"It Takes a Village..." Creating Connections - Online Children & Focusing Conference

PAST EVENT - OPEN FOR POST REGISTRATION

Recordings will remain available through August 31, 2022

March 25 - 27, 2022
10:00 - 22:00 CET
(5:00 am - 5pm Eastern (NY) time)
Your start time here

La traducción al español estará disponible en la mayoría de talleres y presentaciones.
Para leer la página de este evento en español, use el traductor de Google en la barra superior.

THE PLANNING COMMITTEE

Laura Bavalics

Joke Van Hoeck

René Veugelers

We invite you to feel, to explore, to share, to deepen your Focusing wisdom and experiences! Our goal is to highlight the diversity and creativity in our Children's Focusing Community, by exploring the many ways we can support children and each other through Focusing and connections.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This conference is designed for anyone interested in learning these unique Children Focusing skills! Also for professionals workingwith children and young people of all ages-from toddlers to teenagers! And of course open to parents, grandparents, caregivers, and to anyone interested in learning more about how Children & Focusing cross.  Most importantly it’s available for YOU!

Presentations and Workshops

Laura Bavalics -  Everybody's Welcome - Inclusion and Focusing - Presentation

"How can we be so different and feel so much alike? And how can we feel so different and be so much alike?" J. Cannon

During the presentation, we'll explore ways to create an inclusive environment for children in the classroom through listening, storytelling, and story acting. Experience how the inner stories can unfold using the shadow theatre technique.

-Colorful class - children with special needs
-Listening and inner stories as a common language

-Including parents and caregivers in the process

Laura Bavalics is an early childhood educator, play mentor, and drama teacher. She is a Certified Focusing Professional and a Focusing-oriented educator, who has been working with young children, parents, and   professionals for over twenty-five years. She is a professional director of the Pendula inclusive kindergarten program for children in foster care and with special needs at the Világszép Foundation in Hungary. She   is also teaching at ELTE University, Hungary, in their College of Education. Laura is a member of the International Leadership Council and the Children's Focusing Advisory Board.

Anna Boukydis - Growing Up With Focusing: A Child’s Perspective - Presentation 

In a conference where so many amazing new ideas are shared about Children & Focusing, this presentation aims to bring in a different perspective: that of a seventeen-year-old who grew up with Focusing as a daily part of her life.

In my presentation, I will share the way I see Focusing, not having formally learned it, rather acquired it from my parents during my childhood. As well as the many ways it has added to my life and way of thinking.

And while every child’s journey with Focusing is undoubtedly different, I hope my own story can act as some kind of reassurance or example, of how Focusing with children can manifest itself long-term.

Anna Boukydis is currently in her third year of high school. She volunteers at Hungary’s leading child rights foundation, Hintalovon and works on projects with professionals advocating for human rights. Focusing has been a part of her life since she can remember, as her parents are Focusers. She attended her first Children Focusing Conference when she was ten and is excited to return this year as a presenter, sharing a child’s perspective of growing up with Focusing.

Sara Bradly -  The Feelings Room -  A Way to Help Children Express a Felt Sense - Workshop

This workshop will introduce the ‘feelings room exercise’- an exercise designed to creatively enable children to connect with their feelings inside their body. The feelings room exercise can   be used with art materials, or in conjunction with a body map to facilitate a complete Focusing process.

Sara Bradly, MA is a Focusing Trainer, Children’s Focusing Trainer, FOT and CiT who works therapeutically with children and adults at her private Counselling Centre in the UK [www.inner-   focus.co.uk]. She completed her MA at the University of East Anglia with a study on Focusing with Children in School in which she designed and implemented the feelings room exercise.

 

Sandy Jahmi Burg & Inge S. Terrill - Play for Time, a Role Play Inviting Procrastination - Workshop

Help us create a playful and realistic scene for an upcoming story in Smartview Stories books, which teach the language of Focusing. 11yr old Stryder procrastinates in a way that is hurting the family home dynamic. This

annoys 8yr old Wendy. The whole family is skilled at Focusing. How might this story play out?

Our time together will be a mix of story-telling, self-reflection, and felt sense crossings with brief role play demos. We’ll be crossing our own felt sense of ‘procrastination’, role playing one of the story characters, to co-create a potential scene we act out.

Sandy Jahmi Burg – Sandy lives a delicious rural life with her husband Bob in the farming/arts/music tourist town of Floyd, Virginia, USA. She is a Focusing Coordinator-in-Training, teaches via zoom, and is author of the Smartview Stories Book Series.

