WBF Training Archives – Kevin McEvenue's Wholebody Focusing Blog

The “Me Here” Series of Training Conversations

In August of 2018, Addie van der Kooy, Kevin McEvenue and I met to discuss what is new in Wholebody Focusing. Addie and Kevin collaborated on FOCUSING WITH THE WHOLE BODY: A CD-integrated Focusing Learning Program that was published in October 2006. We wanted to bring together the two people responsible for this extraordinary learning program and to look toward the future of Wholebody Focusing.

That day we filmed until what needed to be said was complete. The result was the six videos listed below. The first four are already on the blog. You may have seen them already. The last two complete the series and set the stage for what comes next.

My experience as the producer/editor of these videos is that new ground is broken in these intimate dialogues and they may need several views to fully take in what is being shared. This blog is proud to have the opportunity to make these conversations possible and to be the mechanism to share them with those who would benefit.

These six videos are each part of a flow of exploration so you may want play them in the order they are listed. Once you become familiar with them, you may want to pick and choose which one suits you most on any given day.

Please comment and share how these conversations have impacted you. This is an exciting way to keep WBF as a vibrant life experience.

The Inner Core Muscle of “Me Here” This Interview discusses training someone to find grounded presence.

The Inner Core Muscle of “Holding Both” This interview discusses training someone to “hold both with equal positive regard.”

Let Your Experience Be This interview discusses how to be with whatever comes even if it is not what you expected.

Me Here and My Thoughts This interview discusses how to be with racing thoughts that may or may not be true or helpful.

What Is Needed to Start the WBF Process?

Why is establishing an inner structure so important to learning Wholebody Focusing?

The End Note: Why Talk About Muscles?

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Wholebody Focusing Trainer Corner

Inspired by the work that Addie van de Kooy has been adding to the blog that precisely describes what happens when someone learns Wholebody focusing, we decided to develop a new category of communication. We want to provide those who are Wholebody Focusing Trainers with a place to share their expertise and have a Heartfelt Conversation on how to deepen our practice of working with our clients. Kevin McEvenue’s Intunements are an extraordinary resource that can support both personal practice as well as the work of WBF trainers. Kevin is genuinely interested; however, in being a part of the growth and expansion of how the teaching of Wholebody Focusing can support the forward moving life in all of us.

To that end, we have created this new area in the blog called The Wholebody Focusing Trainer Corner so that information about teaching Wholebody Focusing can be shared and discussed. One should consider the Intunements as part of this training material; however, it will continue to have a separate section on the blog because it serves individual practice as well.

We invite all those who teach Wholebody Focusing to share with us your best practices. If you would like support to prepare an article or video for this section, please contact Diana Scalera at wbf285@gmail.com.

Enjoy the fantastic work of those who are carrying forward what they have learned and continue to find new ways of supporting life in all of us.

Today we are going to highlight a trainer in China. YongWei Xu shares how she experiences Wholebody Focusing and Heartfelt Conversation in her life and the lives of her focusing partners and clients. She also describes her work with Wholebody Focusers in a small village near Shanghai.

To watch this video in English please click on https://wholebodyfocusing.blog/2018/03/27/is-this-the-life-i-really-want/

To read or leave a comment please click on the word Comments next to or under the photo.

About Us

The Dance of Life

By Cathy Rowan

I grew up in a family full of unacknowledged trauma and grief, where the only way to “be” was to “not be” and to not feel. As a family, our expertise lay in dissociation and disconnection: even as a small child, something in me felt this was all wrong for me. From my early childhood, my life has been about finding a very different way. This way needed to be unlike that of my parents. I wanted to live in this new way these allotted years of my time here on earth.

Enter Focusing

This need brought me to Focusing a decade ago, and it has proved to be my salvation, my learning to feel and to start to connect with my bodily experience and feel safe in so doing.

To go deeper into connecting to and being in my body, I started my Wholebody Focusing training more than over five years ago. However, very quickly, what I connected to, in my body, as I went deeper, were layers and layers of frozen tears and pain. I had disowned and buried the grief of the many losses in my past. Some of that grief and loss were mine, and some were those of my parents and grandparents. My Focusing journey then took the path of showing me how to grieve and mourn, how to start to hold, and befriend heartbreak and loss. This journey surprised me by also taking me into a much deeper and more spiritual lifestyle.

