Domain Focusing Self-Guiding Form

For many years, I have wished that Robert would make this self-guiding form publicly available. It was always a work-in-progress for Robert. Every so often a new version would come out and I would be amazed at how much richer it was, how much more the new version could help me move in my own Focusing process. This single sheet incorporates decades of intricate Focusing experience. I consider it a high point of development of Focusing practice and thought. Thank-you Robert. Neil Dunaetz

Commentary on Focusing Self-Guiding Form

For many years, I have wished that Robert would make this self-guiding form publicly available. It was always a work-in-progress for Robert. Every so often a new version would come out and I would be amazed at how much richer it was, how much more the new version could help me move in my own Focusing process. This single sheet incorporates decades of intricate Focusing experience. I consider it a high point of development of Focusing practice and thought. Thank-you Robert. Neil Dunaetz

Making Psychotherapy More Effective and Affordable

Listening in focusing partnership involves cultivating the habit of wanting to understand without judgment just what someone is saying in their own terms, with good will. Learning to have an open accepting space for whatever focuser, is a lifelong project. It never ends. How much you bring there, always will affect the rest. Starting with a basic good will and being able to sustain that through the specific content and way of the focuser are so important. You cannot just do that in a general way. “From the white light I can be with anyone” is nice but not what I’m advocating. We want to be engaged with the specifics and with the person of the focuser while freshly generating an openness to that particular person.

As a listener you need to know that that being with a person in their terms is already a great thing to be doing. Otherwise you’ll be looking for something more to do instead of putting your heart into just that.

Listening in Focusing Partnership

Listening in focusing partnership involves cultivating the habit of wanting to understand without judgment just what someone is saying in their own terms, with good will. Learning to have an open accepting space for whatever focuser, is a lifelong project. It never ends. How much you bring there, always will affect the rest. Starting with a basic good will and being able to sustain that through the specific content and way of the focuser are so important. You cannot just do that in a general way. “From the white light I can be with anyone” is nice but not what I’m advocating. We want to be engaged with the specifics and with the person of the focuser while freshly generating an openness to that particular person.

As a listener you need to know that that being with a person in their terms is already a great thing to be doing. Otherwise you’ll be looking for something more to do instead of putting your heart into just that.

The Essential Role of Self-Empathy in Focusing

I want to posit that self-empathy and a felt sense that can be related to and symbolized, articulated by word, gesture, image, sound, are two ends of the same see-saw.

One of the ongoing problems of teaching focusing is the person who has great difficulty recognizing or acknowledging or relating to a felt sense. Moreover, even people who do know how to get a felt sense may have difficulty getting a felt sense in relation to a particular issue. Moreover, even people who can get a felt sense with a particular issue, may not be able to allow it to emerge to the place where it is moving through steps (Not Gendlin’s “6-steps” but the little changes that a felt sense goes through) and eventually, a qualitative change. Understanding the role of self-empathy and its intrinsic relationship to the felt sense, even it being part of one “self-empathy>>felt sense” process can help with these problems. Moreover, self-empathy has the potential to add elegance to the focusing process by linking many strategies to one idea. In addition it adds strategies that were hitherto unthinkable or difficult to think.

I want to elaborate on self-empathy theoretically, in practice, and in new practices.

Informational Meetings on Quaker Focusing Project – Chapel Hill

A Quaker-Focusing Supportive Community group is forming at Chapel Hill Meeting.  It is envisioned to include participants from Durham Friends Meeting, Carolina Friends School, and other nearby Quaker institutions as well as meetings in Piedmont Friends Yearly Meeting which are further away. 

Focusing Comes to Cambridge Meeting (Quakers)

Advanced Listening Exercises in Domain Focusing

Colliding Styles of Focusing

Focusing with Difficult Feelings – The Safety Protocol

Domain Focusing in the initial 1-2 years has more boundaries by a listener in partnership than any other focusing style I know. This includes the limitation of process suggestions like “maybe you want to stay with that”. That is partly because DF gives more freedom to guide as a practitioner than any other style so someone must be great at following and at listening in partnership or they cannot learn to guide in this system. Each guiding suggestion in DF comes out of a new implying generated by an authentic reflection. It is also because listening without any need to fix or help is one of the skills requiring the longest most sustained amount of practice. It is also for having the happy differentiation between egalitarian and practitioner. It also is for safety in an egalitarian setting.