Learn Focusing
Understanding You – Through Focusing
Do you often feel disconnected from your emotions or struggle to understand what you truly want? Focusing is a powerful, body-based practice that helps you tap into your inner awareness—your ‘felt sense’—to gain deeper insight into your experiences.
Focusing teaches you to listen to the wisdom of your body, guiding you toward emotional healing and a more authentic connection with yourself.
What is Focusing?
Focusing teaches us toIt is a body-based practice of developing an inner self-awareness and as a result, emotional healing.
The Origins of Focusing
In the 1960s, Eugene Gendlin, while collaborating with Carl Rogers, embarked on a groundbreaking research project. The goal was to understand why psychotherapy and counselling were not effective for all clients. Gendlin and his team recorded hundreds of hours of therapy sessions and discovered a critical insight:
Internal Processing
The way clients processed their experiences internally was a key determinant of successful therapeutic outcomes.
Predictive Outcomes
They found that by observing the first therapy session, they could often predict whether the therapy would be successful.
Key Findings
Successful clients consistently connected with their present-moment experience and developed an awareness of their ‘felt-sense’—an internal understanding of their entire situation. This connection was observed through:
Slowing down their speech.
Becoming less articulate as they checked their words against how their entire situation felt within their body.
Development of the 6-Step Focusing Process:
Gendlin questioned whether this ability to connect with the felt-sense was an innate skill or something that could be taught. This inquiry led him to develop a 6-step process to engage with the body’s felt-sense, a method that has since been taught worldwide and integrated into many therapeutic practices.
The Felt Sense
The felt-sense is the whole way a situation feels in your body. It may include emotions, sensations, metaphor, imagery, memories, words – in fact it may encompass and be felt through many of these at one time.
This term, “felt-sense” has become popularised in current somatic therapies, yet its origins are rarely cited and its meaning is usually lost in translation.
Today, many therapists use ‘felt-sense’ interchangeably with emotion or sensation. Yet it is much more than that. The felt-sense is a culmination of all your body knows about your life or about this certain situation of yours. It is deep and rich, and it wants to be listened to, for it has much to tell us.
Focusing-Oriented Therapy
At Holding the Space, I work from a Focusing-Oriented perspective in our counselling sessions (along with other therapeutic modalities). This means that I hold the space for you to get in touch with what your body knows about the whole of your situation. I’ll guide you in this process.
Learn Focusing
I also offer training in Focusing, so that you can take this beautiful life-enhancing skill into all aspects of your life, building a place of emotional healing and inner-relationship with yourself.
Once you have learned Focusing you can practice it in traditional Focusing Partnerships. This is where you meet one on one with another Focuser and exchange time Focusing and Listening. This partnership is free and greatly enhances therapeutic outcomes and overall life satisfaction.
Benefits of Focusing
If you’re seeking a way to better understand your feelings, make clearer decisions, or enhance your counselling outcomes, Focusing may be the right path for you. Once learned, Focusing can help you in all moments when you want to be in touch with your felt sense, your intuition and the wisdom of your body. Focusing helps you to:
Understand what you are truly wanting and feeling
Make decisions, solve problems creatively, and overcome obstacles
Be more friendly and attentive to yourself and others
Integrate body, mind and spirit
Find relief from tension, pain and other discomforts
Make more effective and deepen counselling outcomes
Learn Focusing with Cathy Lee
My classes run for 10 weeks and work within the NSW school terms.
I do also offer one-on-one Learn Focusing classes. Please contact me to enquire and book.
Day & Time
Friday’s 10am – 12pm
Dates
7th February – 11th April 2025
Place
Online, in a comfortable space of your choosing
