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By Carolyn, March 25, 2009 7:15 pm

Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown, 2005) shows that, contrary to popular belief, the majority of decisions are not made through careful listing of pros and cons but through following a “gut instinct” or an “intuition.” Intuitive Focusing , often accompanied by Focused Listening, is a predictable self-help skill for “unpacking” these “intuitive feels,” “bodily-felt senses” into usable insights and action steps, for personal growth, creativity, spirituality, intimacy, parenting, innovative decision making and problem solving at home and at work.

A child’s wonder at discovering a first Christmas present at the bottom of a deep bag provides a good symbol for the wonder and transformation to be found by using Focusing for “sitting with” and “going deeper into” the vague, preverbal information constantly offered up by the body/mind, the deeper psyche.

Working with Flavia Cymbalista, Focusing Teacher at www.marketfocusing.com , George Soros and other financial managers explored the use of Focusing in relation to “gut instincts” amidst the uncertainty of financial markets.

Over the last 30+ years, thousands of people have used Focusing for emotional, spiritual, and creative problem solving.

The six steps of the Focusing Process, from Eugene Gendlin’s self-help book, Focusing (Bantam, 1981, 1984):

Step One: Clearing A Space

Deciding to stop and take the time to sit down and pay attention to what is going on inside, the “preverbal” feel of your living, problems, decision making.

Step Two: Getting A Felt Sense

Setting aside all of your already-known intellectual answers and waiting quietly, as long as a minute, for the “bodily felt sense” of “this whole question” to arise.

Step Three: Finding A Handle

Carefully looking for words/images/gestures that can begin to describe the “bodily-felt sense” : “jumpy,” “like a whirly-gig, going round and round,” ” wanting to scrunch down into a tiny ball, disappear,” etc.

Step Four: Resonating And Checking

Taking any symbols (words/images/gestures) that come, and carefully going back and forth between the symbols and the “intuitive feel,” until the body-sense says, “Yes! That is exactly right! That fits perfectly!”

Step Five: Asking

Going deeper by asking the “intuitive feel” open-ended questions like, “And what is so important about that?” or “And what is the crux of that whole thing?” or “And why does that make me feel sad?”, and, instead of answering from the “head,” waiting each time, again at least for a minute, for the “bodily-felt sense,” the vague, preverbal knowing, to arise in the middle of the body, around the chest/heart area, and only then carefully looking for a Handle word/image/gesture, and Resonating and Checking until the body says “Yes! That is it!”. Continuing this Asking as long as you like or until you experience a “felt shift”:  “Yes, that is exactly it. Now I understand what is going on and what I need to do to act on this information.

Step Six: Receiving

Taking a moment to “live into” this new knowing, let it sink into the cellular level of the body. Taking a moment to be grateful to the “body/mind” for offering you this information. Taking a moment to receive any new insights that have come before going into action.

You can read a more thorough description of Dr. McGuire’s version, The PRISMS/S Problem Solving Process.

You can read applications Including Focusing Alone, Focusing Partnerships, Interpersonal Focusing for Conflict Resolution, Creative Edge Meetings, Creative Edge Organizations in The Creative Edge Pyramid.

See my article, “Creative Edge Organizations: Businesses and Organizations As A ‘Kind’ Of Focusing Community” from The Folio: Thirtieth Anniversity Tribute edition at The Focusing Institute, www.focusing.org .

You can learn all about Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening with the many resources listed below:

CREATIVE EDGE FOCUSING(tm):  SELF-HELP SKILLS FOR HOME AND WORK

Free Downloads:

Complete Focusing Instructions Manual (17 pages)

“Ajas” Instantaneos Mini-Manual

Creative Edge Focusing (www.cefocusing.com ) teaches two basic self-help skills, Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening, which can be applied at home and at work through The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid.

Based upon Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing (www.focusing.org ) and Rogers’ Empathic Listening, our website is packed with Free Resources and instructions in these basic self-help skills. Learn how to build Support Groups, Conscious Relationships, and Creative Edge Organizations based upon these basic skills of emotional intelligence.

You can try out    “Focusing: Find Out What Is Bothering You.”

Click here to subscribe to Creative Edge Focusing(TM)’s  Instant “Ahah!” e-newsletter and get the latest exercises first!!! 

Click here for a free Intuitive Focusing Mini-Course

Click here for a free Focused Listening Mini-Course

 See  Core Concept: Conflict Resolution to find a complete mini-course on Interpersonal Focusing and Conflict Resolution, including Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Blanchard’s “One Minute Apology,” Patricia Evan’s books on Verbally Abuse and Controlling Relationships, McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance, and much more.