Inge S. Terrill - Inge is an Environmental Educator who lives on a small farm in Southwest Virginia, USA. She came to Focusing in the Spring of 2015 and is now a Focusing Trainer-in-Training and co-creator of the Smartview Stories Book Series.

 

Joe Colletti - Strategies and Challenges for the Implementation of Focusing in a School System - Presentation

This presentation will address the dynamics of implementing Focusing within a school system.  It will begin with a review and discussion of a high level strategic flow. Next, there will be a detailed exploration of each of the high level strategic components. The presentation will end with the utilization of individual templates for the assessment of the program participant’s implementation status. 

 

Joe Colletti  M.Ed., M.Div., S.T.M., CFT   has been Focusing for more than 12 years and been certified as a Focusing Trainer since 2013. Over the years, he has been an advocate for Children’s Focusing in educational settings and developed and maintains the website: www.focusingwithchildren.com which is a resource for teachers and educators.  He is also assists in the design and maintenance of https://www.childrenfocusing.org. Joe is also actively involved the BioSpiritual Institute’s Focusing education programs design and delivery and serves on its Board of Directors as well as being the webmaster for its websites: www.biospiritual.org  and www.bsfcompanioning.com.

 

Jeannette Daily - Listening Presence…a guide for children, parents and grandparents – Presentation

This presentation will assist PARENTS, AND GRANDPARENTS and TEACHERS to learn how to LISTEN gently to their BODY WITHIN and how they can use this same process with the CHILDREN in their care.

The participants will learn how to guide those in their care to “BE WITH” this place within by CLEARING A SPACE to a gentle, quiet place, that I sometimes call the EMPTY SPACE!

Jeannette Daily, ssj  is a Sister of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia with a Masters in Education from Fordham University, USA, a Teacher and Administrator for over 50 years, a Certified Focusing Professional, and has studied Biospiritual Focusing with an emphasis on helping children, parents, grandparents and teachers in a LISTENING PRESENCE way!

 

Barbara Dickinson - The L.A.C.E. Project – Listening,  Attention, Compassion and Empathy - Bringing Focusing to Social and Emotional Learning Curricula - Presentation

Project Director Barbara Dickinson met Dr. Eugene Gendlin in 2010 and worked with him to develop the presentation of several of his leading-edge ideas.

In his last years, Dr. Gendlin keenly desired to reach educators on a national scale to explain how Focusing could help them. Sadly, he died before he realized his dream. Now Barbara is undertaking to make his dream about social and emotional literacy a reality.

This Project is his legacy, bringing Focusing skills into existing Social and Emotional Learning Programs to provide the missing links to attentiveness, compassion, and empathy.

Barbara Dickinson - After a long career in the U.S. Federal Reserve, Barbara now enjoys a varied career as a consultant to non-profit organizations, a career coach, a writer/blogger, and most recently, Director of the L.A.C.E. Project. Having raised two sons, she lives quietly in New Jersey with a menagerie of the dearest creatures - her rescue dog Scout, and cats Jasmine and Zen.

Tracey Gramm -  Clearing a space with expressive arts: An experiential workshop on finding emotional clarity for kids – Workshop

A workshop that begins with an introduction through an expressive arts warm up with movement. Focus will be on opening up to emotions through various art modalities, as well as the exploration of a “clearing space” art exercise for children.

Tracey Gramm is a Registered Therapeutic Counsellor, Certified Focusing Oriented Therapist, Certified Expressive Arts Therapist and a Certified Heart Math Biofeedback Practitioner from Surrey, BC. My passion is in helping people ‘find themselves’ inwardly, through tapping into one's intuition and inner wisdom. I strive to inspire others to connect to their body’s insight so that they might enhance their personal growth, self-expression and empowerment in order to live more courageous, resilient and creative lives.

 

Kara Hill -“I have feelings about that!” Creating attuned and helpful responses with children’s emotion states - Workshop

An important step in adult Caregivers helpfully responding to children’s emotions is to understand how the child’s feelings are experienced by the adult. When an adult companion encounters strong feelings in a child, feelings also get triggered in the adult’s own nervous system. As the adult begins to feel and attune to their own feelings, it clears a space for more accurately reflecting and responding to the child’s feelings. This can be accomplished in a focusing way by invoking the inner-relationship responses of noticing, acknowledging, and offering self-empathy. 

In this workshop we will explore this “feeling about the child’s feeling” phenomenon, how it relates to our daily encounters with children, working with children through their strong emotions, and making the connection to our own past experiences. Through instruction, experiential exercises and self-reflective discussion, the participant will grow in their understanding of how and why attending to our own feelings can help us create helpfully attuned responses to the children in our care.

