August 20 - 26, 2007 at Garrison Institute in Garrison, New York.
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How would you like to spend one week of your summer vacation learning more
about Focusing than you ever thought possible? How would you like to spend that
week with a large group of other Focusers from all over the world?
Would you like to apply Focusing to: movement, relationships, thinking,
meditation, psychotherapy, children, your profession and much more... with the
support of six of the most renowned Focusing teachers from all over the world?
Ann WeIser Cornell, Akira Ikemi, Nada Lou, Kevin McEvenue, Atsmaout Perlstein
and Lucy Bowers
Ordinarily you’d have to travel around the world to study with these six
master teachers... but this week they’re going to be all in one place, creating
an opportunity for going in depth with Focusing that will enliven people at any
level, from beginning to advanced.
You can create the kind of week you want: immerse yourself in the company of
one teacher or sample all six... make it a time of intensive study or more like
a holiday with lots of play and fun... or all of the above!
The Summer School is open to anyone, at all levels of Focusing including
beginners. Bring a friend!
This program has been approved by NASW - New York State for 25 contact hours
under approval number A-953.
The Summer School is open to anyone, at all levels of Focusing including
beginners. Bring a friend!
New to Focusing?
We’ll bring you up to speed, starting with an intensive 2 1/2 hour introduction
on Monday, August 20, from 3:00 to 5:30 PM. Then, every day, Lucy Bowers will
meet with beginners to answer questions and facilitate Focusing partnerships. If
you are new to Focusing,
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Major (morning sessions)
Ann Weiser Cornell: Getting Unstuck
When you feel stuck or blocked from forward movement in your life, this is a
rich place for Focusing. Writer’s block, procrastination, difficulty making
decisions, persistent self-criticism are all ways that forward energy gets
stuck. We’ll learn a series of experiential exercises for releasing the stuck
energy and going beyond inner conflict to a state of grace and flow. You’ll take
home skills you can use over and over whenever life gets stuck.
Nada Lou: Dancing with Felt Sense and Meaning - TAE
Thinking at the Edge is a practice for thinking freshly about what you
know....but cannot yet articulate. In a step-by-step process you will learn how
to say more about what you know so you can put it into the world with clarity
and confidence. Useful for business meetings, personal development, professional
proposals, partnership dialogue, projects development, creative writing, family
interaction, public speaking, educational events, negotiation skills, mediation
process and in endless other ways.
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Atsmaout Perlstein: Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy
In this course we will learn the main concepts of the Philosophy of the Implicit
and their contributions to our therapeutic approach (implicit intricacy,
implying, carrying forward, experiential order, bodily felt sense) and spend
time on practical issues such as the essence of the therapist-client
relationship, what a therapist can do to help clients move into direct
experiencing and invite a series of experiential change-steps, how the therapist
handles blocks and dead ends in therapy. We’ll deepen the learning through
exercises, modeling and case supervision presented by the participants.
Akira Ikemi: “Zig-zagging”: Felt Sense, Explication and Understanding
The felt sense is the core of Focusing. We’ll be speaking from the felt sense,
listening to the felt sense, and expressing the felt sense in art (collage).
There is an interplay, an ongoing “zig-zag”,between expressions (words, art,
movement) and felt experience. The zig-zag will show us the understandings we
have of ourselves, our situations, our living. We will be zig-zagging without
felt sense and expressions, and also between one’s felt sense and others’.
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Kevin McEvenue: Wholebody Focusing and Listening
This workshop offers an in-depth experience of Wholebody Focusing and to teach
the core elements of Wholebody Focusing and Listening. In Wholebody Focusing we
get in touch with the self in a whole body kind of way. This invites spontaneous
movement and a sense of inner direction. We can then allow any particular part
of us that needs special attention to come into relationship with this Wholebody
sense.
Lucy Bowers: Beginning Focusers
Lucy will provide a safe, invitational and flexible space between 1:30 p.m. and
3:30 p.m. each day for Beginning Focusers. Here we will find a Home Group to
connect with others to form triads for observing, practicing and discussing. We
will experience the Felt Sense with a variety of exercises designed to find and
flex the Felt Sense "Muscle". There will also be opportunity for questions and
answers that may arise from the morning classes.
Optional afternoon Sessions:
Akira Ikemi: A Quiet Afternoon for Art (Collage)
(2 sessions repeated)
Collage is a form of art where clippings of pictures and words are pasted
onto drawing paper. The collage is like a dream, because images that appeal to
the felt sense appear on it, even though you may not know why or what these
images mean. In this collage work, we will spend an hour making collage and
another hour in pairs, focusing on the meaning of the collage we have just made.
