Learning how to BE with your struggle over food, weight and body image in a way that allows it to finally shift and transform
Beta Version! (see below for more information)
You've just read (and FULLY
agree with!) the latest article explaining why diets don't work... and yet you find yourself thumbing through the same magazine searching for that article on the latest miracle diet...
Or maybe you’ve actually beaten the odds and been at your goal weight for quite some time now – and yet you find yourself just as anxious about what to eat and what not to eat as you were when you first determined that this time you were going to lose the weight.
Do you find yourself shoving sweets into your mouth until you feel tired and ill - and then you have some more?
No matter how little you eat or how much you eat, there is a never-ending sense of struggle around food.
If you recognize yourself here, this course is for you.
Why is it SO hard?
What makes it so difficult for us to simply relax and eat when we’re hungry?
Each of us could give our own personal litany of how and why we sublimate our life struggles into struggles with food. We tend to think of our struggles around weight and body image as our shameful personal problems.
And yet, a recent study reveals that little girls as young as 3 years old have internalized the all-encompassing negative cultural pressures around weight and body image.
This negative atmosphere is what you breathe in every day. No wonder it’s so difficult for you to find your way out of the struggle around food!
But there’s an even deeper problem here.
A Tragic Misunderstanding
There is a fundamental cultural misunderstanding of the nature of the Body and of Life itself.
We grow up perceiving – and being perceived as – objects in a world of objects. We grow up believing that if only all of these objects can be manipulated in the right way, we can be happy.
Our bodies are the up-close and personal object that we have the most control over.
And so the game begins…
The endless manipulation of our bodies to get the nourishment we hunger for from Life – a game that is doomed to failure from the start.
But there is a solution to this no-win game.
We need to start over freshly, with a brand-new way of being in the Body, in Life. And that’s exactly what Unleashing the Life allows you to do.
SO… WHAT’S THIS COURSE ALL ABOUT?
This course provides you with the resources you need to begin relating right now to your Body, your Self and your Life in an entirely new way.
With this foundation, you can begin to allow that gnawing struggle to relax, open up and shift into its own unique way forward.
And once that happens, the release of the tremendous life energy bound up in your struggle around food and your body image will refresh, enliven and transform your world.
“But,” you might be thinking…
…”I’ve had years of therapy – of mucking around in there – and nothing’s changed. Thanks for the miseries, but no thanks! There’s just no point in going there.”
However…
When your situation remains tthe same-old/same-old year after year – that’s a clue.
A clue that what you’ve actually spent years doing is talking or emoting about this struggle, getting lost in this struggle, strategizing about how to fix this struggle, figuring out how to overcome this struggle, figuring out how to get rid of this struggle.
It’s a clue to the one thing that you have not tried: simply being with the struggle in a way that allows it to transform.
And that’s exactly what this class teaches you how to do.
UNLEASHING THE LIFE: THE BASICS
Instructor: Jocelyn Jacks Kahn, Certified
Focusing Trainer
Location:
149 Royal Avenue, Hawthorne, NJ
Dates/Time: 7 consecutive Thursdays: May 15 – June 26
Time: 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Fee: See below (Section explaining “Beta” version)
WHAT YOU’LL BE LEARNING: THE DETAILS
We will primarily be using the resources of Wholebody Focusing and Inner Relationship Focusing in this course.
What's Focusing?
Focusing is a path to growth and wholeness that originated over 40 years ago when Dr. Eugene Gendlin headed up a study at the University of Chicago that asked: What makes real change possible?
In this series of seven classes, you will be developing step-by-step your ability to listen – both to your inner self and to another human being – in a way that makes actual transformation of your struggles with food possible.
We will be working in the context of peer partnership.
When each partner is grounded in the interconnected Life that nourishes us all, a bigger space opens up that allows something more to come.
The focus of the full series of classes is on growing toward transformational dialogues that can initiate true transformation in both individuals and the larger society.
In this initial module, however, we will be focusing on weekly Listening partnerships, where the emphasis is on learning to listen – both to your inner self and to another human being.
We will be developing skill with a specific way of Listening that supports making room for the full expression and forward movement of the Life that moves in you and through you. (Please note that partnerships will take place in class as well as between class meetings each week.)
SUMMARY OF CLASSES:
Weeks 1 - 3: Resourcing ourselves for this journey
WEEK 1
Taking in the Positive in Our Lives
When I work with clients and students, it’s astonishing to see how quickly people move away from the nourishment of the positive feelings already available to them.
When you rediscover how to pause long enough to actually take in and nourish yourself with the wholesomeness of your life that is already available to you, you discover a fundamental resource that requires nothing more than your awareness.
When you can take in the good feelings that come to you, you are nourished and strengthened in a fundamentally satisfying way that has the power to provide a strong, safe and compassionate space that can hold your more difficult feelings and issues.
We will also be starting to explore the bodily-felt sense, and why it is a major key to actual change.
WEEK 2
Grounded Presence, Part 1: A Foundational
Practice to Reconnecting to the Life that You Are.
What is the body, really?
“Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people – in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from the inside.” from Focusing, by Eugene Gendlin
Does this sound like a lovely abstraction?
It is not.
On the contrary, this insight is the starting place to fundamentally changing your relationship to your Body and how you relate to it.
It is a starting place for a fundamentally new relationship to the depth and ever-evolving possibilities of Life.
In this class, we will be exploring Grounded Presence: a foundational practice for reconnecting directly to the Life of the Body.
WEEK 3
Moving Into the Wholeness of Who You Are In
the Midst of the Struggle: Presence Language
This class is about a brilliantly simple yet powerful way of creating right relationship between the sense of struggle you’re experiencing and the compassionate space – the "vast system "– that can BE with all of this.