Kara Hill, MA, LMHC is a licensed mental health counselor, educator, and coach in the USA. She works primarily with parents and caregivers of children ages zero to five-years-old and is a member of the faculty of Seattle Colleges. Her work with families is trauma-informed and positively framed. She gently supports parents through education, creative self-exploration, and community building. The focusing process and playfulness are integral aspects of her teaching. When she isn’t working, Kara can be found exploring the beach with her own two children and partner.

 

John Keane - BioSpirituality and Children - Presentation

In this presentation, I will share my experience of offering BioSpiritual Focusing to children in the Irish school system.

We will explore how children of different ages present differing challenges in this regard. I will share the modified strategies I employed to meet these challenges. Always following the children, rather than trying to lead them.

I will offer the active and playful techniques I used to engage with the children – both in person and online. 

We will also explore the possibility of having the children’s parents/guardians and teachers involved in this process. And, how they become intrigued by the process when they notice the change in the children.

John Keane has been Focusing for over 25 years. After receiving my accreditation from the Focusing Institute, I began to explore BioSpiritual Focusing. For the last 5 years I have worked as the International Director of the BioSpiritual Institute.

 

Bettina Markones - „Wohin mit Kummer und Sorgen" Where to go with sorrow and worries –Presentation delivered in German with English translation

The Book „Wohin mit Kummer und Sorgen" (Where to go with sorrow and worries) published by „Fisch und Schildkröte“ is a picture book but also an instruction to clearing  space with kids. There is also a movie version of the book (in English language) and will be shown during the workshop.

We will pause the showing at suitable points in order to demonstrate how to continue working with single children or groups. The workshop will be held by the author of the book, Bettina Markones.

Bettina Markones is a teacher for children with special needs, a focusing therapist and works with children for more than 25 years. Focusing has been her main tool for all issues concerning the social and emotional area. Moreover she is an enthusiastic mother and grandmother.

 

Atsmaout Perlstein - KOL·BE Body Mapping and FOT: Teaching Children the Language of Self Healing – Workshop

KOL·BE Body Mapping provides practitioners of FOT a powerful therapeutic tool that is a non-verbal method, intuitive and bi-passing cognition and behavior patterns.

The body map is a flat one-and-half meters outline of a human figure without gender or facial characteristics. Acting as a mirror, KBBM enables abstract emotions become tangibly visible, thereby creating an I-It relationship. The ongoing interaction between the inner experiencing, the child and the therapist facilitates multi spontaneous  shifts and steps of change to occur.

The KB Body Mapping connects children to their natural inner self healing process in the here and now. The child practices finding qualities of materials to describe his inner experience (objects, symbols and images),  locates them, finds the right distance to calm his body, become his Self Best Friend and more.

Dr. Atsmaout Perlstein is a clinical psychologist, active for the past thirty five years.  She devotes her current professional practice to lecturing and training psychotherapists and Focusers in using KOL.BE Body Mapping as a therapeutic tool.
 

Tricia Stern - Getting to Know Our Inner Parts: Adapting Inner Relationship Focusing to Help Children - Presentation

This presentation will explore how Inner Relationship Focusing (IRF), developed by Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin, has been adapted to help children learn how to be with and bring compassionate curiosity and understanding to their emotions, experiences and inner parts. IRF emphasizes being ‘Self in Presence’- in gentle, allowing relationship with all parts of one's being-, including parts that are in conflict, denied, pushed away or parts that can feel overwhelming.

Tricia Stern LCSW, MPH is a psychotherapist with specialized training and expertise in working with children, adolescents, parents and families. She is also certified in Inner Relationship Focusing and works to help kids, teens and adults better understand and be with their inner experiences and parts.

 

Leonie Stewart - Discovering the “Felt sense” of YOUR ‘Big SELF.’ Workshop

Our ‘Big SELF’ is the all-encompassing, best version of YOU and me. It can watch on and notice. It has a spacious awareness. It is present, wise, strong, curious and exudes deep compassion and nurture for you and others.

It does not have agenda (a plan) or judgement. (Other names: 'Wise,' 'True,' 'Authentic,’ ‘Best,’ ‘Higher,’ SELF; ‘Self in Presence’, our ‘Essence’ or ‘Core’, our ‘Consciousness’ or ‘Awareness’ or ‘The One who Witnesses’)

In Focusing, we often assume that a person's 'Big SELF' will emerge organically (and it can).

