Ann Weiser Cornell

Inner Relationship Focusing Training for Healing Professionals
July 5-9

Inner Relationship Focusing (IRF) is a proven method for emotional healing and accessing life-forward energy, developed by Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin from the Focusing work of Eugene Gendlin. It is a body-centered awareness process that shifts one's relationship with problems, issues, and life situations. Therapists and counselors can add IRF methods to the work they already do, and their clients can experience desired change in a context of safety and empowerment.

The essence of Inner Relationship Focusing is trust in each person's implicit process of knowing, growth, and life-forward direction as experienced somatically. Your clients learn to be Self-in-Presence, their natural state of calm interest and curiosity, and to find and consult a bodily "felt sense" that is more intricate and more reliable than emotions. The result: an increased ability to live in the present with balanced awareness of emotional states.

Helping your clients find Focusing starts with you, with your own ability to connect with that deep place of inner knowing, and your own ability to be Self-in-Presence. When you are able to be present with your clients in Presence and in touch with your bodily felt sense, both of you can contact the here-and-now implicit dimension of change. You can more easily build rapport with your clients, increasing safety and connection. And you can bring in any other method you know in an integrated way.

This experiential workshop includes presentation, demonstration, and paired practice each day. Participants will learn and practice the IR Focusing process with each other, and come away with a solid ability to accompany felt senses.

Monday

How "Presence language" facilitates a shift from being identified with emotional states to being able to accompany one's own felt senses. The state of Self-in-Presence for both client and therapist is deepened by an open, accepting body awareness. How to help a client bring a self-accepting Presence to difficult emotions.

Tuesday

"Describing" vs. "labeling" one's felt experience, and how describing a felt sense facilitates movement and change. How to help a client shift from story-telling into engaged contact with the immediate body process.

Wednesday

How contact and presence with a felt sense allows an opening of implicit meaning, and repetitive or stuck emotional states can begin to shift. How to help a client stay with the body-felt process with patience and empathy.

Thursday

How to facilitate the experience of safety, openness, and acceptance, both for the client and within the client, and why this is crucial for change to happen.

Friday

How to facilitate the process when self-acceptance is difficult, or when body awareness is difficult.

Ann Weiser Cornell Ph.D. is an internationally known author and seminar leader who has been working with the Focusing process since she learned it from its originator, Eugene Gendlin, in 1972. She is perhaps the best-known Focusing teacher in the world, having taught in eighteen countries around the world for the past twenty-five years. With her colleague Barbara McGavin in the UK she has been developing Inner Relationship Focusing since 1992, and today there is a flourishing worldwide network of therapists and practitioners of IR Focusing.

Ann is the author of The Power of Focusing and The Radical Acceptance of Everything, as well as numerous articles, including "An Invitation to Presence: Focusing Helps Clients Embrace Their Most Feared Emotions," (Psychotherapy Networker, Nov/Dec 2005). She is the founder and CEO of Focusing Resources, which offers over 50 phone seminars on IR Focusing every year.

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