See  Core Concept: Intimate Relationship to find a complete mini-course on increasing intimacy and sexuality, including the “Sharing Your Day” exercise, Listening/Focusing Partnerships for The Way of Relationship, untangling and equalizing desire, tantric sexuality, and much more.

Download complete Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual, in English and Spanish, from CEF Website, or download from links at top of this blog.

Find links to free articles, personality tests, multi-media Self-Help training, Classes and workshops

Dr. Kathy McGuire, Director

Creative Edge Focusing (TM)

www.cefocusing.com

Comments (1)

By Kathy McGuire, March 21, 2009 2:34 pm

Stagnant and sterile: Stuck!

The psyche, like Yellowstone Park, is a seething cauldron, brewing and steaming, shrouded in mist, ever ready to throw up a bubble or a blast of something new, and capable of deep change, techtonic shifts.

Intuitive Focusing, based upon Eugene Gendlin’s six-step Focusing Process (Focusing   www.focusing.org ) is a simple, predictable self-help method for “sitting with” the mist, the bubbling, the cauldron, and finding words and images which bring the depths into consciousness.  Undercurrents  can become “techtonic shifts,” Instant “Ahah!”s of creativity, emotional problem solving, innovation, spirituality.

The PRISMS/S Problem Solving Process begins with the pregnant Pause and uses Intuitive Focusing to find words and images which lead to paradigm shifts.

The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid of applications allows use of Intuitive Focusing at home and at work,  alone, in partnerships, in groups/teams, for interpersonal conflict resolution, for Creative Edge Meetings, and Creative Edge Organizations.

See my article, “Creative Edge Organizations: Businesses and Organizations As A ‘Kind’ Of Focusing Community” from The Folio: Thirtieth Anniversity Tribute edition at The Focusing Institute, www.focusing.org .

You can learn all about Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening with the many resources listed below:

CREATIVE EDGE FOCUSING(tm):  SELF-HELP SKILLS FOR HOME AND WORK

Free Downloads:

Complete Focusing Instructions Manual (17 pages)

“Ajas” Instantaneos Mini-Manual

Creative Edge Focusing (www.cefocusing.com ) teaches two basic self-help skills, Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening, which can be applied at home and at work through The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid.

Based upon Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing (www.focusing.org ) and Rogers’ Empathic Listening, our website is packed with Free Resources and instructions in these basic self-help skills. Learn how to build Support Groups, Conscious Relationships, and Creative Edge Organizations based upon these basic skills of emotional intelligence.

You can try out    “Focusing: Find Out What Is Bothering You.”

Click here to subscribe to Creative Edge Focusing(TM)’s  Instant “Ahah!” e-newsletter and get the latest exercises first!!! 

Click here for a free Intuitive Focusing Mini-Course

Click here for a free Focused Listening Mini-Course

 See  Core Concept: Conflict Resolution to find a complete mini-course on Interpersonal Focusing and Conflict Resolution, including Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Blanchard’s “One Minute Apology,” Patricia Evan’s books on Verbally Abuse and Controlling Relationships, McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance, and much more.

See  Core Concept: Intimate Relationship to find a complete mini-course on increasing intimacy and sexuality, including the “Sharing Your Day” exercise, Listening/Focusing Partnerships for The Way of Relationship, untangling and equalizing desire, tantric sexuality, and much more.

Download complete Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual, in English and Spanish, from CEF Website, or download from links at top of this blog.

Find links to free articles, personality tests, multi-media Self-Help training, Classes and workshops

Dr. Kathy McGuire, Director

Creative Edge Focusing (TM)

www.cefocusing.com

Comments (0)

By Kathy McGuire, March 16, 2009 2:31 pm

Creative Edge Organizations, using The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid  for application at all levels,  incorporate Interpersonal Focusing for conflict resolution as well as Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening to facilitate creative, innovative problem solving. Interpersonal Focusing can take place in a separate session or right during the flow of a Collaborative Edge Decision Making (CEDM) meeting. But how do you teach Interpersonal Focusing in an actual business or organization, if there are no conflicts evident? How do you introduce it without the stress of a full-blown conflict?

Interpersonal Focusing can involve the use of a Third Person Listening Facilitator mediating between the two people in conflict. Download the entire Interpersonal Focusing Chapter from Focusing In Community: How To Start A Listening/Focusing Support Group. Order the complete manual and multimedia Self-Help Package .

