MATCHING GRANT NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL DECEMBER 31!
When the crisis on the Gaza/Israel border began, The International Focusing Institute (TIFI) offered five “Compassionate Conversations” to allow members of our community to come together in a felt sensing way, to be with each other. We were hardly going to resolve a situation over which we have little direct control, but what we could do was to be compassionate toward ourselves and one another in a tough moment. Many people said to us, “Yes, this is just what TIFI is for.”
One participant called our attention to a line from Gene Gendlin's article The New Phenomenology of Carrying Forward: "Every situation consists of hundreds of possibilities…. An individual body can sense not only the routine patterns, but also new life-enhancing steps beyond the forms and routines."
There are no magic solutions to troubles in our lives or in the world, but the more of us who can slow down to sense into the ongoing situations we face, the better a chance we have to find those “life-enhancing steps” which are not bound by the structures which are already in place.
One of the participants wrote us to say: "Thank you for offering this during such horrible times, without asking for payment. It was so crucial, and I was able to move myself from a state of shock and disbelief, and grief, to a state of understanding and doing."
The International Focusing Institute serves to bring felt sensing to as many places and situations as humanly possible. We depend on you to help make that happen.
The vast majority of our donations come to us in December, and we depend on these to continue to make our work possible.
Gene's wise words bring to mind the breathtaking walnut tree that we encountered at our Weeklong this past summer in Dublin, Ireland. It had many branches, which reached up toward the sky, down toward the earth and out toward all who entered the garden. That tree had clearly been bent, twisted, even broken. And the result of all of its many years of living have turned it into a kind of sanctuary for those visiting its garden home.
The tree did not move, but it moved us.
OUR WORK AT TIFI
Our work at The International Focusing Institute is to open up ever more avenues to allow new life-enhancing steps to emerge, in our communities and in our individual lives. We accomplish this by being like that tree. Slow and steady. Offering shade and a cozy place to gather. Reaching out and up. Sensing where the sunlight is calling us to stretch forth. And lots of silence.
There are very concrete things that we’ve done at TIFI which we hope you’ll feel deserve your financial support.
We are dedicated to making our membership, certification and programming accessible. The Board this past year finalized its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion statement, and then followed it up with the creation of a scholarship for those in any under-represented group, with a special emphasis on young people and members of the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) community.
This year, our Equity in Membership initiative adjusted membership and certification fees to be better aligned with local economies around the world. Our Trainers and Coordinators are telling us that this has made connection with our international community a realistic possibility for many of their students.
And we continue to see of our Certified Focusing Professionals making great use of the Events listing at focusing.org/events to promote their offerings, in a dazzling variety of languages.
UNDERNEATH IT ALL
Among all these practical and valuable initiatives, underneath it all lies the power of Focusing and felt sensing to reveal new life-enhancing ways of moving forward in our lives and in our communities. Like the walnut tree, we experience sunshine and storm, we fall and we rise. The power of Focusing lies in its power to surprise us; to offer us new ways of interacting with the world. Felt sensing strengthens us to carry on, it generates fresh buddings of life, and it allows fresh life-enhancing paths to reveal themselves.
