Do you want to learn how to:
- Be a better listener to yourself?
- Make clear choices?
- Be calm and compassionate to yourself?
- Support yourself through change?
- Feel relaxed and less stressful?
Focusing helps you learn how to be Present and listen to yourself so that you can move ahead in your life in an empowered and safe way. Focusing brings you closer to wholeness and allows you to access your inner wisdom. This helps you move in the direction of your potential. It can help you move beyond blocks and get in touch with your goals. Focusing is a gentle and powerful way to develop a deep interpersonal healing relationship with yourself.
Awareness of sensations in the body can be blocked through habits of dissociation and repression. This is because the sensation maybe uncomfortable or painful, and we are not trained to focus on this inner knowing and awareness of the body. Transformation of energy involves the acknowledgment, and information of the inner movement of sensation. This energy and awareness is essential to reconnect what has been fragmented by life stress, injury or trauma.
In this workshop we will work with:
- artist’s blocks
- money issues that we may have around our art
- time issues that we may have for our art making
- why we can’t get into the studio
What is Focusing?
Focusing is “direct access to bodily knowing.” It is a practice that takes a person towards a state of conscious perception that goes far beyond knowing something on a mere conceptual level.
As with Somatic Experiencing, Focusing refers to this bodily knowing as a felt sense. As the Focusing Institute’s website explains, “You can sense your living body directly under your thoughts and memories and under your familiar feelings.” Focusing happens at a deeper level than your feelings. Under them you can discover a physically sensed murky zone which is concretely there. This is a source from which new steps emerge. This murky zone “opens” as you learn to stay with it longer. Being with it increases the ability to sense feelings behind words or images, even when those are not yet formed. Eventually, you can learn how to let a deeper bodily felt sense come in relation to any problem or situation. It is a subtle process, hard to define in words. Focusing was developed by the philosopher Eugene Gendlin in the late 1960s and early 70s, while he was working with the famed psychologist Carl Rogers.
You will learn the skills of and receive credit for Level One Focusing by taking this workshop. You can continue to take Level 2 to 4 with Karen or another Focusing Teacher after this workshop.
About the Instructor
Karen Wallace
Karen is an artist, art therapist and art instructor. She leads creativity, archetypal and therapy workshops and has a private practice in Regina, SK. Canada. Karen teaches Art Therapy at several retreats and schools in Canada and internationally. She is currently studying Interrelationship Focusing with Ann Cornell and Wholebody Focusing with Glenn Fleish and has combined this with her knowledge of Somatic Experiencing and Expressive Therapy to offer creative and healing workshops.
Karen has presented workshops at Hollyhock B.C., Hawaii, Italy, throughout the U.S.A. and at several retreats in Canada. Her entertaining and insightful programs create an enriched creative process to play, explore and learn.
- Visit Karen’s blog.