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Course
Focusing and the Enneagram Level 4:
The Radical Acceptance of Everything
F&TE-4 is the fourth workshop in our Focusing and the Enneagram Training, and will return to the essence of Focusing.
Schedule
Sat. Sept. 17, 1PM-4PM ET
Sat. Oct. 8, 1PM-4PM ET
Sat. Oct. 15, 1PM-4PM ET
Sat. Oct. 22, 1PM-4PM ET
Zoom Link
New! Recommended Text for Levels 3 and 4:
The Focusing Student's and Companion's Manual Part Two
“Experiencing is a myriad richness that exceeds any number of separated facets. There is vastly more than our conceptual structures can encompass. And experiencing moves—we cannot think all that just was. We feel more than we can think, and we live more than we can feel. And if we enter into what we feel in certain genuine steps, we feel more than before.
And there is much more still.
Despite so much, experiencing is always also in various ways a whole, and it also already involves the other people, situations, things and contexts in which it occurs.
Experiencing exceeds thinking.
Thinking is a great and indispensable power, but how thin it usually is! It can make stick figures of anything. We have a trunk full of patterns, mostly gotten second hand, which can reduce anything to manageable proportions. We have many such thought forms. Depending on which we take out and apply, we can reduce anything to one of the various types of stick figures.
Whatever one thinks upon seems rendered as if it were itself no more than the sticks and patterns of that kind of thinking.”
Eugene Gendlin, Draft 1971
“Staying with a bodily felt sense is not like pushing into emotions or feelings. In ordinary experience there are only two possibilities. Either you fall into your feeling or else you run away from it. Neither of those is very good. In focusing there is a third possibility. You stay next to whatever you find, or near it. Once you know how to stay next to something, you never again need to be afraid of anything inside you. If it is too much at the moment, you know how to step back and say: ‘Oh, that's too much for me right now.’ You don't run away, you're still in touch with it, but near it and not in it. You back up and take a little room to breathe. The steps come best when you are neither fallen in, nor running away. They come when you can say ''I am here, it is there.”
When You Feel the Body From the Inside, There is a Door
Eugene Gendlin
Gendlin, E.T. (2000). When you feel the body from inside, there is a door. In Jeffrey K. Zeig (Ed.), The evolution of psychotherapy: A meeting of the minds.
Phoenix, AZ: The Milton H. Erickson Foundation Press. From http://previous.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2232.html
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