Deep Listening Down Under - Creating Community and Connection

Saturday, 16 November, 2019 from 9:30 to 11:30 am AEDT

Friday 15 November at 5:30-7:30 PM EST (US)

Times worldwide: convert to your time zone

The TIFI Membership Committee is pleased to offer this series of Focusing Roundtables designed especially for members of the Institute from Australia and New Zealand. If you are not a member, please join at https://focusing.org/page/join-or-renew, then return to this page to register. This program will afford members a valuable opportunity to engage in casual peer-to-peer conversation with other members who share Focusing-related interests.

As Down Under Focusers, we are often separated by vast distances from each other, as well as from the rest of the world. This platform of virtual Roundtables provided by TIFI can help us to connect, build community, and draw on the deep pool of experience and knowledge we have.

Indigenous peoples of both Australia and New Zealand share an ancient tradition of deep listening. In that spirit, we offer the first Roundtables conversation.  Deep listening is also vital to Focusing.

Gendlin wrote, “Listening makes a space into which something new can come.” (Gendlin, 1990). He elaborated:

A safe and steady human presence willing to be with whatever comes up is the most powerful factor. If we do not try to improve and change anything, if we add nothing, if however bad something is we only say what we understand exactly, such a response adds to our presence and helps clients to stay with and go further into whatever they sense or feel just then. This is perhaps the most important thing that any person helping others needs to know. (Gendlin,1996).

In this Roundtable we will be exploring Focusing as a way of deep listening, based on chapter 11 in “Focusing” by Gendlin.  

Some questions we may explore together are:

•    What is your experience of being listened to and listening to others in a deep way?
•    How can we assure that deep listening is happening in our conversation?
•    How can we teach others to listen in that way?

Other questions may emerge from our mutual exploration during the Roundtable.

CONNECTION>CONVERSATION>COMMUNITY

What to expect from Focusing Roundtables:  Each Focusing Roundtable is designed to promote informal peer-to-peer conversation. Rather than acting as expert presenters, the Hosts will serve as conversation moderators to encourage sharing and exploration of the topics from the participants’ own perspectives.  All participants’ sharings are welcome and valuable, no matter what level of experience or knowledge you have on the topic. To preserve the nature of informal conversation, the program will be offered live only and no recordings will be available. Registration is limited and on a first-come, first served basis. Participants are encouraged to create follow up opportunities for connection among themselves after the Roundtable.

About your hosts:

Heather Rogers is a Counsellor and Focusing Therapist in Private Practice living in Palmerston North, North Island, New Zealand. She is a Focusing Teacher, Certified Coordinator and member of TIFI’s Membership Committee.  She is committed to training and developing the Focusing Community in New Zealand, with passion for incorporating Focusing in her daily life and work.

Biliana Dearly works as a Focusing-Oriented psychotherapist, lecturer and supervisor in Melbourne, Australia. She is Focusing Trainer and Certifying Coordinator for TIFI. Biliana teaches Focusing as both a personal process that can help everyone navigate their life's journey, as well as a therapeutic process that brings deep transformation and lasting change. Beyond her qualifications and training, Biliana’s passion is to engage in learning about herself and others whole-heartedly, and to create connections within, and between people.

Sue Burrell is a counsellor and Focusing Trainer, and trained in Archetype and Dream Pattern Analysis with the Assisi Institute (USA). She co-hosts the Sydney Changes Group. She is keen to see the Down Under Focusing community connect and grow, and become a mutually supportive resource for developing Focusing in our increasingly polarized world.