Through “presence language” and the bodily-felt experience that it tends to evoke, you can move into the compassionate spaciousness that can be WITH everything that’s shown up inside – neither getting lost in it nor needing to push it away.
*
* *
Weeks 4-7: Refining and deepening
our ability to be with our struggles around food in a way that allows them to
shift and transform.
WEEK 4
BEing with our experiencing.
Experiencing our experience. We are so used to living in our thoughts about our experience that it can be hard to even recognize what it means to describe what we are actually experiencing. We’ll be exploring in a very physical way what it means to describe the present-moment experiencing of what’s actually happening, rather than cutting ourselves off from our experience by labeling it.
WEEK 5
Creating a bridge from the story about
what’s happening into the experience of what is happening.
Moving from storytelling into experiencing. Our habitual way of dealing with our struggles is to tell our story of "what happened." Our stories are both useful and necessary – up to a point. If we stay at the level of our “story about,” however, it’s easy to avoid the experience of the struggle as it lives in our Body right now.
Our lives are lived in and through the Body – and therefore, that is the only place where Life can carry forward into something new.
We will be exploring specific steps that can bring a story into the fresh possibilities of present-moment experiencing.
WEEK 6
More on our relationship to the Body:
Letting Go of the Need to Control
We’re stepping back and spending some time exploring our relationship to our body more deeply.
Having had an experience of the body as more than an object to push around, we are experimenting this week with a step toward trusting the body as having its own living awareness.
We’ll be experimenting with how it actually feels to let go of control over the body and invite IT to find its own right way to explore a simple movement.
WEEK 7
Sensing freshly where we are now in
relation to our original issue.
You’ve been introduced to different elements of a Focusing exploration. This week, we’ll be taking time to explicitly explore the essential transformative elements of a Focusing session.
We will also be sensing freshly into where each of us is now with regard to our original issue; taking in how our situations have developed; how far we’ve come; where we go from here.
YOUR INSTRUCTOR:
JOCELYN JACKS KAHN
I’ve been certified by The Focusing Institute as a Focusing trainer and guide since 2010. I completed Ann Weiser Cornell’s certification program in Inner Relationship Focusing, as well as a two-year training in Wholebody Focusing taught by Kevin McEvenue and Karen Whalen, who have given me permission to teach WBF.
For over 20 years prior to discovering Focusing – the love of my life! – I practiced and taught energy healing. What ties the two together for me is the connecting up with something bigger than our problems, bigger than me, that comes into being as I sit in presence with another being.
Focusing was such a pure expression of this that once I discovered it, I have never looked back!
I see so many people lost in their “stuff” who believe that a way out is an empty fantasy. I want to let them know: Focusing is a very real way out!
Origins of this Course
A while ago I began a series of “Heartfelt Conversations” with a Focusing friend, WBF trainer Elizabeth Morana, on “What nourishes us.”
I noticed how my struggles around food began to ease dramatically. As an example, I had struggled for years with eating sweets compulsively, and suddenly it simply wasn’t a struggle any longer.
My friend and I began talking about what a powerful resource Focusing can be in the struggle around food and weight.
And so this course was born. I hope it proves to be exquisitely nourishing to anyone attracted to it!
"Jocelyn Kahn is a sensitive, wise, and generous teacher of Inner Relationship Focusing. I'm proud to recommend her courses to anyone wishing to become solidly trained in this powerful process for emotional healing and life change."
~Ann Weiser Cornell, CEO, Focusing Resources
& originator with Barbara McGavin of Inner Relationship Focusing
LUCKY YOU:
*THIS IS A “BETA” VERSION OF THIS COURSE!
In case you’re not familiar with that term, when companies are developing software that they want to test out, they label the initial version as “beta.”
This signals users (1) that it’s something of an experiment and (2) that the first people trying it have a real opportunity to help shape and develop the new product through their feedback.
And that’s exactly what I want to signal to you!
This is a brand-new class that I’m developing, and I need some help shaping it through your feedback.
Because of this, there is a two-part fee:
Fee – Part 1. The first part of the fee is a traditional monetary fee. It is an exceptionally low fee to encourage you to hop on board! I am charging only $75 for the seven 2-hour classes that make up this first module.
Fee – Part 2. The second part of the fee is your extensive feedback.
Once this class is out of development, it will never be this inexpensive again – which makes this a great time to experience it!
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SIGN UP, YOU NEED TO DO IT SOON…
This class begins in less than 2 weeks! It
will be small: a minimum of 3, a maximum of 6.
Please pay careful attention to the class dates/times: Thursdays, from May 15 through June 26 – 6:30-8:30 pm. I realize that we’ll be going into the beginning of summer and you may have vacation plans.
If you will not be able to be at ALL class meetings, please do NOT sign up. (Of course, things happen – but due to the smallness of the group I do not want to start out with an expectation of missed classes.)
* * *
I would love to have you join me in exploring this rich topic together!
If you have any questions, please contact me at: jocelynkahn@gmail.com. (I would be happy to talk to you over the phone as well, but the easiest way to initially get hold of me is through e-mail.
Note: Very rarely, someone will use a browser on which the registration form below does not show. If you do not see the registration form, please use this link to access the form: https://forms.aweber.com/form/37/1628857837.htm
HOW TO REGISTER
If you would like to register, please fill out the form below. You can pay via PayPal, credit card (using PayPal) or a check. (The PayPal button is at the very end of this page.)
If paying via check: Please make it out to: Jocelyn Jacks Kahn and mail it to me at 149 Royal Avenue, Apt. 8, Hawthorne, NJ 07506.
Registration is only complete upon receipt of payment.
This will not be an issue if the class does not fill up. However, if it does begin to fill, do note that you could lose your desired place if payment is delayed.