What is Somatic Focusing?
To learn about and enroll in my 10 week Somatic Focusing course click here
The Art of Deep Inner Listening
Somatic Focusing, also known as Inner Relationship Focusing, is the art of deep inner listening—a gentle yet powerful practice that taps into the body’s incredible native intelligence. Discovered in the 1950s by Eugene Gendlin, this transformative approach helps you access the body’s natural movement towards growth, its inbuilt capacity to heal, and its power to illuminate creative solutions to life’s conundrums.
The practice of Focusing arose from groundbreaking research by Gendlin in collaboration with luminary psychologist Carl Rogers. By studying videotaped therapy sessions, Gendlin uncovered a key insight: those who benefitted most from therapy had an ability to connect with a unique bodily phenomenon called the Felt Sense.
The Felt Sense is a dynamic, embodied awareness that arises in response to life’s challenges and experiences. It is a subtle yet vastly nuanced sensation —a holistic “knowing” that holds far more insight than the mind alone can provide. Like a flower bud opening in sunlight, the Felt Sense holds a treasury of information about our life, affording new ways to:
Build a deep and nurturing connection with your body and its inner wisdom.
Unlock fresh perspectives on the challenges that leave you feeling stuck.
Discover clear, actionable steps toward healing and personal growth.
Access deeper dimensions of your Being, opening pathways to profound spiritual growth and self-discovery.
Focusing is an exquisite process that comes naturally to us. My role as a Focusing teacher is to help you reconnect with this innate ability—to guide you in turning inward and listening to the wisdom of your body. Through this practice, you’ll rediscover a tool that empowers you to heal and grow, through life’s many ups and downs.
Whether you're seeking emotional clarity, a path through life’s challenges, or a deeper connection to yourself, Somatic Focusing provides a profound and life-changing resource that’s accessible whenever you need it.
How does Somatic 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 a practice known as Inner Relationship Focusing, which allows us to connect with the "family" of inner parts that live within us—often the parts that carry wounds from childhood. These may include feelings of grief, abandonment, rejection, anger, shame, or hurt, as well as the inner critics who seek to keep us small 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.
Experience Somatic Focusing For Yourself
Book a private 1:1 session to experience the beauty of Somatic Focusing firsthand. Taking our time to regulate the nervous system first, we’ll gently explore your inner world, guided by the deep wisdom of your body.
Private Somatic Focusing sessions are deeply personalized, creating a safe space for you to connect with your inner world. My role in session is to companion you as you touch into and are guided by the unfolding wisdom of the felt sense in your body. Through this guided process, you can:
Explore and resolve life challenges with body-centered awareness.
Cultivate emotional resilience and self-compassion.
Experience a sense of rest and nourishment even in difficult moments.
Learn how to regulate your nervous system.
Somatic Focusing 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
What to expect in a Focusing Session
Meet your teacher
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.
Learn more with my introductory videos
This invitational video to the Focusing 1 training introduces the transformative practice of Somatic Focusing, showing how to access your body’s innate ability to heal and grow.
In this video I distill 5 key benefits of learning Somatic Focusing, including how it bridges mindfulness and body awareness. In a world saturated with Mindfulness techniques, Focusing gifts us greater "bodyfulness", affording access to the inimitable wisdom of the body.
Ready to transform from within?
Take the first step toward profound healing and growth. Whether through private sessions or enrolling in my 10 week course, Somatic Focusing is your pathway to inner clarity and wholeness.