Akira Ikemi: Therapist Focusing: When Therapists Focus on Their Clients
(1 session)
Therapists experience felt senses about their clients. For example, therapists
may feel stuck, heavy or burdened when they think about a particular client.
These felt senses have much meaning and when we focus on them, they begin to
show us what we don’t yet know about the client, the therapy situation, or about
the therapists themselves. “Therapist Focusing” has been used not only with
therapists, but with teachers focusing on their students, and physicians and
nurses focusing on their patients. In fact, it can be useful for any
interpersonal helping professions.
Ann Weiser Cornell: Focusing-Oriented Marketing for Focusing Teachers
Are you teaching Focusing as much as you’d like to? Many would-be Focusing
teachers get stopped by the mysteries of marketing: how to find the people to
fill up our classes. As one of the most successful Focusing teachers (I teach
over 30 workshops a year all over the world), let me share with you my marketing
secrets: how to talk about what we do so that people are interested and want to
know more, how to keep people coming back after the first workshop, how to
create Focusing community… and how to do all this in a Focusing-oriented way.
Ann Weiser Cornell: Radical Gentleness – Transforming the Inner Struggle
All too often we are locked in an inner struggle to control or suppress our
feelings or our behavior. Patterns of emotional eating, the inability to get
organized, repeating patterns of unhealthy relationships – they all involve a
split between a part of us that behaves in a way that another part of us calls
“out of control.” If you ever find yourself (or your clients) saying “I can’t
get myself to…” or “I don’t know why I….”, this workshop will offer powerful
insights and tools for using Focusing to find the life forward movement that
resolves the inner struggle.
Ann Weiser Cornell: Gendlin’s Philosophy – Why Focusing Works
For years I taught Focusing without paying much attention to Gendlin’s
philosophy. I talked about concepts like “felt sense,” “carrying forward,”
“life-forward direction.” Then a few years ago I began to seriously study A
Process Model – and my whole life was transformed. For the first time I felt I
actually understood the concepts I had been teaching for years. I realized that
“life-forward direction” isn’t an optimistic idea, it’s simply how things are.
And I learned what Gendlin means when he says “in the forming of the felt sense,
the problem is already solved.” In this workshop I’ll attempt to share what I’ve
learned.
Lucy Bowers: Focusing Through the Eyes of Children
Participants will spend an afternoon experiencing the ease with which
children come to Focusing and how they absorb the experience. It will provide a
sense of how the Focusing Attitude is an important ingredient for adults who
work and interact with children. They will see how easily children can access
their Felt Sense and remove the stumbling blocks on the path of their emotional
and intellectual development. We will use art materials to discover the
importance for children to symbolize their experience in nonverbal ways. It will
be both interesting and fun.
Kevin McEvenue: Focusing and the Art of Storytelling
The aim of this workshop is to explore the ancient tradition of storytelling
combined with bodily felt sense listening as its driving force. How is this
story in you lived fleshly now? How does it want to begin? As the Listener, when
I can sense how this story is living in you now something in me not only can
feel and hear what is being said, but also knows what the story wants to hear
back to move it forward. Participants will have an opportunity to listen to one
another and share a story that feels fresh and alive in the moment. Some
familiarity with body felt sensing is required.
Nada Lou: I listen, I hear
There are ways of doing more than listening, but they aren't "more" if you do
them without first listening! This workshop will help you become familiar with
many different ways in which Focusing Listening can become part of your everyday
life, work and any conversational exchange with people you encounter. You will
become aware that you hear - understand people in a more profound way.
Communicating your own thoughts will be easier and better received.
Nada Lou: Dreams and Focusing
Dreams are fascinating. Your dream knows a lot more about you than you do!
Dreams also bring you something that Focusing doesn’t. Your body can open up to
your inner knowing spontaneously in the dream, because it can bypass the usual
daily intrusion.
Once you learn how to hold the dream in a focusing way, and let the felt sense,
not the content of the dream, connect to your situation, the felt sense will
give you support, interpretation and the next step for carrying forward your
situation. Interpreting your dreams in this way can be taught and learned.
Nada Lou: The Body’s Search for Spirit
I will show how BioSpiritual Focusing explores the link between Focusing and
Spirituality. The body has the ability to experience "felt meaning" as the
bridge into the experience of Spirit. There is a transcendent or "graced"
quality to the meaning in the body. Felt meaning in your body opens the door to
larger Body that provides you with new energy and new information. Meaning comes
as spontaneous gift and surprise. Crossing the mind-knowing of our
information-based culture with our spirit-based body wisdom, opens a whole new
paradigm of human consciousness for exploration - the heart of healthy prayer.
