Entering the Mysteries of "The Big Therapy Process".

About the Course

6 TWO-HOUR SESSIONS started January 2026 but you can join Feb 8th (classes recorded)

What We'll Explore

In this first module (6 two-hour sessions), we’ll look at essential questions that arise when we partner others with Focusing:

How we attend to the ‘spot’ that most needs attending to with what Gendlin called “maximum contact with minimum intrusion”.  And then how do we find the right distance where a subtle alchemy can happen and where the steps of change are possible.  

How can we both sense into and respond in ways that help the other person feel deeply seen and open to what they are saying and experiencing?

How can we be aware of both the leading edge where life is carrying us forward, and the trailing edge – the under tow that signals us about what needs our attention and care.  How does life both carry us forward into who we’re becoming, and pull us back to what still needs our attention and care?

How can Focusing free us from the captivity of linear time - helping us stay grounded in the present even as we touch into past experience or future anticipation?

And how can we begin to trust that it is never too late - that the life force inside knows how to fill itself in?

As helpers how can we trust the guidance our own felt sense of the interaction.

Course Outline

Each session will weave experiential learning, teaching, and space for reflection and integration.

Class 1: The Therapeutic Us
Therapy is not a process that is within the client or the expertise of the therapist, but it is a process of unfolding the living interaction that we make together. 

Class 2: Pointing, Making Something, & Right Distance
Unpacking the “something” together - allowing the implicit to speak, be more known and alive making what is implicit more known and alive while exploring the moment-to-moment dance together of making intimate contact without intrusion.

Class 3: Embodied listening and responding.
The complex art of sensing into the deeper point and of the kind of reflection that brings more of the felt sense, more aliveness, and more possibility?

Class 4: Asking into Forward Movement
Navigating the leading edge and trailing edge - and recognizing the difference.

Class 5: The New Was
How to work with the past experienced as a new living process in the present.

Class 6: It Fills Itself In
Trusting the process - how healing can touch even the deepest places, and how it’s never too late to grow, heal, and become more fully ourselves.

About Charlotte 

This course will be led by Charlotte Howorth, LCSW.  Charlotte taught the Focusing Institute's 2-year certification program for 10 years and then went on to teach the program privately for an additional 5 years.  She has also taught many advanced FOT courses as well as how to use focusing in coaching.  Charlotte has over 30 years’ experience of both using focusing in her own therapy practice, as well as teaching in the US and abroad.