Focusing: The Body’s Understanding of How It Is Now
led by Gena Corea and Helen Hawes
In the 1960s, philosopher Dr. Eugene Gendlin, working at the University of Chicago, discovered Focusing, a gentle process for accessing a bodily knowing. With training in attending to the “felt sense,” you can find the entry point to your embodied knowing. The felt or body sense contains everything your organism has sensed as it has lived in its human situations. Consisting of the unconscious mind, feelings, desires, memories and thoughts, the body sense is more complex than rational thought alone.
Gendlin developed specific steps for attending to this body sense and tapping into its vast source of data. These Focusing steps enable you to get a “gut feeling” about anything.
Focusing brings brand new, fresh information—not yesterday’s stale facts, not data you can find on the internet, but creations born of your own experiencing, right now. Come find your Personal Inner Guidance System (pigs) to help in:
Decision-making and problem-solving; working for social justice; life transitions such as parenting, career changes, death and divorce; managing stress; attending to troublesome feelings without being overwhelmed by them; breaking through action blocks and creative blocks; listening to physical symptoms from the point of view of the symptom itself; finding lost parts of yourself; bringing the body’s wisdom into writing, painting and all the arts; deepening intimacy in relationships.
Focusing gives you the pleasure of discovery. Since you are accessing what you know in your gut before it has been sent upstairs to the brain, what emerges in a Focusing session is often surprising and refreshing.
Places you will find Focusers:
- In corporations and art studios
- In schools and monasteries
- In prisons, malls, and medical practices
- In churches and temples
- In support groups and emergency rooms
- Outdoors and indoors, in rain, snow and sunshine
- In countries all over the world
Participants are asked to arrange for one guided Focusing session before September 15, at the half-price of $30, with either Corea or Hawes in order to facilitate the deepening of your experience during the workshop. For those living at a distance from Vermont, the session can be conducted over the telephone.
