Focusing with Eugene T. Gendlin/Focusing Teachers


	Kathy McGuire Bouwman gives an impassioned talk about why she teaches Focusing and Listening together and how the exchange of turns builds a community of sacred bonding between participants. She gives a twenty-minute instruction on "Focusing on something that touches or moves you to tears."
Neil Friedman shows how to plan an introductory workshop and gives a noteworthy rundown of the psychotherapy research that led to the discovery of Focusing. He also gives a Focusing Instruction which can be tried on one's own.
	Ann Weiser Cornell, with credit to an also-present Barbara McGavin, presents her newest way of teaching Focusing on the first day of a workshop by Focusing herself. In this session Ann says out loud her inner process while Focusing and shows the application of her "Inner Relationship" work. The session is very delicate as Ann touches upon tears in relation to a "small, young" part of herself that needs and is getting protection - a suitable example to show at a workshop.
Robert Lee demonstrates a teaching method he calls "3-dimensional" in which he helps a beginning "listener" to differentiate when focuser is thinking, having a felt sense and being in an empathic relationship to the self. He does this by using a technique with three chairs, to help the listener pay attention to the focuser's process.
	Mia Leijssen, a professor at the University of Leuven, Belgium demonstrates one of her research projects. In her own work she discovered that as the therapist / listener, while paying attention to the focuser's felt sense, she has her own felt sense about this person's process. She found that when she verbalized her felt sense, it was often congruent with what the focuser was experiencing. Mia claims that it is a teachable process. She leads a small group of participants through the initial steps of such training.
Fr. Ed McMahon and Fr. Pete Campbell, psychologists of religion and co-founders of the Institute for BioSpiritual Research, explore the link between Focusing and Spirituality. They present their insight - that the body's ability to experience felt meaning is the forgotten bridge into the experience of Spirit. In a simple, practical process they show how BioSpiritual focusing reawakens one's ability to allow a transcendent quality for meaning in the body to guide one into greater wholeness. This excerpt is a clip from the video series "The Body's Search for Spirit"