Atsmaout Perlstein: Embracing your Physical Pain: Unlocking a Meaningful
Story!
Recurring physical pain can create a long standing stress on the suffering
person and on his relationships. When the pain is present, people report feeling
out of control, helpless and victimized. When the inner critic and self blame
come into play a continuous negative feedback loop is created.
The objectives for this workshop are: a) learn to embrace the physical pain b)
use the Focusing process to discover the meaningful themes and events in your
unique story c) draw the inner map, the inner structure of the physical pain
which holds the pattern together d) find small steps to bring in fresh air into
your life around the physical pain.
Atsmaout Perlstein: Interactive Focusing: The Art and Skills of Living your
Relationships
Session 1:
Experiencing Empathy and Increasing Intimacy in Your Relationships
This workshop invites you to get in touch with what is meaningful and vital for
building and enriching your important relationships. You will learn to create a
safe interactional space in which individual differences can be appreciated and
accepted. You will be encouraged to find your communication road-blocks and your
inner patterns that sabotage your potential for empathic, intimate and loving
relationships.
Atsmaout Perlstein: Interactive Focusing: The Art and Skills of Living your
Relationships
Session 2:
Healing the Conflicts in your Meaningful Relationships
This workshop will focus on: a) the function and meaning of conflicts in
relationships b) identifying personal patterns that fuel the conflicts in ones
own relationships c) experiencing and practicing interactive focusing and
conflict healing.
The Teachers:
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Ann Weiser Cornell is the author of The Power
of Focusing, and The Radical Acceptance of Everything. Ann has
been teaching Focusing since 1980, in seventeen countries. She is
renowned for her relaxed attitude and cheerful, humorous approach. Her
special interests include: Focusing and decisions, releasing blocks to
action, the art of facilitative language, and changing our relationship
with an inner critic.
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Nada
Lou teaches Focusing on five continents, with a double specialty in Thinking
at the Edge (TAE) and BioSpiritual Focusing. She also teaches Focusing for
mediation, listening for everyday life, Focusing and dreams, and the philosophy
of the impicit. She is well known for her videos that have brought the teaching
of Focusing luminaries into our homes and offices.
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Akira
Ikemi grew up in Japan, received his MA from the University of Chicago
(working with Eugene Gendlin), and his PhD in Japan. Akira has an
insider’s view of the Oriental cultural and spiritual bedrock into which
Focusing has been planted. He is a gifted therapist, university
professor (clinical psychology) and seasoned presenter who weaves
stories about Zen Masters into deeply experiential wisdom and academic
proficiency. |
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Kevin McEvenue
is internationally known for his development of Wholebody Focusing,
bringing together the essential elements of the Alexander technique and
Gendlin’s Focusing process with his own unique genius. He is a beloved
and popular teacher whose warm and generous heart can be felt by
everyone in his presence. He lives in Toronto and is also an
accomplished watercolorist. |
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Atsmaout
Perlstein is an eclectic, dynamic Focusing-oriented psychotherapist who
weaves mindfulness and Zen principles into her work. She has brought
Focusing into business and school settings and to conflict resolution
conferences. Atsmaout explores topics such as: the courage to change,
“being my own empathic soulful friend,” intimacy in partnerships, and
being an authentic and spontaneous therapist. |
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Lucy
Bowers has been teaching school children since the early 60s. She began
studying Bio Spiritual Focusing in the early 80s and is now a Certifying
Coordinator with the Focusing Institute. She has presented her work with
children for teachers, social workers, parents etc throughout Canada and
in other countries. Focusing and sharing Focusing has been the passion
that fuels her life. |
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Fees: Tuition plus Room and Board
There are 2 costs associated with this retreat - tuition and room and board.
The deposit is for the whole tuition. Room and board must be paid by June 21.
If you are going to pay room and board later, please tell us in the
instructions on the last page of the order if you are going to want a single,
double or dorm-style room.
Tuition:
Registration $750. Special discount when 2 people register together $700
each.
Room and board fee: Single:$660, Double: $540, Dorm-style: $450 (They are
triple/quad rooms. We will make room assignment depending on the number of males
and females wanting this category.)
Please note: There are a limited number of Dorm-style rooms available.
If you are ordering a Dorm-style room, please tell us in the instructions on the
last page of the order if you are paying for room and board for more than one
person.
Questions, please contact Melinda Darer:
melinda@focusing.org or 845-362-5222.
$150 administrative fee for cancellation, all fees nonrefundable, after June
21 except in unavoidable emergency.
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Product Code: W-070820-FS
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