The Heart of the Practice
Returning to the wellspring from which everything fresh and new emerges.
Right Relating is a way of being - being with ourselves, being with one another, being in the world - building on, and deepening into, the fundamentals of Focusing and Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit. Join us as we bring Self in Presence to our inner exploration, our work with others, our relationships, and ultimately to every aspect of our lives.
Returning to the Fundamentals
Focusing is not just a methodology, it is a way of being more fully human. This natural human capacity can be learned and can change the way we relate to ourselves and others, allowing freshness and vitality to infuse our moment to moment experience, our relationships and all of our lives.
As humans, we have “built-in forgetters” - we drift, even from what we know is true and essential. It’s inevitable. Even though we know that being with what is, as it is, is what allows change to flow forth, we forget, and we fall back into conditioned ways of being: labeling and assuming instead of encountering freshly and wondering; interpreting and analyzing instead of slowing down and deeply listening; and leading or pushing an agenda instead of accompanying and allowing what is unclear to emerge in its own time. Returning to the fundamentals of Focusing is returning to a way of being with ourselves that allows fresh life to emerge, and can transform our way of being in the world.
Helping One Another
Focusing makes all good methods work better because it cultivates our capacity to turn toward and accompany what is, just as it is, creating the environment that allows fresh steps of change to emerge. The embodiment of this way of being is what we call Right Relating. When we bring this into our work with clients, even in the most subtle ways, our work is easier, our clients feel more seen and supported, and lasting change occurs.
How do we harness the power of focusing to support our clients? How do we stay present when others are in distress or experiencing intense emotions? How do we cultivate the confidence that being with what is, just as it is, will bring next steps, and hold that knowing, even as we also hold and use all the skills, methods, and tools we have learned in order to help people change?
Our Practitioner groups provide support and community around questions like these, and more.
Living with Inner Complexity
Complex Developmental Trauma is a particular interest of mine, because of my own experience and my observation that many, many people share this kind of experience. So very many people come into the world and develop as bodies and embodied minds in environments that don’t support what the world calls “normal” development. Our bodies adapt in ingenious ways that enable us to survive even unimaginable hurt, yet our suffering is ongoing even after childhood because of how these adaptations play out in our lives in the world. Focusing can help us learn to understand the sense our inner worlds actually make, to gently and respectfully access places that got locked away, and cultivate a way of being that allows the living forward of our wholeness.
I am passionate about bringing together individuals with a history of complex developmental trauma to explore our present experiences of living with complex systems and complex processes, using the focusing practice and the focusing way of being that I call Right Relating.
“"Most of our living is more intricate than concepts and goes on quite well without them."”
— Eugene Gendlin