From a Certified Focusing Professional bringing the CEDM model, and Creative Edge Pyramid, into two businesses:

“Can I ask you a question? I have tried to teach the same group that was so happy about CEDM, your Interpersonal Focusing, when people disagree about something. They find it hard to practice the method, without two people really having an argument. Do you have any suggestion how to “train” this skill, listening to another that you have an argument with?

Because the people I teach, they say something like “No, I could never listen in a Focusing way when I am mad at someone”. Maybe just practicing focusing is the best?”

My response: The question is a good one: how do you teach Interpersonal Focusing when there is no conflict going on?

1. Sometimes I have worked instead on even when one person in the group has strong positive feelings about someone else, like “Wishing I could be like you,” “Thinking you are so self-confident,” etc.  Even hearing this kind of positive information about oneself can be difficult to hear and provide a good exercise in Focused Listening to emotional material.
2. And you can decide to have a discussion about a topic likely to bring up some conflict. E.g., it is not difficult to find two people who have differing views about politics, for instance, or any other controversial topic.
3. If this is a group that works together, there can also be a fear of uncovering any negative feelings or interpersonal conflicts, so saying “Oh, we don’t have any of those.” Maybe done the road they would feel safer.
4. Usually, when I have an ongoing 10-week group, I look for small conflicts we can practice on, as simple as whether we should invite new members, or whether we should have tea and snacks.
5. Also, if I see a conflict happening, I drop the lesson for the day and practice Interpersonal Focusing right then instead.
6. You could also have a Focuser work on their feelings about someone outside of the group that makes them really, really mad — so, as Listener, people could at least have the experience of Listening to someone who might be really angry, but it would be less threatening than working on their problems with each other. I think this is a great idea! Getting people used to being around anger when it is not directed at them, getting them used to just reflecting it.

But, you are correct, the more people practice Focusing, in the sense of “owning” their own internal reactions, and Listening, being able to set aside one’s own reactions and really “hear” another, the more these skills will be available when a conflict arises— 

For more on dealing with anger, see  my “yelling at the wall” component in the Passive Listening Turns model  and my Active Listening Turns short article.

Five Minute Grieving might be helpful (what to do if a patient, client, friend, colleague starts crying) and bring up interesting discussion about the role of emotion in business settings.

These are all Instant “Ahah!”s in the sidebar of my website homepage and also in the free download, Instant Ahah Mini-Manual, which you can find below.

Especially in businesses whose work is helping and supporting and healing others, it is important to find a way to nurture those who are trying to help others. That, to me, has always been the great gift of teaching Listening/Focusing to staff — that they can choose to use it to support each other as well!

See my article, “Creative Edge Organizations: Businesses and Organizations As A ‘Kind’ Of Focusing Community” from The Folio: Thirtieth Anniversity Tribute edition at The Focusing Institute, www.focusing.org .

You can learn all about Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening with the many resources listed below:

CREATIVE EDGE FOCUSING(tm):  SELF-HELP SKILLS FOR HOME AND WORK

Free Downloads:

Complete Focusing Instructions Manual (17 pages)

“Ajas” Instantaneos Mini-Manual

Creative Edge Focusing (www.cefocusing.com ) teaches two basic self-help skills, Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening, which can be applied at home and at work through The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid.

Based upon Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing (www.focusing.org ) and Rogers’ Empathic Listening, our website is packed with Free Resources and instructions in these basic self-help skills. Learn how to build Support Groups, Conscious Relationships, and Creative Edge Organizations based upon these basic skills of emotional intelligence.

You can try out    “Focusing: Find Out What Is Bothering You.”

Click here to subscribe to Creative Edge Focusing(TM)’s  Instant “Ahah!” e-newsletter and get the latest exercises first!!! 

Click here for a free Intuitive Focusing Mini-Course

Click here for a free Focused Listening Mini-Course

 See  Core Concept: Conflict Resolution to find a complete mini-course on Interpersonal Focusing and Conflict Resolution, including Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Blanchard’s “One Minute Apology,” Patricia Evan’s books on Verbally Abuse and Controlling Relationships, McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance, and much more.

See  Core Concept: Intimate Relationship to find a complete mini-course on increasing intimacy and sexuality, including the “Sharing Your Day” exercise, Listening/Focusing Partnerships for The Way of Relationship, untangling and equalizing desire, tantric sexuality, and much more.

Download complete Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual, in English and Spanish, from CEF Website, or download from links at top of this blog.

