Level 1: Encountering the Inner Relationship
Overview:
Ability and clarity in the essential process of Focusing, and the ability to listen to a Focuser, so that when the class/workshop is complete each person is able to continue practicing with a partner or in a Changes group.
Essence:
Focusing is an inner relationship.
Focusing Skills:
• Understanding the importance of the inner relationship and being able to hold facilitating attitudes for it, including patience, not-knowing, inner presence, and inner listening.
• Knowing what to do when you can’t hold this attitude.
• Being able to bring awareness into the body, especially the torso area.
• Being able to find a felt sense about an issue.
• Being able to find a felt sense without specifying the issue in advance (“What wants my awareness now?”).
• Being able to acknowledge any inner experience, and especially to acknowledge strong feeling as a way of forming a relationship with it.
• Being able to find descriptions for inner experience.
• Being able to check/confirm descriptions with inner experience, as well as checking/confirming whatever else arises.
• Being able to sit with the felt sense with a curious, interested attitude, and ask it questions if necessary without answering the questions mentally.
• Being able to receive new and positive awareness and allow it to be there.
• Knowing about the commonest blocks to Focusing, like the Critic, the Doubter, fearing, fixing, imposing, forcing a choice, etc., and being able to recognize and acknowledge them when they come.
• Beginning to be able to Focus alone. (This ability develops over the whole training.)
Listening Skills:
• Being able to be deeply present with another person who is Focusing.
• Being able to give listening reflections, some word-for-word and some paraphrasing, without asking questions, leading, or interpreting.
• As a Focuser, being able to use listening responses to check/confirm with inner experience.
• As a Focuser, being able to say when a listening response is not right or only partly right, and to use that not-quite-right to sense what is right instead.
• As a Focuser, being able to tell a listener how you would like to be listened to.
• Being aware that the Focuser is in charge of the Focusing/listening exchange.
Level 2: Accompanying the Inner Relationship
Overview:
Deeper acquaintance with Presence and “the edge.” Creating and enhancing competence in self-guiding (with a listener), learning advanced listening techniques that deepen the focuser’s ability to stay with present awareness, and leading-in.
Essence:
Being a more and more facilitative companion to a Focusing process, in yourself, or in another.
Presence is the ability to be with whatever arises in awareness.
We cultivate Presence by:
• Sensing the supported body as a whole
• Using Presence language
• Remembering what Focusing partnership feels like
The “edge” is the experience of “more-than-words”
We understand more and more how that “more than words” quality of awareness is the source of change... and we learn skills for supporting a partner in finding that edge.
Listening Skills:
• Deepening of the ability to give a listening presence to another person, including noticing what might be in the way of that.
• Knowing how to be present to one's self and inwardly acknowledge one's own feelings while listening to another.
Advanced listening skills:
• Responding to the present.
• Responding to what's there rather than what's not there.
• Not responding to doubts or what's not known.
• Using “something” to respond to what’s not yet specified.
• Using “part of you” or “something” to facilitate disidentification.
• Including the focuser (as in “You’re sensing,” “You’re realizing,” etc.).
Guiding skills:
• Leading-in at the start of the session
NOTE: The textbook for Levels 1& 2 is The Focusing Student's & Companion's Manual-Part 1 by Ann Weiser Cornell.
Level 3: Supporting the Inner Relationship
Overview:
Learning how a guiding session proceeds if it goes smoothly, with no major blocks or hitches. Beginning to learn to guide when the partner requests it and be supportive with reminders throughout the session.
Essence:
The Focusing session has a typical “shape,” and the guide is aware of supportive suggestions appropriate to each stage of the process.
Guiding Skills:
• Knowing that the companion is guided by the focuser's process.
• Having the attitude of the absolute rightness of the focuser's process.
• Being able to say “Yes” to whatever happens for the focuser even if gently suggesting something else.
• Knowing how to use tone of voice and pacing to enhance the focuser’s experience.
• Being able to help the focuser bring awareness into the body.
• Being able to help the focuser acknowledge what comes.
• Being able to help the focuser find the description.
