Learn Focusing at Valley Ridge Art Studio

Come to beautiful Valley Ridge Art Studio to learn Focusing and Expressive Art Therapy

Learning Focusing to Help Free the Artist in You, Level One Focusing

Do you want to learn how to: Be a better listener to yourself? Make clear choices? Be calm and compassionate to yourself? Support yourself through change? Feel relaxed and less stressful? Focusing helps you learn how to be Present and listen to yourself so that you can move ahead in your life in an empowered and safe way. Focusing brings you closer to wholeness and allows you to access your inner wisdom. This helps you move in the direction of your potential. It can help you move beyond blocks and get in touch with your goals. Focusing is a gentle and powerful way to develop a deep interpersonal healing relationship with yourself. Awareness of sensations in the body can be blocked through habits of dissociation and repression. This is because the sensation maybe uncomfortable or painful, and we are not trained to focus on this inner knowing and awareness of the body. Transformation of energy involves the acknowledgment, and information of the inner movement of sensation. This energy and awareness is essential to reconnect what has been fragmented by life stress, injury or trauma. In this workshop we will work with: artist's blocks money issues that we may have around our art time issues that we may have for our art making  why we can’t get into the studio Instructor Karen Wallace What is Focusing? Focusing is "direct access to bodily knowing." It is a practice that takes a person towards a state of conscious perception that goes far beyond knowing something on a mere conceptual level. As with Somatic Experiencing, Focusing refers to this bodily knowing as a felt sense. As the Focusing Institute's website explains, "You can sense your living body directly under your thoughts and memories and under your familiar feelings." Focusing happens at a deeper level than your feelings. Under them you can discover a physically sensed murky zone which is concretely there. This is a source from which new steps emerge. This murky zone "opens" as you learn to stay with it longer. Being with it increases the ability to sense feelings behind words or images, even when those are not yet formed. Eventually, you can learn how to let a deeper bodily felt sense come in relation to any problem or situation. It is a subtle process, hard to define in words. Focusing was developed by the philosopher Eugene Gendlin in the late 1960s and early 70s, while he was working with the famed psychologist Carl Rogers. You will learn the skills of and receive credit for Level One Focusing by taking this workshop. You can continue to take Level 2 to 4 with Karen or another Focusing Teacher after this workshop.  To Register: Valley Ridge Art Studio   Learning Focusing to Make Inner: Finding Inner Peace, Level Two Focusing Would you like to learn how to use Art Therapy and Focusing to: Invigorate your creativity? Be calm and compassionate with yourself? Access more of your imagination and creative potential? Having acquired the skills of Level One Focusing, you will be ready to deepen your understanding and ability to use of this process to work with creating inner peace for yourself and others. Focusing and creating art helps you learn how to be Present and listen to yourself in order to move ahead in your life in an empowered and safe way. It can help you feel more integrated and whole.  Focused Art making is a gentle and powerful way to develop a deep intrapersonal healing relationship with the self. In this workshop you will work with: Learning how to guide yourself to have peaceful inner dialogue Finding forward movement and feeling empowered to create Taking responsibility for your own healing Focusing in on your emotional behaviour and language Humans are creative beings. Sometimes the creative flow gets blocked and Focused Art making helps a person learn how to be Present and listen to themselves in order to move back into the creative flow. Focused Art making is a gentle and powerful way to work with your personal stories and to move away from feeling constrained or trapped by them. Awareness of sensations in the body can be blocked through habits of dissociation and repression. This blocks the creative abilities and life force. Transformation of energy involves the acknowledgment and information of the inner movement of sensation. This energy and awareness is essential to reconnect what has been fragmented by life stress, injury or trauma. You will work with releasing emotional, physical, and intellectual beliefs and stories through Focused Art making. Participants will receive Level Two Focusing qualification. To take this workshop participants need to have completed Level One Focusing. To Register:  Valley Ridge Art Studio