Creating Space for Community

Each of us lives in community. Our family is our first one. In Focusing, we learn to create a space of radical acceptance for our inner community. Using examples from Smartview Stories, we will create a safe, playful environment to explore how we show up for the communities outside of us.

Smartview Stories is a series of family books that explore living a Focusing way of life in community. The stories illustrate both what is going on outside of us as well as inside of us via three Inner Companions based on neuroscience concepts. We’ll become familiar here with how these Inner Companions function within our own lives.

Our time together will be heavily experiential. We’ll utilize universal themes and prompts from adventures in Smartview Stories. There will be whole group invitations and discussions. Sometimes we’ll invite writing, art and movement. We’ll have pair and small group breakout spaces. You will be invited into role-play scenarios and groups can volunteer to share their skit. Expect to laugh here, humor seems to be an essential quality of being when we invite our fears around holding our own sense of self in the world.

Besides becoming familiar with how community is practice within Smartview Stories, you will also get a feel for how we practice community in the Learning Community for Mastery in Guiding Change. This is a community for advanced Focusers and certification trainees that I facilitate. I have been involved in a variety of community start-ups for more than 30 yrs. All of this experience is now interwoven with the life experience each Learning Community member brings with them. 

An aspect we practice in this community is both presuming welcome (I belong) and extending welcome (you belong). From here, a We Space between naturally forms. I encourage self-empowerment and enjoy working alongside members of the Learning Community. I have invited them to join in co-teaching these webinars. Together, we create a magical carpet ride we extend toward you.

Our November theme looks more at positive resources that guide us away from communities that are not right for us. Note we will be meeting Sunday during the day which works well for European time zones.  

In November, we are inviting a passion or dedication in your life that helped save you from communities that were not a fit for you. Niko will share his story about how his dedication to music early on gave him the strength to avoid communities that were not right for him.

Niko Toroshelidze, a Trainer-in-Training from the Republic of Georgia and a member of the Learning Community for Mastery in Guiding Change ,will co-facilitate this webinar. 

We welcome any threads you’d like to add during your time with us here!

Skills you can grow during our time together.

* learn to utilize the three Inner Companions from Smartview Stories to make valuable aspects of Gendlin's philosophy and our body/brain neuroscience easy to understand.

*learn to discern when you are living from a partial view and when you are holding space for the whole of your body's wisdom in this situation.

* our mind is 'sticky', it likes to hold on to patterns it knows from the past. We will become more efficient at recognizing these sticky strategies and gain insight into moving beyond them in this playful community environment. 

* the ability to pause and move into your body, into the present moment, or over to your right hemisphere to access a bigger picture and potentially do something new here. Each time we do this rewires our brain to for a sense of working together around future similar situations. 

* via improvisational role play during our time together, practice resilience in rolling with what is here now.

* improve your ability to interact with others with kindness and clarity that everyone and everything is safe and with a sense of we're in this together.

* develop more ways to support yourself and those around you in processing challenging interactions. 

* become aware of embodiment techniques that you can incorporate into your daily life to encourage holding on to new patterns that are emerging for you. 

* receive neuroscience related handouts to support you in practicing these concepts in your daily life.