My Workshop will show participants how to guide children through a ‘Big SELF’ focusing process.

The Workshop will give the participant a process to enable children to:

Get to know their ‘Big SELF’ sooner
Purposefully stand in or live from their ‘Big SELF.’
Be able to be beside a fragile part of them and allow and acknowledge that part
Come into kind and curious relationship with that part from a ‘Big SELF’ position that is already there and known
Reflect and draw on the whole process

Based in Sydney, Australia, Leonie Stewart provides counselling, coaching & focusing sessions. She enjoys working with individuals, couples and also young people. Leonie believes we are all meant to belong and connect, to love ourselves and love others, and so to find meaning. She finds purpose in helping others find their own way forward to a happier and more hopeful life full of possibilities. www.hopeandpossibility.com.au

Harriet Teeuw – Exploring Nightmares with Children - Workshop

Focusing helps children transform nightmares into a dream with a direction for personal growth. Listening with a child to a nightmare, helps to change the fear in the dream. When the dream is explored, it will not return. (Stapert, M. 2003). In every dream there is a direction of growth. In this workshop we will experience how even a nightmare indicates that direction of growth.

Harriet Teeuw: Focusing Coordinator and Art Therapist, working in her own practice with children and adults in The Netherlands. Teaching “Dynamic Expressive Focusing” and Focusing International Online Certification Program for Focusing Practitioners https://www.childrenfocusing.org/  www.deruimte-info.nl    [email protected]

René Veugelers - The Essence of Presence - The unfolding of the WONDERING space - Workshop

My experience informs my understanding that the body carries all the important information and answers for us. It’s all in there, but we may not always be connected with it. So, in my daily work with children and teenagers, I stay

connected with my own Felt Sense and Presence: building up safety, non-judgmental space, having clear boundaries and showing interest and openness in whatever is there inside the child, by reflecting many new and unexpected feelings, movements or non-verbal language, revealed by the child’s behavior and posture. This way of listening facilitates the carrying forward of the child’s process. So, the wonders of the process could unfold naturally!

You experience a direct exercise to be grounded, in everyday situations.
You get access to your inner playfulness, creativity and inventiveness.
And will expand your creative range of open yourself for the ‘wondering space’ and how to listen in three directions in a dynamic expressive way!

René Veugelers is an international Children Focusing coordinator, Art therapist, Psychiatric nurse and group social worker, trained in Emerging Body Language (EBL). He lives in the Netherlands, where he works with parents, toddlers, children and adolescents, emphasizing the non-verbal world and inner child experiences. www.ftcz.nl

Fraser Watt and Jenna Chevalier - Unreconciled Child: The Adolescent Link Between Sensible Immaturity and Mature Silliness – Workshop

In a rush to claim the authority of adulthood, we embrace the cultural norm that childhood is a deficit state to be overcome. A Poverty of creativity and imagination in adulthood leaves us seeking codified

play in low-priority recreation and hobbies. What if the metamorphosis of adolescence was a time when we learned to harness the power of imagination, creativity, innovation, and experimentation, purposing play as a tool to begin the negotiation of the adult world carrying forward as an embodied being?

Fraser Watt is a Focuser, student, artist, and most noticeably, an adolescent who remembers being (and still is) a kid. Fraser hopes to reflect his embodied self and share with others through his Focusing practice and his work in social advocacy. Fraser is an emerging teacher and workshop facilitator who is studying psychology and sociology at Ryerson University.

Jenna Chevalier is a Coach, Teacher, Visual Artist, and Focusing Professional studying to become a qualified psychotherapist. Jenna holds a Master's degree in Education with additional qualifications in Special Education and has worked with thousands of adolescents, creating programs and interventions to address emotional and behavioural regulation.

Monica Zambelli - Family Sessions - Workshop

How to create a special time of listening for the family with children focusing? The family is a complex system with many resources. Is it possible to see the family as a resource and a strength? With Children Focusing, adults and children can safely express something difficult they have experienced, in an open trust atmosphere without judgment. 

Starting from one’s own experience and interactions, a common safe place is created where new shared steps can appear, contact points that bring us to new fresh steps with playfulness and light loving kindness.

Monica Zambelli is a Focusing coordinator, lives in Italy in the Monferrato hills with her partner and three sweet children. She has worked for the hospital in pediatrics (focusing and symptoms) and like a trainer  for doctors (humanization of care and children focusing). From her work in social cooperatives and  family homes with children and troubled teenagers and with private families she develops family  sessions. 

