A few quick updates…
Most Importantly… we have our art groups on Tuesday evenings at 4:30 for pre-teens and 5:30 for young teens. If you know a kid who stuffs it all inside, this is a really health activity for them.
Also Most Importantly… Queers for Queers starts THIS FRIDAY at 6:30. Support group for Queer adults on the younger side.
Part Two of the Focusing Psychology series starts March… if you’ve taken an intro course or have a fair amount of experience with Focusing, this 8 week class is for you.
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It’s been a slow but steady growth at The Experience Studio, with the Queer and Autism and Men’s groups, and the Buddhist Psychology and Focusing classes, and the art therapy and the kids’ group, and of course Community Zen. Write us at counseling confidence@gmail.com for info or to sign up.
With our limited staff, doing the groups pulled time away from the newsletter and the podcast. And, to be honest, the consequences of the election and all the building chaos has, too.
The last few months have shown me the limits of what we can do at any given time. I knew we’d be pushing against those limits.
I want to take a few moments, though, to reflect on Focusing and why it is valuable.
For a person, for an individual, Focusing emphasizes learning how to trust feelings in our body as a good proxy for sensing a whole situation. We might have a gut sense to not trust someone, and then talk ourselves into trusting them. But imagine if before we did the latter, we had a little time to reflect, out loud, with someone who would not judge, who would listen so carefully, and then mirror back to us our expressed experience.
We might give that felt sense of “not trusting” more time, more space, and feel it more. We might pause.
From a broader perspective… this felt sense in our body of a whole situation, a gut feeling, a pressure in the chest, a blocked something in the throat, is much more than an unpleasant sensation we wish to resolve. It is a direct experience of being part of our world, not outside of it. It is being interconnected and being responsive to it.
Focusing helps us in two ways. We can learn to trust our perceptions of things and we can experience that trust as our being part of a whole.
I apologize for the looseness of the thoughts here… I want to get this newsletter out, remind everybody of the good work we are doing, and get myself committed to publishing regularly again.
Take care!