette has an undergraduate degree in environmental science from the University of Waterloo and a MBA in sustainability from the Schulich School of Business. Her previous work was dedicated to sustainability and climate change research, most recently as communications director at Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission. She enjoys gardening, rock climbing, cycling, and cooking.