Basic skills start HERE! Join us if you would like... *to improve your ability to listen, both within yourself and to the world around you. *to nurture trust within yourself and become your own best friend. *to develop social and emotional skills that make it easier to be your authentic self in the world. *to explore the essence of change and the healing capacity of our own body. *to grow your ability to be with yourself and the world from a place of deep understanding and compassion (we might say through eyes of the divine). *to heal trauma and learn to support yourself and others in change processes. *to rewire your autonomic responses toward safety, belonging and resilience. *to experience yourself as living process, evolving toward a greater sense of wellbeing. *to maintain a healthy brain in a world struggling to know what is real. *to begin your journey toward Certification as a Focusing Professional with The International Focusing Institute. We will be do this by Creating Space. Together. For ourselves and each other. You might not quite know what that means and that is how it should be. We'll be unlearning our traditional cultural ways of relating with ourself and others and rewiring our neural connections toward safety and connection as our natural way of being in the world. Much of what we learn to do here revolves around the Gendlin's concept that 'change requires being in relationship'. Here are some of the inner relational skills we'll be developing here: Making space for what you sense inside Sensing body sensations, images, emotions, thoughts, movements Forming relationships with what comes up Staying with them Sensing when they change Sensing what fits and doesn’t - checking back for a yes, no or more... Being able to tell whether what you observe is aware of you being with it Being with one body sense even as you’re sensing something new arising Enjoying positive feelings We will all find our own way to doing this. We practice in partnership here to make it easier for us to stay with our own process. Companioning others comes with a variety of gifts, one being that our body finds new ways to communicate with us by observing what works for others. Part 1 is also a good place to return to after you have been Focusing for awhile. This is spiral learning and something new comes every time around. It still does for me as your teacher. We have two starting opportunities for 2026. We may add another evening option in fall. All require a Prerequisite: Guided Focusing Session Creating Space for Lasting Change PART 1 2026 Offerings 6 Thursday evenings – 7 - 9 pm Eastern New York Time or your equivalent Sept 17, Oct 1, Oct 15, Oct 22, Nov 5, Nov 19 6 Sunday afternoons – 2 - 4 pm Eastern New York Time or your equivalent Sept 20, Oct 4, Oct 18, Nov 1, Nov 15 (3 weeks), Dec 6
