Learn Somatic Focusing
Unlock self-healing & personal growth
Discovered in the 1970s by Eugene Gendlin, Focusing is the art of deep inner listening. Focusers learn to tap into the body’s incredible native intelligence, its natural movement towards growth, and its inbuilt capacity to heal. It is an exquisite process that comes very naturally to us and it is my job as a Focusing teacher to help you remember.
The practise of Focusing emerged from Gendlin’s study of videotaped therapy sessions with luminary psychologist, Carl Rogers. He discovered that those who benefitted most from therapy were naturally able to connect to a bodily phenomenon known as the ‘felt sense’, a dynamic, embodied awareness that arises in response to life’s many triggers and challenges. The felt sense holds an incredible amount of insight about our life - far more than the mind alone can know - together with the right next step that we can take towards healing and growth. In this way, Focusers are capable of unlocking new understanding around issues where they feel stuck, using a life tool that is available to them whenever they need it.
How does Focusing work?
When we focus, we start by slowing down and by pausing. This invites in a fertile space to explore our life and its challenges with fresh eyes. And it is into this space that the felt sense slowly takes form, offering a doorway into a process that is life enhancing. I teach inner relationship focusing, which connects us to the family of inner parts that live within us, and which are accessed via the felt sense. Often, these represent the parts of us that were wounded in childhood; the ones that carry grief, abandonment, rejection, anger, shame and hurt, together with the inner critics who would keep us small, boxed in and safe. Consciously and compassionately connecting to our inner parts through the felt sense, we can slowly tend, hear and heal them, offering them the unconditional listening ear that our parents were unable to offer us. In this way Focusers learn to re-parent themselves, calling home the lost, orphaned and disavowed ones back into the family of wholeness.
Focusing also opens us into naturally healing, embodied states of being that can arise spontaneously in response to our inner suffering. Flowing from a deeper place, these states emerge from the part of us that was never broken and which is capable of holding all of our wounds, labels, deficiency stories and traumas because it is prior to them. From experiences of deep peace to feelings of boundless maternal love or dynamic strength, the vast intelligence of Being so often dynamically arises in the midst of our suffering, meeting us exactly where we are; offering us a medicine that is exquisitely tailored to the moment. Nothing outside ourselves is needed, nothing external need be added, just a willingness to walk through the doorway of what ails us on the path of healing. Focusing is the key in the lock, helping us to contact and metabolise our wounds as well as connecting into the deep truth that lies beyond them.
Want to experience Focusing before diving in? Book an individual Focusing session with me.
Learn focusing for yourself
Focusing 1: Foundations
Learn the skills to unlock your inner wisdom
In this 10-week introductory program, you will:
Discover the fundamentals of Somatic Focusing.
Learn how to cultivate Self in Presence; the deep ground of somatic work.
Learn to access the dynamic wisdom of the felt sense as a tool for healing and growth.
Learn a fresh approach to working through any stuck areas in your life.
Gain deep listening skills to hold space for others in your life.
Build Focusing partnerships to practice your skills.
Gain skills to see life challenges from a different perspective
Gain lifelong tools for emotional regulation and self-awareness.
Learn amongst a small cohort of like-minded folks on a path of growth and discovery
Course Details:
Format: Small group classes, live on Zoom with 1hr focusing partnerships between classes to practise and deepen your skills
Duration: 10 weekly 2.5hr sessions.
Outcome: Ability to Focus on your own and in partnership.
Plus, a copy of the Focusing 1 practitioner’s manual to keep, together with easy to follow focusing exercise cards covering skills learned each week.
Focusing 1 is your gateway to reconnecting with your body and its innate intelligence. In a world saturated with mindfulness practises, Focusing is a tool that cultivates the bounty of what Christine Caldwell calls ‘bodyfulness’
Next Course: Jan 10th - March 14th 2025
Focusing 2: Deepening
This 10 week advanced training is the next step for those who have completed Focusing 1. This course builds on the foundational skills of Focusing, equipping you with advanced tools to explore complex emotional dynamics, unlock deeper self-awareness, and cultivate a richer relationship with your inner world.
You will:
Learn advanced techniques for working with inner parts, including tools to transform the inner critic and patterns of self sabotage
Learn how to be a more supportive presence in Focusing partnership, offering skilful invitations to help deepen their experience
Gain a deeper understanding of the structure of Focusing, the steps, stages and ways of coming into inner relationship at each
Skills to overcome common challenges when doing somatic inner work, including resistance, emotional overwhelm, doubt, flatness, stuckness and vagueness
Practices to address long-standing patterns and blocks.
Skilful tools to work with complex inner states or multiple parts that want different things
Course Details:
Format: Small group classes, live on Zoom with 1hr focusing partnerships between classes to practise and deepen your skills
Duration: 10 weekly 2.5hr sessions
Outcome: Proficiency in Focusing for deeper personal and interpersonal work
Plus, a copy of the Focusing 2 practitioner’s manual to keep, together with easy to follow focusing exercise cards covering skills learned each week.
Next Course: Oct 10th - Dec 12th 2025
Private Focusing sessions with me
In addition to learning Focusing for yourself, I also offer private, 1:1 focusing sessions with individuals, to help them work through issues in their life
I’ll gently guide you in the process, first creating a sense of slowness and safety in the body, before leading you in. Sessions are 1hr in duration and are unlike most types of traditional talk therapy in that we are almost entirely guided by your body and the process unfolding within it. People often find Focusing enormously restful and nourishing, even when difficult experiences are touched into. This is because Focusing cultivates deep presence and self awareness and leverages polyvagal tools to help you regulate your nervous system. Book a 1:1 Focusing session with me here
Why learn with me?
I am a certified teacher of Somatic and Inner Relationship Focusing, accredited with the International Focusing Institute. This intensive 2 year training - grounded in contemporary polyvagal theory - was deeply experiential and profoundly shifted the relationship I had with my body and the family of inner parts it housed.
Like many, I once lived ‘from the neck up’, quarantined from my body and the kaleidoscope of stored wounds that it held. But Focusing was part of a seismic shift in the relationship I had with myself and it gifted me the gentle capacity to turn inwards and towards my suffering, rather than outward on a search to transcend or escape. It taught me how to walk through the doorway of direct experience in a profound process of healing, growth and discovery.
I am passionate about helping others unlock the wisdom that lives within them and would be honoured to pay forward the gift of Focusing.