Find links to free articles, personality tests, multi-media Self-Help training, Classes and workshops

Dr. Kathy McGuire, Director

Creative Edge Focusing (TM)

www.cefocusing.com

Comments (0)

By Carolyn, March 15, 2009 6:07 pm

In the Creative Edge Focusing (TM) model, The Creative Edge is the bodily-felt, intuitive “something-more-than-words” that anyone can find if they simply pause, for at least a minute, paying attention in the center of their body for the “intuitive feel,” the “bodily-felt sense” of any issue or idea or problem to form.

The PRISMS/S Focusing Process  shows how Intuitive Focusing, often coupled with Focused Listening, can allow this non-linear, right-brain, intuitive knowing to unfold.

The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid shows how these simple self-help skills of Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening can be incorporated into all levels within a company or organization, as well as for stress relief, conflict resolution, and emotional problem solving at home:

Focusing Alone for Personal Growth
Focusing Partnership for Ongoing Creativity
Interpersonal Focusing for Conflict Resolution
Focusing Group/Team for Innovative Problem Solving
Collaborative Edge Focusing Decision Making for Win/Win  Meetings
Focusing Community To Facilitate Diversity and Mutual Support
Creative Edge Organization To Motivate People For Collaborative Action

Creative Edge Organizations  benefit from the innovation, creativity, commitment, and collegiality which come when each person is engaged at their own Creative Edge and sharing and supporting Creative Edge exploration in others. Read Creating At The Edge: The Culture of Creativity

Here is feedback from a Certified Focusing Professional teaching Listening, Focusing, and Collaborative Edge Decision Making (CEDM) in two companies:

“I am teaching two small companies focusing and I also have workshops and individual sessions for everyone interested. I have also done a few talks on focusing, and I want to develop that more. I want to develop everything more!!!
 
I just want to tell you that the people at the companies, were really amazed about your method for decision making. I translated it all and made sheets for them to work with and it all went so well. We have done it twice in two different groups, and the next two weeks we will try it again.

Afterwards one woman said: “I feel like I have a lot of energy after the meeting, usually I am all tired and out of energy.”

Another one said: “I am a slow person, and have often been told, just hurry and pick the word and say what you want. But I don’t feel like doing that, it just makes me feel so stressed. I rather just stay quiet.” And she really enjoyed this kind of meeting.

I could “feel” the stress disappear when everybody understood that they were going to have their piece of the time for saying what they wanted.

And when I told them that they all had the same responsibility for creating a meaningful meeting, it sort of started twinkling in their eyes.

Most amazing of all was that the ones that volunteered for the timekeeping both times we did this, were two people that usually have a hard time being on time (according to the others in the group). Strange, isn’t it?

And more:

“Thank you for the links you gave me here. I am thinking about translating both “5 minutes of grieving” and “Active Listening: Short-Circuit Angry Confrontations”, they are so good, and the people I work with do need something very “resolute” to get started with Focusing in their daily work … there is really a need for a tool that is respectful and very human. (that’s a need everywhere of course!)”

“The staff that I am teaching Focusing are more and more getting it in to their daily routines. They all say: When we start the morning with some Focusing, there is a calm feeling throughout the day! No matter how much stress they are facing.

So now they are trying, at least in one of the companies, to have at least 10 minutes each in the morning, just Listening to what is inside them right now. And at least once a week they do a longer Listening/Focusing turn two and two. And their meetings have really changed!”

See my article, “Creative Edge Organizations: Businesses and Organizations As A ‘Kind’ Of Focusing Community” from The Folio: Thirtieth Anniversity Tribute edition at The Focusing Institute, www.focusing.org .

You can learn all about Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening with the many resources listed below:

CREATIVE EDGE FOCUSING(tm):  SELF-HELP SKILLS FOR HOME AND WORK

Free Downloads:

Complete Focusing Instructions Manual (17 pages)

“Ajas” Instantaneos Mini-Manual

Creative Edge Focusing (www.cefocusing.com ) teaches two basic self-help skills, Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening, which can be applied at home and at work through The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid.

Based upon Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing (www.focusing.org ) and Rogers’ Empathic Listening, our website is packed with Free Resources and instructions in these basic self-help skills. Learn how to build Support Groups, Conscious Relationships, and Creative Edge Organizations based upon these basic skills of emotional intelligence.

You can try out    “Focusing: Find Out What Is Bothering You.”

Click here to subscribe to Creative Edge Focusing(TM)’s  Instant “Ahah!” e-newsletter and get the latest exercises first!!! 

Click here for a free Intuitive Focusing Mini-Course

Click here for a free Focused Listening Mini-Course

 See  Core Concept: Conflict Resolution to find a complete mini-course on Interpersonal Focusing and Conflict Resolution, including Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Blanchard’s “One Minute Apology,” Patricia Evan’s books on Verbally Abuse and Controlling Relationships, McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance, and much more.

