Roundtable on Listening: An exploratory conversation on listening to our companions with more care and love in the flow of life.

Wednesday, August 16, 2023 -  5pm-7pm New York Time

Thursday 17th August -  7am-9am Sydney   

Times worldwide: convert to your time zone

Live attendance required - no recording.

The TIFI Membership Committee is pleased to offer this series of Focusing Roundtables, designed especially for members of the Institute. If you are not a member, please join at this link and 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.

Roundtable Topic:

We warmly invite you to join us in a conversation about listening and felt sensing. Focusing involves a very unusual kind of listening - a simplification of a psychotherapist's listening: in a focusing partnership, we listen to each other to help each of us listen more deeply to ourselves. It is a rare thing to have a companion solely focused, for a time, on helping us bring to birth our own understandings.

What makes focusing unusual is this deliberate, sustained process of letting our implicit understandings grow, to help us reorient ourselves. Someone listening very carefully to us, and helping us track the movements of our own understanding, by reflecting back the gist of what we are saying, or our precise words, helps us pay very fine resolution attention to what precisely, holistically, is next for us.

At the same time, felt understanding is in play nearly all the time in everybody's lives. However, many of the social processes we engage in don't support people listening to themselves in any depth. So there are opportunities to explore how to help our companions by listening to them with more care and love in the flow of everyday life.

And when we need to work together, we need ways to cross developing understandings, letting something fresh emerge from encountering. For this we need much more fluid, mutual processes than traditional focusing: conversations with different rhythms, with listening that is at once listening to ourselves and listening to the other person deeply, at the same time.

A culture in which we listen to each other, to help more profound, more holistic insights emerge, is a culture with the potential for more creativity, compassion and wisdom. We invite you to join us sharing experiences, questions and your own emerging understandings in a Roundtable discussion, in which we can all learn from each other.

Who might be particularly interested in attending this Roundtable?

This Roundtable is intended for anyone who has a knowledge of Focusing and an interest in listening, in conversations of all kinds.

CONNECTION>CONVERSATION>COMMUNITY

What to expect from Focusing Rountables:  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:

Jane Quayle is a Certifying coordinator and former member of the TIFI board of Trustees.  She is a Focusing Oriented Psychotherapist, and has taught focusing in her private practice for 20 years.  She has also taught in a variety of tertiary institutions including Western Sydney University, Macquarie University and developed a Focusing Oriented Therapy elective for the Jansen Newman Institute.  Her teaching experience includes counselling skills, supervision of student therapists and Focusing Oriented Psychotherapy.

Greg Walkerden PhD is a researcher who designs practices in felt sense centred reflective practice, and environmental management and planning. His academic roots are in philosophy and psychology. He has been a Focusing practitioner for over 35 years, is a Certified Focusing Professional and Teacher, and taught felt sense-based decision making at Macquarie University in Sydney for about 15 years. At Gendlin’s invitation, he taught A Process Model at his 'Thinking at the Edge' retreats in New York in 2000, 2001 and 2002.