Are you curious about Focusing and wanting to experience it? Do you ever wish you paid more attention to your own needs and wants? Wouldn’t it be great to know how to find your reliable inner guide, that sense inside you that knows your right next steps? Do you want to be able to support other people in your life to listen inwardly as well?
Focusing is a simple yet revolutionary skills of awareness, developed outof research into how people were being when they were changing successfully. It is used in many areas: with personal problems, with thinking, with writing, art, movement, creativity, with relationships, with children, the list goes on. Focusing can be everywhere in your life, helping you be in integrity with yourself as you work and play, live in your family and when you are most deeply yourself.
The Focusing Institute Summer School is an opportunity for people at all levels of experience with Focusing to join in a community of learning more about this remarkable way of being. We especially welcome beginners because we feel this weeklong experience is a great way to begin your acquaintance with the many facets of Focusing.
At the Summer School all of the six “master teachers” are interested in helping beginners, and one of us has the special task (she calls it a privilege) of being a resource for the new Focusers. Lucy Bowers has this to say:
“Last August at the Focusing Institute’s summer school it was my privilege to accompany and observe many people who were new to Focusing. They allowed that wonderful motivator we know as curiosity, to challenge them to trust and nurture those wonderful felt senses that moved them ‘forward’ towards a further unfolding in their lives. What a delight for me and how affirming to keep me on the path of doing the same.”
All six of us, as well as the Focusing Institute, extend a welcome to people new to Focusing to join us at Garrison in August and allow yourself the gift of discovering the most amazing person of all: yourself.
Early registration discount until June 21. To register: http://www.focusing.org/fiss
Nada Lou: Dancing with Felt Sense and Meaning - TAE
If you are thinking about coming to FISS this year, I’d like to tell you a bit more about my major offering. I am calling it “Dancing with Felt Sense and Meaning – TAE”, because of an image that came to me about my last year’s group. The enjoyment my students exhibited, felt as if they created a dancing liaison between their felt sense and fresh thinking from it. If you decide to take this opportunity to be introduced into TAE you will learn how thinking and saying from the felt sense is radically different from what you do now. You will work on your personal “project” with a partner and learn different method how to dialogue between your felt sense and thinking.
TAE
Learn new skills to help you develop new, world-changing ideas
Can you imagine developing new ideas that will change the way people look at the world? Ideas that are right there, inside you. Ideas that you have been mulling over for years maybe, but you cannot say what the crux of them are... yet. Yet you know they are important, for you, for your field of work, for the world.
There is a way for you to think freshly about what you know....but cannot yet articulate. It's called Thinking AT the Edge. It's about making concepts from experience, your experience. Everyone has this capacity, but until now, there was no structured way to do this. There is now.
Using skills learned from this workshop, you can use the TAE method in many different areas of life:
For business meetings, personal development, professional proposals, partnership dialogue, private projects development, creative writing, family interaction, public speaking, educational events, negotiation skills, mediation process and in endless other ways.
By the end of FISS this year, you will be able to have a firm grip on what TAE is about, how to work in TAE Partnership and a lot more taste about your own “project”.
"You need to stand again in your own experiencing - in your own felt
ongoingness, which is that intricate complexity inside of life - to put into
the world what hasn't been said yet that you are carrying from your
particular experiencing"
Early registration discount until June 21. To
register: http://www.focusing.org/fiss
Akira Ikemi: “Zig-zagging”: Felt Sense, Explication and Understanding
Many ways of teaching
and using Focusing have evolved.
They’re all wonderful!
But the essence, the principle, the basics, of Focusing remains the same.
That’s what I calling “zig-zagging”,
a phrase that Gene Gendlin sometimes uses in his writings.
And most of you do this “zig-zagging” already in your life,
although you may not be fully aware of it.
Focusing is not something “invented”, like a new mechanism.
It’s lifted out from what people do.
So if you look with care, you will find yourself zig-zagging.
Zig-zag between what?
It’s the zig-zag between what is already, and what is not-yet.
I’ve written some lines on this page. It’s there /already/.
Yet I know that /more/ is coming, and that more is /not-yet/ there.
And even if it’s not-yet there, right now, I sense what would be coming
there soon.
That’s why I know that some lines don’t say what ought to be there.
Then I erase those lines.
So even if it’s not there yet, I /sense/ the /not-yet./
We all do this kind of sensing, checking back our words with what we sense.
I do, when I write, shop, cook, meet people, see therapy clients, teach
classes …
But let us look into it carefully, what we do in this zig-zagging.
/How/ do we sense?
How are we in our experienced body, /as /we sense.
How does our body change when I say, draw, cook, the not-yet.
And how does meaning go further and /make/ sense --- make new sense.
You may find that how we /understand/ our situations, other people and
ourselves
are quite different from what we know and assume /already/,
within the realm of the sensed /not-yet/.
We have a whole week to experience zig-zagging,
doing different modes of /explication/ like
body movements, arts (collage), listening and speaking.
And all this, you already know in a subtle way.
So, it isn’t like learning to speak a new language, and memorizing
vocabulary.
It’s more like caring and attending to what you sense, in every situation,
in a very gentle way
Early registration discount until June 21. To register: http://www.focusing.org/fiss