See  Core Concept: Intimate Relationship to find a complete mini-course on increasing intimacy and sexuality, including the “Sharing Your Day” exercise, Listening/Focusing Partnerships for The Way of Relationship, untangling and equalizing desire, tantric sexuality, and much more.

Download complete Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual, in English and Spanish, from CEF Website, or download from links at top of this blog.

Find links to free articles, personality tests, multi-media Self-Help training, Classes and workshops

Dr. Kathy McGuire, Director

Creative Edge Focusing (TM)

www.cefocusing.com

Comments (0)

By Kathy McGuire, March 13, 2009 12:03 pm

Times of grief, depression, economic recession, imprisonment, in the external world or internally self-imposed, can give the time needed to go deeply, “fish up” new energies and creativities from the bottom feeders, and come out renewed.

Intuitive Focusing, especially in the company of Focused Listening from an empathic friend or support group, is a simple self-help tool for doing this fishing, providing predictable steps for “Ahah!” experiences, at home, work, and in the community, while avoiding getting drowned in the process!

A friend posted this on the Focusing Discussion e-list (subscribe at www.focusing.org under “Felt Community”) and, with his permission, I share it with you:

“(A blog about innovation prompts the following thoughts, which takes form together with what comes for me)

On reflecting on these dark and unprecedented times, amidst gathering clouds and raging storms… it occurs that our predicament is not without parallel (I do not mean 1929), and that it is only that we have not just yet recognised the edges of our cell. By way of locating ourselves, a we-ing of us in this, an Eskimo proverb says that in the storm is the time to fish…

So I’d like to tell you a story… but first, what are the similarities in the lives of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela? Each made a personal and social contribution to equality that was far-reaching, upset a status quo, and has sustained beyond their lives. Each recognised the energy of truth and non-violence. And each spent a lot of time in jail, and each found it to be productive time for reflecting and writing, re-editing and re-imagining the world as-it-was-known.

Ibn Al-Haitham is less known but no different. Ab? Al? al-Hasan ibn ibn al-Haytham (also known as Al hazen) is considered as the first ‘scientist’, a pioneer of the scientific method and a ‘father’ of optics. He headed a project to regulate the flow of the Nile in Egypt. Once he decided it was impossible, he escaped severe punishment from the Fatimid caliph in Cairo only by pretending to be mad. So instead of a death sentence, he was kept under house arrest until Hakim’s death in 1021.

There, in-house (as more than a few of us are about to be), he spent his time experimenting with light and physics, and made the discovery of light travelling in a straight line (instead of light beaming out of eyes as it was known) by making holes in the prison’s wall and seeing how buildings outside were depicted upside down on the other wall. Ibn al-Haitham gave the first clear description, illustration, and correct analysis of the camera obscura. The word ‘camera’ comes from the Arabic (qamara), which means dark or private room.

During this time in prison, he wrote the influential Book of Optics and scores of other important treatises on physics, medicine, science and mathematics problems (among which he explored the squaring of the circle). More than 200 works he wrote on all these topics, and in particular published a seven-volume treatise on optics which had great celebrity and influenced western thought, notably that of Bacon and Kepler. His time in prison gave him time to open himself to new theories, and elaborate the gift of a deeper science of optics some 6 centuries before Isaac Newton’s studies.

So in thinking about  ‘our time in prison’, and considering the evolving impacts that the decline-of-empire inevitably bring, this might also just be our opportunity to explore new ways of being-before-doing in a global self-righting-and-redistribution. Seeking new ways to see and know, even when the images are unfamiliar, upsidedown, senseless, or without a pattern that can be quickly picked.

Not a story directly related to Focusing, but when I hear ‘try Focusing with anything’, I want also to try it with contemporary apprehension, with uncertainty and suburban dread, with this wintering and these icy currents, with what works at all anywhere in this we-ing across the world, in our qamaras and private connections, in my living, seeking wild hybridisations and simpler, quieter approaches – much like in remembering how to fish… in a storm.
Mmm … what might that feel like…”

My friend includes a link to a beautiful short video, A Father’s Tools and The Tears of Things, by Tim Wilson, who includes many more “deep fishing” videos at www.personamedia.com .

You can learn all about Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening with the many resources listed below:

CREATIVE EDGE FOCUSING(tm):  SELF-HELP SKILLS FOR HOME AND WORK

Free Downloads:

Complete Focusing Instructions Manual (17 pages)

“Ajas” Instantaneos Mini-Manual

Creative Edge Focusing (www.cefocusing.com ) teaches two basic self-help skills, Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening, which can be applied at home and at work through The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid.

