How This Work Heals
Let’s begin with the values
that ground this work:​
Safety
We begin by establishing a felt sense of inner and outer safety. This is the foundation for everything that follows.
A welcoming of your whole self
Not just the polished parts – but the uncertain, reactive, or contracted places as well.
Friendly, non-judgmental curiosity
Together, we create a space where nothing in you needs to be pushed away.
A sense of wonder
As we open, something larger begins to emerge – something that holds both of us, and more.
An embodied spirituality
Your everyday struggles are not distractions from your path –
They are your path.
This work is not about fixing yourself.
It’s about increasing your capacity to stay present to your lived experience –
Until what feels stuck or cut off begins to open, move, and reconnect with the larger flow of your life.
So… how does this work actually help you heal?
You slow down and pause... long enough to notice what is going on right now in your body.
You start to become less sure of what's supposed to be happening. Instead, you start to listen more attentively to what is happening. Hints of a new aliveness stir inside you...
That new aliveness you feel is your own life energy waking up and starting to
feel its own way forward through a situation which moments before
seemed impenetrable.
How Is This Work Different?​
A concern brought up at times by prospective clients and students is:
"I’ve spent years in this muck. Uh… remind me why I want to spend more time there?"
Our work together is not about rehashing, fixing, analyzing, trying harder, being more positive, etc. It is about connecting with what wants to come to awareness now, freshly, out of your body’s sense of this whole situation, right now.
What comes may be surprising, weird, enchanting, bizarre, funny, insightful, mysterious. What pretty much never comes is the "same old/same old."
The key to the effectiveness of this work is that it starts with the assumption of your wholeness.
What does this mean?
1.) It means that there’s not something you lack that you are striving to get. You are relaxing into what’s already here inside.
2.) When something shows up in your experience, it shows up because it is part of you, and there is some good reason why it is here, now. No matter how unattractive or unworthy or just plain dull and unimportant it may seem, it is holding some crucial part of your life energy.
"Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness."
– Eugene Gendlin
Ph.D. Founder of Focusing
In difficult, persistent issues, there is always some aspect of your experience that you have pushed away as something that is not-you, that doesn’t belong.
In other words, you feel blocked because you have blocked off some crucial bit of your own life-energy.
In Focusing, we invite into consciousness what wants to come to awareness now. You are guided into welcoming and then being with whatever shows up in a companionable way. Locked-up life energy is freed from its prison and allowed to return to the wholeness of who you are, to enliven your whole being.
From that place of wholeness, of integration, your life begins to move into its next right steps.
