Being Focusing Together

Being Focusing Together:

Speaking and Being Heard in a Larger Group

Six Sessions over 12 months
Second Session - July 16, 2025
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...

Most of us know that being able to listen in a Focusing way usually requires lots of practice and reflection. Yet, when we speak with others, we often find we have nothing but our habits to guide us.  We can’t expect ourselves to automatically be skilled at speaking up, speaking out, speaking to and from our felt sense.  Especially when we speak in larger groups, our Focusing skills can disappear! We need a place to practice speaking and some guidance to find a new way.

These Being Focusing Together gatherings will use Gendlin’s manuscript "Fitting In and Pouring Out, and Relating" to help us do just that.

In this paper, Gendlin loosely identifies some ways forward:

• 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.
   
• The body instantly senses that if we can’t “pour out” all our feelings, then 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,” (which can feel even more painful in Focusing spaces).
   
• The new invitation is to notice how far we’ve already travelled in our Focusing practice and ask ourselves if we are “strong enough to go further”?  Can we find a more relational way?

Rachel is struck by Gendlin’s empathy for the shakiness of doing this and the affirming “of course this is difficult" which she hears in Gendlin’s accompaniment. 

In the first session the group considered (and spent some time in a large group) how forming a Focusing large group would be different.  Rachel suggests that we expect the group to hold examples of difficulties that arise in a group, for the language to be incomplete, inexact and unsatisfactory when pointing to the whole of what we mean and for the group to use the ‘direct referent’ to further refine its own internal experience, individually and to the group. To practice the art of knowing we can carry only some of what each of us implies forward and only be partly met, all the while longing to carry forward as much of what our situation implies forward. We want so much to do something differently, but can we stop falling into our old habits even as we discuss breaking free of them?

In this meeting we will try short sharings and pausings as a group, to notice our experiences of groups with Focusers when we are outside the Focusing Dyads. We will move towards the group dialogue steps Gendlin roughly outlines in "Fitting In and Pouring Out, and Relating".

This is our second of six meetings in which to develop our thinking and sharing around this topic and together see what new patterns and fresh ways to Be Focusing emerge in our group interactions. It is an organic series of meetings, open to all and planned as we move forward together in the group and the survey after. I look forward to exploring this with you.

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

This will be the second of six sessions over the next 12 months with returning and new registrants welcome each month.  Each time there will be a slightly different starting point, such as: how it is to start speaking, what it’s like after speaking, how it is to be the speaking one.

Each month a new email announcement will be sent and you need to register freshly each month.

Online / Live attendance required - no recording

6 Sessions
May 21 - 2-4 pm NY time
July 16 - 2-4 pm NY time
Sept 17 - 2-4pm NY time
Nov 19 - 2-4pm NY time
Jan 21, 2026 - 2-4pm NY time
March 18 - 2-4pm NY Time

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