Level 1 Training Online in New Zealand

This 8-week online programme provides a solid basis for understanding how to bring the wisdom of your felt sense to your daily experience. We will focus on developing ‘Inner Relational Focusing’, how to listen to ourselves, which is the essential first part of learning Focusing. Before we can bring ourselves into relational depth and be with another with presence we must be able to do so with ourselves. This work is very transformative personally and will aid your relationships with others.

The skill set we work with in Level 1 includes:

• Creating a space within that welcomes a fresh ‘felt sense’.
• Exploring ways our body might communicate with us through our senses.
• Forming relationships with what comes up.
• Staying in relationship, even when things are tricky.
• Negotiating boundaries within ourselves by getting the ‘right distance’.
• Noticing that things change without effort.
• Being able to check what fits and doesn’t.
• Being with one body sense as you’re sensing something new arising.
• Enjoying positive feelings.

We will discuss the theory of Focusing offered by Gene Gendlin which influenced Gestalt and Experiential and Mind-Body approaches and how this theory relates to Neuroscience.

You will learn the practical step-by-step process Gene described to enable you to bring your awareness to your felt experience of your life. We will use mindfulness skills of radical acceptance with warm relationally and enlivened curiosity, when we do this we develop and change neural circuits. By practising together in class and once a week with your focusing partner you will learn how to relate to yourself differently, as the Self-in-Presence.

Our work will be safely held in the class by a common understanding of respect for each others process and the unknowable intricacies of our own process.

Each session will have question periods, group exercises and paired exercises as well as demonstrations and information. There will be an optional reading list for people who have time and want to progress to the Level 2 class. There will be updates as to when this will be offered as our community grows.

It is important to be able to commit to at least 6 of the 8 evening events and to make time for a 45 - 60  minuite call with a focusing partner between each class.

You do not need to be a therapist to benefit from this training, in our paired expertise one person will focus while the other listens, feeling into their felt sense, holding the space with curiosity and presence and simply offering reminders or reflections to keep the focuser company.  It is a time to enjoy being aware of the relational field with no hurry to ‘fix’ or change anything.

People who work in therapeutic or caring roles can expect this experience to help them hold space for those they work with while learning to be with the focuser in a way which is very different than mainstream talk-therapy and counselling roles. Here we trust the inner wisdom of the body to emerge in spontaneous ways which are much more profound and helpful than our thinking mind could devise. Prepare to be challenged and intrigued. For people continuing to Level 2 and beyond the links with Internal Family Systems, Emotion Focused Therapy, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and others will become evident, while non-therapists may see relationships between Focusing and ecopsychology, energy, bodywork, spirituality and intergenerational work. On one session we will reflect on a video of Shirley Turcotte a Canadian First Nations instructor and clinical supervisor who championed aboriginal/indigenous Focusing which is very pertinent to our context in Aotearoa.