• Being able to help the focuser check/confirm the description and other meanings that come during the session.
• Being able to help the focuser be in Presence
• Being able to help the focuser be with the sense in a curious interested way, and offer it invitations if necessary.
• Knowing how to help the focuser create a positive inner relationship by sensing it from ITs point of view, and by letting it know they hear it.
• Being able to help the focuser receive new and/or positive experiences.
• Being able to help the focuser end the session gently, usually by checking if something more needs to be acknowledged and thanking what came. (If necessary, leading out.)
Level 4: Facilitating the Inner Relationship
Overview:
A compassionate approach to blocks, inner criticizing, thoughts and distractions, physical symptoms. Guiding another person who is encountering these things. Guiding people through other blocks such as feeling “nothing,” feeling overwhelmed, one part which is victimizing or attacking another, etc.
Essence:
Going to a higher/deeper level with the philosophy of Focusing, sometimes called “The Radical Acceptance of Everything.”
Guiding Skills:
• Being able to help a Focuser who has a hard time finding a felt sense, using evoking techniques, inclusion of whatever comes, and awareness of positive feelings.
• Being able to help the Focuser deal with the Critic and other interfering voices.
• Knowing how to help the Focuser when two or more “somethings” come, especially when they are in conflict.
• Being able to help the Focuser move awareness to the Feeling about the Feeling.
• Being able to help the Focuser be compassionate to blocks, and knowing why.
• Knowing how to sense when a silence has lasted long enough and how to come in.
• Knowing how to accept the focuser's refusal to do what is suggested, with grace.
• Being able to tell when something suggested has confused or stopped the focuser, and being able to take it back, back up, or break it into smaller steps.
Level 5: Guiding New People
Overview:
The key characteristic of this class/workshop is that people new to Focusing are invited as guests and participants guide them in class, with or without video. After the session, the guest leaves and the class discusses the session (gently!) and watches segments of the video.
Essence:
Guiding a person who is new to Focusing includes getting to know what the person expects from the session, answering questions, explaining the guiding process, and other pre- and post-session contextual processes, as well as being responsive to special needs during the session.
Guiding Skills:
• Being able to make a new person feel comfortable and safe.
• Being able to answer the question, “What is Focusing?” and to answer other typical questions.
• Being able to explain to the focuser before the session what is expected.
• Being able to use all the guiding skills from Levels 3 and 4 with people new to Focusing.
• Being able to rephrase any suggestion because the language may not have connected for this person.
• Understanding that reflection does not have the same effect for a new person that it does for an experienced focuser, and being able to rephrase reflections as suggestions to resonate, acknowledge, or be with, if necessary.
• Being open to the unexpected; being able to "forge new tools" as needed.
NOTE: The textbook for 3, 4 and 5 is The Focusing Student's & Companion's Manual-Part 2 by Ann Weiser Cornell.
Certification Training Outside of Formal Classes
Other skills:
• Being able to explain Focusing to a new prospect calling on the phone.
• Being able to give an introductory talk on Focusing.
• Being able to develop centered, wholistic marketing strategies that enhance the Focusing message and enable building a teaching practice with integrity.
Teaching skills:
• Being able to plan a class for teaching Focusing and listening.
• Being able to talk about/describe the following:
• What is Focusing
• What attitudes enhance Focusing
• Blocks to Focusing, especially the Critic, and how to respond
• What to do when feelings are strong; the power of acknowledging
• The importance of positive feeling
• Being able to gently guide group process, setting an atmosphere of safety, setting and enforcing ground rules such as no discussion of content, and making sure each person is acknowledged.
• Being able to lead group Focusing exercises.
• Being able to lead round-robin listening practice.
One-to-one skills:
• Being able to have the Focusing attitude toward a client even while outside the actual session.
• Being able to set boundaries clearly and negotiate gently but clearly about fees, times, policies on lateness and missed sessions, etc.
• Understanding clearly and being able to explain the differences between Focusing teaching and psychotherapy.
• Knowing when this person or situation is not appropriate for Focusing training and being able to refer the person to a more appropriate helper in a loving way.
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