Focusing-Oriented Therapy Applications 

May 2025 (three-day workshop)

If your everyday practice is to open to all your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that – then that will take you as far as you can go. And then you’ll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.” – Pema Chodron

When we have some problems in life, we usually feel too much or too little. In FOT, we take a moment with intense emotional experience and allow a freshly forming, whole bodily sense of it to emerge. By doing that, we suspend what we already know and all possible judgments of that emotion or feeling as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and shift into particular attention to the present experiencing. Experiencing is more than feeling; it is where we find what matters and where new meaning emerges.

From the FOT perspective, we don’t focus on pathology or work with abstract and generalised states or conditions such as anxiety, depression, jealousy, sadness, etc. We work with the specific individual experience in the context of individual tendencies (nature or constitution) and interpersonal influences (nurture). Gendlin (1996) wrote about psychotherapy “as the client’s process, rather than as a type of procedure” (p.178). With that view, this workshop offers you an exploration of:

-       Working with a variety of emotional experiences and expressions to open our perspective, find a way to be present with them, to connect and develop ease with them, which will re-establish a natural flow

-       Experiential understanding of different emotions, feeling states and sequences - fear, anger, guilt, shame, humiliation, anxious and depressed moods, grief process and consequent social insecurities and addictions.