Based upon Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing (www.focusing.org ) and Rogers’ Empathic Listening, our website is packed with Free Resources and instructions in these basic self-help skills. Learn how to build Support Groups, Conscious Relationships, and Creative Edge Organizations based upon these basic skills of emotional intelligence.

You can try out    “Focusing: Find Out What Is Bothering You.”

Click here to subscribe to Creative Edge Focusing(TM)’s  Instant “Ahah!” e-newsletter and get the latest exercises first!!! 

Click here for a free Intuitive Focusing Mini-Course

Click here for a free Focused Listening Mini-Course

 See  Core Concept: Conflict Resolution to find a complete mini-course on Interpersonal Focusing and Conflict Resolution, including Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Blanchard’s “One Minute Apology,” Patricia Evan’s books on Verbally Abuse and Controlling Relationships, McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance, and much more.

See  Core Concept: Intimate Relationship to find a complete mini-course on increasing intimacy and sexuality, including the “Sharing Your Day” exercise, Listening/Focusing Partnerships for The Way of Relationship, untangling and equalizing desire, tantric sexuality, and much more.

Download complete Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual, in English and Spanish, from CEF Website, or download from links at top of this blog.

Find links to free articles, personality tests, multi-media Self-Help training, Classes and workshops

Dr. Kathy McGuire, Director

Creative Edge Focusing (TM)

www.cefocusing.com

Comments (0)

