Introduction

What are you looking for?
—A few words about Experiential Focusing and Listening

Personal development means different things to different people. It means listening to your hopes and fears. It means taking a fresh look at how life is going. It means setting free your future. It means action.

For me, it means finding a human path.

It seems natural to suppose that, when we are born, each of us is able to develop a certain creative and emotional intelligence. This would help us to find our path in life.

Yet does not something tend to go awry? Does not intelligence of this kind get crushed or warped as we are growing up? Yes, sadly, it does. Were your natural powers of sensitivity and imagination somehow closed down? And if so, can we open them up again? Yes, it seems that we can.

I am not a counsellor or therapist, but a teacher. Many years ago, I began to teach piano-playing; and since 1988 I have also been teaching a practice known as Experiential Focusing. When I am teaching, and always in my life, I try to be emotionally intelligent myself; and to set up conditions in which the natural awareness and resourcefulness of the student or the other person will thrive.

I see Focusing as having four pillars:

1. Relational depth

As relational beings, we need to be able to tell when we are in touch with one another, and how to evoke a sense of encounter, when contact is thin or not yet present.

2. Experiential search

You are the expert on your life, both on what to say and on how to move forwards. It is your life. My role is keep you company whilst you are feeling your way forward, to follow attentively the fine workings of your emotional intelligence.

3. The transition to the new space

Suppose you’re exploring some problem or situation in your life. After a while you come to a halt. You’ve said all the part you know, and find yourself stuck or puzzling. Something new needs to come, and you don’t yet know what this will be. As you begin to dwell at that point of uncertainty, you let some mild new sense come to you of the-problem-as-a-whole. What is this whole thing like? What does it feel like, as a whole?

4. The open space

Finally: when you are with another person, you can lean into a flow of listening, wrinkle by wrinkle, trusting the other to find a way forward. Listening is a beautiful open space. In that open space, something may come to you. Why not say it? You can say anything at all which seems likely to be helpful, or just because you feel like it. And then you listen carefully once more, to see how they are taking what you said.

These four pillars are the foundations of my work. They are simple, clear and poignant.

Typically, it may take about thirty individual sessions for a person’s natural Focusing ability to revive. Sometimes a few lessons may be enough. Quite often somebody will stay for many more lessons than thirty. Still, on the whole, people are ready after a short while to do Focusing alone, or in the flow of life, or with a Focusing Partner – a friend who has also learned Focusing, and with whom you exchange Focusing and Listening time.

I offer a deeply personal response to each single person who comes my way.

We all have problems in life – both practical and spiritual. There is no way to turn away from life, to forget our dreams, to hide from our realities. We have to go forward.

I believe there are two keys to solving our life-problems:

1. We must face our fears, and
2. we must come into contact with our capacity for love.

The way is one of hope, love and commitment.

In every human community from the earliest times, there has been some form of vision quest. This is simply an intrinsic feature of human societies – as is the part played in this search by a mentor or companion of some kind.

My work is rooted in a tradition which goes back more than twenty-five hundred years. It is about helping you to make your own judgments in life, about breaking free from submission to authority.

It is about listening to your heart. It is about truth.

My methods are simple, gentle, hopeful, thorough, tender, clear and practical.

I find that everybody needs a sense of solidarity. We need to know there is somebody beside us who has a vivid and accurate sense of who we are, who is not going to give in to feelings of defeat or insecurity, and who inspires us to be resourceful when faced with the challenges and joyful openings of life, or with its bitter surprises.

When our natural warmth finds expression in love and gentleness, laughter and irreverence, courage and commitment, it transfigures the world in which we live.

This site is here simply to tell you about my work. The writing is meant to be clear and plain. I have done my best to be straightforward – to clear away all trace of advertising or persuasion. I hope you will feel this, as you read on.

The pictures are by my generous friends Jila Peacock and Janet Pfunder, the illustrations by my friend Beatrice Blake. Thank you all for allowing me to share here your haunting and evocative images, which add such magic and poetry to the site.

To learn more about Jila’s and Janet’s work, go to www.jilapeacock.co.uk and www.janetpfunderpaintings.com. Beatrice has a blog about her work with Focusing at www.focusing.org/blog.