She teaches mathematics and physics at secondary school, incorporating children's focusing into  her teaching, both for learning and for overcoming performance anxiety related to science  subjects. [email protected]     www.monicazambelli.com 

 

The Schedule                                                 
                                                                                   

FRIDAY                                                   schedule for download

5:00 am - 5:30 am New York time
10:00 – 10:30 CET
Your time here
Welcome & Orientation

6 am – 8 am New York time
11:00 – 13:00 CET
Your time here
René Veugelers - The Essence of Presence - The unfolding of the WONDERING space - Workshop

BREAK (1 hour)

9 am – 10 am New York time
14:00 – 15:00 CET
Your time here
Anna Boukydis - Growing Up With Focusing: A Child’s Perspective - Presentation 
OR
Barbara Dickinson - The L.A.C.E. Project – Listening,  Attention, Compassion and Empathy - Bringing Focusing to Social and Emotional Learning Curricula – Presentation (relates with Joe Colletti below - "Two Approaches to Implementing Children’s Focusing in Education")

10 am – 11 am New York time
15:00 – 16:00 CET
Your time here
John Keane - BioSpirituality and Children - Presentation
OR
Joe Colletti - Strategies and Challenges for the Implementation of Focusing in a School System - Presentation (relates with Barbara Dickinson above - "Two Approaches to Implementing Children’s Focusing in Education")

11:00 am -11:30 am New York time
16:00 – 16:30 CET
Your time here
Welcome & Announcements

BREAK (1/2 hour)

12 pm – 2 pm New York time (next day Asia/Oceania)
17:00 – 19:00 CET
Your time here
Sandy Jahmi Burg & Inge S. Terrill - Play for Time, a Role Play Inviting Procrastination - Workshop

BREAK (1 hour)

3 pm – 5 pm New York time (next day Asia/Oceania)
20:00 – 22:00 CET
Your time here
Tracey Gramm -  Clearing a space with expressive arts: An experiential workshop on finding emotional clarity for kids – Workshop

 

SATURDAY

5:00 am - 5:30 am New York time
10:00 – 10:30 CET
Your time here
Announcements & Chat

6 am – 8 am New York time
11:00 – 13:00 CET
Your time here
Atsmaout Perlstein - KOL·BE Body Mapping and FOT: Teaching Children the Language of Self Healing – Workshop

BREAK (1 hour)

9 am – 10 am New York time
14:00 – 15:00 CET
Your time here
Laura Bavalics -  Everybody's Welcome - Inclusion and Focusing – Presentation
OR
Bettina Markones - Where to go with sorrow and worries – Presentation

10 am - 11 am New York time
15:00 – 16:00 CET
Your time here
Tricia Stern - Getting to Know Our Inner Parts: Adapting Inner Relationship Focusing to Help Children – Presentation
OR
Jeannette Daily - Listening Presence…a guide for children, parents and grandparents – Presentation

11:00 am -11:30 am New York time
16:00 – 16:30 CET
Your time here
Announcements & Chat

BREAK (1/2 hour)

12 pm – 2 pm New York time (next day Asia/Oceania)
17:00 – 19:00 CET
Your time here
Fraser Watt and Jenna Chevalier - Unreconciled Child: The Adolescent Link Between Sensible Immaturity and Mature Silliness – Workshop

BREAK (1 hour)

3 pm – 5 pm New York time (next day Asia/Oceania)
20:00 -22:00 CET
Your time here
Leonie Stewart - Discovering the “Felt sense” of YOUR ‘Big SELF.’ Workshop

 

SUNDAY - note that Europe has changed its clocks

5 am - 6 am New York time
11:00 – 12:00 CET
Your time here
Living Room (time for informal conversation)

6 am – 8 am New York time
12:00 – 14:00 CET
Your time here
Harriet Teeuw – Exploring Nightmares with Children - Workshop

BREAK (1 hour)

9 am – 11 am New York time
15:00 – 17:00 CET
Your time here
Sara Bradly - The Feelings Room -  A Way to Help Children Express a Felt Sense - Workshop

11 am - 12 pm New York time
17:00 – 18:00 CET
Your time here
Living Room (time for informal conversation)

12 pm – 2 pm New York time (next day Asia/Oceania)
18:00 – 20:00 CET
Your time here
Monica Zambelli - Family Sessions - Workshop

BREAK (1 hour)

3 pm – 5 pm New York time (next day Asia/Oceania)
21:00 -23:00 CET
Your time here
Kara Hill -“I have feelings about that!” Creating attuned and helpful responses with children’s emotion states - Workshop