By Carolyn, March 9, 2009 11:30 am

Here is a book of interest to those seeking greater intimacy through the gentle combination of sexuality and spirituality found in Tantra, with a recommendation from internationally-known Focusing Teacher, Ann Weiser Cornell:
~~~~~~~~~~
Diana Daffner
BOOK: www.TantraforBusyCouples.com (Hunter House, March, 2009)

“As a lifelong advocate of how body awareness can bring us into connection with the present moment, I was delighted to encounter this book. With charming anecdotes and refreshing clarity, the Daffners offer a practical guide to that most elusive of states: true intimacy. Highly recommended! “–Ann Weiser Cornell, Ph.D.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Daffner’s also offer educational Intimacy Retreats:

www.IntimacyRetreats.com
941 349-6804
Florida

And Diana offers a CD audio experience guiding you and your lover to greater intimacy: http://www.intimacyretreats.com/lessons2.htm

Diana also participates in Creative Edge Focusing(TM)’s e-course (three e-newsletters a week teaching skills of Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening as applied to personal growth, creativity, spirituality, intimacy, conflict resolution, and creative problem solving at home and at work) and writes:

Dear Kathy,
 
I’ve been meaning to write to thank you for your emails. They are so rich with information and guidance. An impressive body of material. That this one referred to “intimacy” of course caught my attention!
 
~ Diana

You can subscribe to the e-course at the link below and also find links to our Mini-Course on Intimate Relationship, which includes lessons on Sharing Your Day, Equalizing Sexual Desire, Erotic Massage, Tantric Sexuality, and Sacred Spot Massage.

CREATIVE EDGE FOCUSING(tm):  SELF-HELP SKILLS FOR HOME AND WORK

Free Downloads:

Complete Focusing Instructions Manual (17 pages)

“Ajas” Instantaneos Mini-Manual

Creative Edge Focusing (www.cefocusing.com ) teaches two basic self-help skills, Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening, which can be applied at home and at work through The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid.

Based upon Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing (www.focusing.org ) and Rogers’ Empathic Listening, our website is packed with Free Resources and instructions in these basic self-help skills. Learn how to build Support Groups, Conscious Relationships, and Creative Edge Organizations based upon these basic skills of emotional intelligence.

You can try out    “Focusing: Find Out What Is Bothering You.”

Click here to subscribe to Creative Edge Focusing(TM)’s  Instant “Ahah!” e-newsletter and get the latest exercises first!!! 

Click here for a free Intuitive Focusing Mini-Course

Click here for a free Focused Listening Mini-Course

 See  Core Concept: Conflict Resolution to find a complete mini-course on Interpersonal Focusing and Conflict Resolution, including Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Blanchard’s “One Minute Apology,” Patricia Evan’s books on Verbally Abuse and Controlling Relationships, McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance, and much more.

See  Core Concept: Intimate Relationship to find a complete mini-course on increasing intimacy and sexuality, including the “Sharing Your Day” exercise, Listening/Focusing Partnerships for The Way of Relationship, untangling and equalizing desire, tantric sexuality, and much more.

Download complete Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual, in English and Spanish, from CEF Website, or download from links at top of this blog.

Find links to free articles, personality tests, multi-media Self-Help training, Classes and workshops

Dr. Kathy McGuire, Director

Creative Edge Focusing (TM)

www.cefocusing.com

Comments (0)

By Kathy McGuire, March 6, 2009 12:09 pm

Okay, after five posts on “Why Cry?” (Parts 1-5), time for some light-hearted fun where Dr. Kathy McGuire plays with her collection of Jason Wu’s fantastic Fashion Royalty dolls and their male escorts on the Red Carpet for Oscar night.

 Wu, who designed Michele Obama’s Inaugural Ball Gown, began winning Barbie doll fashion design contests at age 16, went on to join multi-ethnic doll company Integrity Toys (www.integritytoys.com ), and soon started his own line for Integrity, the Fashion Royalty dolls (www.fashionroyalty.com ).

Initially extremely limited (100-1000 max, compared to Barbie’s 30,000-100,000!), with beautiful authentic multi-ethnic face sculpts with fabulous makeup, and fashions from gorgeous fabrics, totally lined, with tucks and pleats and flounces and buttons and snaps galore (compared to Barbie’s velcro closings!), Wu’s Fashion Royalty dolls took the doll collecting world by storm. The entire new line was bought up in Spring and Fall completely on Pre-Order, sight unseen, and dolls immediately tripled (or more!) in value on ebay.

Search “Fashion Royalty,” “Jason Wu,” and “Michele Obama”  in my blog for more details and photos, or look in Category “Best of Everything.”

For my real work (when not playing with my dolls), I, Dr. Kathy McGuire, “give away” a multitude of self-help skills, for intimacy, conflict resolution, parenting, education, spirituality, creativity, innovation, Creative Edge Organization, and more as described below:

CREATIVE EDGE FOCUSING(tm):  SELF-HELP SKILLS FOR HOME AND WORK

Free Downloads:

Complete Focusing Instructions Manual (17 pages)

“Ajas” Instantaneos Mini-Manual

Creative Edge Focusing (www.cefocusing.com ) teaches two basic self-help skills, Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening, which can be applied at home and at work through The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid.

Based upon Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing (www.focusing.org ) and Rogers’ Empathic Listening, our website is packed with Free Resources and instructions in these basic self-help skills. Learn how to build Support Groups, Conscious Relationships, and Creative Edge Organizations based upon these basic skills of emotional intelligence.

You can try out    “Focusing: Find Out What Is Bothering You.”

Click here to subscribe to Creative Edge Focusing(TM)’s  Instant “Ahah!” e-newsletter and get the latest exercises first!!! 

Click here for a free Intuitive Focusing Mini-Course

Click here for a free Focused Listening Mini-Course

 See  Core Concept: Conflict Resolution to find a complete mini-course on Interpersonal Focusing and Conflict Resolution, including Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Blanchard’s “One Minute Apology,” Patricia Evan’s books on Verbally Abuse and Controlling Relationships, McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance, and much more.

