Oceania Focusing Roundtable - Building Community Among Focusers

Saturday, 26th August 2023 - 10:00 am - 12:00 pm AEST (Sydney - Australia)

Saturday, 26th August, 2023 - 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm NZDT (New Zealand)

Saturday, 26th August, 2023 - 7:00 am - 9:00 am AWST (Perth, Western Australia)

Friday, August 25, 2023 - 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm EST (New York - US)

Times worldwide: convert to your time zone

This Oceania Roundtable will be an interactive exploration of the concept of community, and how to build more of it into our Focusing connections.

Marie and Yimfong have lived experience of “community” in their worlds of work, living arrangements, relationships and spirituality. Marie has journeyed from Ireland to Australia more recently while Yimfong came to Australia a longer time ago. Both use the metaphor of “home” in various ways to describe their inner and outward environments. 

Marie and Yimfong will briefly share their stories of “community” to open up other stories at the Round Table, what it has meant to them where they are at with their hopes, intentions and expressions of it now. Participants will be invited to share their own experiences of community, to discern the key components that are present in healthy, inclusive groups. In our discussion we hope to explore meaning-making, belonging, and search for deeper connection within ourselves and each other in an increasingly disconnected world despite the capability of communication systems. Many people feel a longing unsatisfied, a deeper connection unmet.

Marie and Yimfong wish to provide a space for participants to discuss the theme of building community; our experiences of community, what hasn’t worked what has worked, and to then pause and sense freshly “what am I looking for now, what am I hungry for now, what wants more now” around the whole idea and theme of “community building.” We wish to encourage a curiosity around new themes and interests that may be emerging freshly, in the here and now in this group that might point in the direction of carrying forward steps for expanding our Focusing community in the Oceania area. If there is enough interest generated from this roundtable, it is also possible for a follow up space to emerge that could take this further forward.

We will meet together in the larger group at the beginning and at the end and will also share in break out rooms. No prior knowledge of Focusing is required nor lived experience of community to participate at the Round Table.

CONNECTION>CONVERSATION>COMMUNITY

What to expect from Focusing Roundtables: 

We warmly encourage you to register and settle down with us to join other Oceania Focusers passionate to explore topics of interest and get to know each other better. If you have an area of interest, curiosity or passion you would like to see opened up in a future Roundtable, please let us know.

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. Participants are encouraged to create follow up opportunities for connection among themselves after the Roundtable.

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

About your hosts:

Yimfong Voon has trained in Focusing and Focusing-oriented Therapy and integrates this into her work with her clients. Her experience of Focusing has shifted her perspective and practices in the “sacred space” with others. This intentional experience has been transforming for herself and has deepened the conversations, interactions and connection to her family, friends and her spirituality. The Focusing process often and naturally spills into her life and work processes with people.

She continues to notice and welcome community in various contexts with its possibilities for life-forward movements in and with each other. She offers relationship counselling, psychotherapy, supervision/mentoring, and group work in her private practice.

Marie Connors has spent many years exploring the language of the body and the Felt-Sense. She is a body worker and has trained as a Focusing professional and teacher with further training in Relational Wholebody Focusing. She has gained a deep trust in her experience of an embodied inner-directed intelligence that becomes available in safe relational meeting spaces with others. These experiences of an intelligence that emerges from our embodied relational connections including what limits us, has been transformational for her and continues to inform much of her work with clients and students as well as her personal and relational life situations.  Marie values the freedom to follow what feels meaningful and life forwarding. She has recently relocated from Ireland to Australia and is enjoying the process of integrating into new communities and finding the living forward directions within these connections.