See  Core Concept: Intimate Relationship to find a complete mini-course on increasing intimacy and sexuality, including the “Sharing Your Day” exercise, Listening/Focusing Partnerships for The Way of Relationship, untangling and equalizing desire, tantric sexuality, and much more.

Download complete Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual, in English and Spanish, from CEF Website, or download from links at top of this blog.

Find links to free articles, personality tests, multi-media Self-Help training, Classes and workshops

Dr. Kathy McGuire, Director

Creative Edge Focusing (TM)

www.cefocusing.com

Comments (0)

By Kathy McGuire, March 4, 2009 6:41 pm

Articles by Dr. Kathy McGuire: Being Touched and Being Moved, The Alchemy of Grieving, Focusing Inner Child Work, Finding The Meaning of Tears
 
Crying and vision, crying and opening the heart, crying and connecting (this is such a profound experience when it happens — as a Listener, I tear up in empathy with a Focuser, who may also be touching on tears, and, in my experience, the walls, the envelopes of flesh separating us simply melt away, and we meet in Buber’s I-Thou space — the two of us and The Something More, The Sacred entering in).
 
In my own journey to understand the place of crying, being touched and being moved, particularly, I have found
 
(a) an early book by William Frey called Crying, which, when first published, was a media event. He collected tears in test tubes from people watching a tear-jerker movie, and compared them, their chemical analysis, with “non-emotional” tears, collected questionnaire data on frequency of crying (women five times as often as men!), etc.
 
(b) The book by Anglican hermit Maggie Ross, The Fountain and The Furnace, cited above.
 
(c) Pema Chodrin’s (Buddhist nun) work on the “way of compassion” as a complement to, for instance, Tolle’s “way of enlightenment.” While much of Eastern philosophy seems to emphasize “detachment,” “objectivity,” Chodrin talks about going DOWN into the morass of human pain and living through it and into it, with other humans, with compassion.
 
(d) William Gaylin, Feelings: Our Vital Signs (Harper & Row Perennial, 1979), where he has chapters that are a phenomenology of many different feelings. He has a chapter on “being touched” as a human to human happening, and one on “being moved” as between a human and The Something Greater.
 
Here are links to some of my articles (all found on my website, www.cefocusing.com , Category Free Resources, then Articles):
 
“On Tears and Focusing,”  a mini-research where Focusers spoke about their experience with tears (I have tons of great quotes!). SHORT BUT SWEET
 
“Being Touched and Being Moved: The Spiritual Value of Tears”,   with lots of quotes about how Focuser value their tears. 
 
“Finding The Meaning of Tears,” a book chapter, with more great quotes about how Focusers use their tears and giving actual Focusing exercises for following the path of tears.
 
“Affect in Focusing and Experiential Therapy”, containing quotes from dialogue between Gene Gendlin and myself about the value and role of what I call “cathartic unfolding” vs. “sheer, repeating emotions.” THEORETICAL WITH EXAMPLES
 
“Medical Change Events Through Experiential Focusing,” including the complete transcript of the 12- minute session (also on my DVD Listening/Focusing Demonstrations) where a woman goes from depression/migraine to felt shift, including joyful releasing teariness, and also including my “Five-Minute Grieving” procedure for helping professionals, immediate application for all physicians and helping professionals.
 
“Active Grieving Part One,”  a perspective on grieving as an alchemical, tranformative process
 
“Active Grieving Part Two,”  an actual protocol for active grieving of a loss.
 
“Focusing Inner Child Work With Abused Clients”, which is not about tears directly but about the extreme attitude of awareness toward subtle nuances of word or body gesture which can indicate repressed memories of emotional/sexual/physical abuse in childhood and the extreme attitude of gentleness needed to allow clients to “be with” and work through, “carry forward,” these painful experiences.
 
It was enlightening to me to see how much of my work has this emphasis upon a kind of “going deeper” and “connection” that is associated with even a slight SHEEN OF TEARS in the eyes (sobbing not necessary but welcome!)
 
GREAT BOOK: WHY GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE
 
By Stephen Post and Jill Neimark, Why Good Things Happen To Good People: The Exciting New Research That Proves The Link Between Doing Good And Living A Longer, Healthier, Happier Life, Broadway Books, 2007. Read about the Ways of Celebration, Generativity, Forgiveness, Courage, Humor, Respect, Compassion, Loyalty, Creativity , and
 
Chapter 11: The Way of Listening: Offer Deep Presence
 
See more at the author’s organization site, Unlimited Love Institute. 

Free Downloads:

Complete Focusing Instructions Manual (17 pages)

“Ajas” Instantaneos Mini-Manual

Creative Edge Focusing (www.cefocusing.com ) teaches two basic self-help skills, Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening, which can be applied at home and at work through The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid.

Based upon Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing (www.focusing.org ) and Rogers’ Empathic Listening, our website is packed with Free Resources and instructions in these basic self-help skills. Learn how to build Support Groups, Conscious Relationships, and Creative Edge Organizations based upon these basic skills of emotional intelligence.

You can try out    “Focusing: Find Out What Is Bothering You.”

Click here to subscribe to Creative Edge Focusing(TM)’s  Instant “Ahah!” e-newsletter and get the latest exercises first!!! 

Click here for a free Intuitive Focusing Mini-Course

Click here for a free Focused Listening Mini-Course

 See  Core Concept: Conflict Resolution to find a complete mini-course on Interpersonal Focusing and Conflict Resolution, including Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Blanchard’s “One Minute Apology,” Patricia Evan’s books on Verbally Abuse and Controlling Relationships, McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance, and much more.

See  Core Concept: Intimate Relationship to find a complete mini-course on increasing intimacy and sexuality, including the “Sharing Your Day” exercise, Listening/Focusing Partnerships for The Way of Relationship, untangling and equalizing desire, tantric sexuality, and much more.

Download complete Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual, in English and Spanish, from CEF Website, or download from links at top of this blog.

Find links to free articles, personality tests, multi-media Self-Help training, Classes and workshops

Dr. Kathy McGuire, Director

Creative Edge Focusing (TM)

www.cefocusing.com