Then late this summer, something in me knew it was time for me to return to my Wholebody Focusing training. And so a couple of weeks ago Addie van der Kooy and Diana Scalera suggested to me I might like to contribute to the blog about this experience, so here I go.

A Very Different Way

As I turn to my body now, fingers on the keys, what comes immediately as I invite my body to write to this post, is a lightness, an expansiveness, a subtle bubbliness even. It is emanating from the solar plexus area and expanding out throughout my body and into the space around me. There is an uplifting quality and yet also a downward grounding-ness to it – a body sense of getting bigger, there is more of me here now than before the first session I had with Addie almost two weeks ago.

And there is a sense of celebration and excitement in me: the day I started school just before I was five years old, I knew I had not had what I needed to cope with life beyond the home. Now my body is getting it – 59 years later!!

Not only is my body getting the nourishment and loving connection it so needed, what is also different is my body now can take it in, absorb it, digest it, grow from it. In retrospect, five years ago, I realize I had only just stopped dissociating as my default mode of being. When I started Wholebody Focusing training back then, it was inevitable I was going to quickly connect to the buried body memories held inside of me. These feelings became my default mode, a Nobel-prize winning ability in dissociation when life was challenging. And there had been a lot of challenges!

Now a significant amount of energy has surfaced. This energy helps me make space for me to enjoy the experience of embodiment and fascination with the incredible mystery that is our alive breathing bodying.

Observing my Living Process

I feel like I have acquired Richard Attenborough’s fascination for the micro-moments of observing the living process unfolding in me as I sit with my breath. I start with being just open to the minute nuances of the travel of the cool inhale air past my nostrils, stroking down my throat, landing down in the lungs. Next, a diffuse spreading out of the breath comes, a movement that goes into every cell of my body, atoms of aliveness filling me. Then, the mysterious knowing comes of how and when to exhale, to release, to let go, to make space for more to come — finally pausing before the next drawing in of the breath. It is like the most beautiful dance. For me, it is the Dance of Life.

To leave or read a comment, please click here and go past the end of the post.

Addie and Kevin on Gendlin’s Foundational Contribution to WBF

The first benefit of watching this video is a chance to observe these long-time collaborators approach the topic as a Heartfelt Conversation. The second benefit is to hear anew how essential the foundation of Gendlin’s work is to Wholebody Focusing.

We have a new series of videos that provide insights to Wholebody Focusing through a Heartfelt Conversation between Addie van der Kooy and Kevin McEvenue. Their purpose is to deepen their understanding of how the theories of Gene Gendlin, founder of Focusing, is still relevant to Wholebody. They also explore the new edge of the work of Addie van der Kooy in deepening our understanding of the power of Wholebody focusing that also draws from van der Kooy’s experience of working with clients and his own transformation using WBF.

The first benefit of watching this video is that it is a great pleasure to observe these long-time collaborators and friends approach the topic as a Heartfelt Conversation. What comes is from a state of grounded presence. One can see Heartfelt conversation in action and sense into the results of this kind of conversation.

The second benefit is to hear anew how essential the foundation of Gendlin’s work is to Wholebody Focusing. Addie directs us to connect to some parts of what Gendlin proposes into our WBF practice. He also points us to the simplicity and precision of the six core Focusing movements that Gendlin introduces in the Focusing book. Particularly, sensing into Finding a Handle and Resonating the Handle with the Felt Sense.

In future videos, we will present how those foundational concepts are part and parcel to how Wholebody Focusing developed to include the role of the bodily felt sense in a new way.

This post includes the video of this conversation. It also has the transcript of the video so that those who speak other languages can use the translation app attached to this blog as a way to translate the content of the video. Transcript of Van der Kooy, McEvenue, and Gendlin

We invite you to enjoy, like, and comment on this conversation. We also encourage your anticipation of the videos of the rest of the conversation

To leave or read a comment, click here and go past the end of the post.

Focusing with One’s Body

Photo Credit: Michael Lux The Creative Little Garden NYC

As part of our Trainers’ Corner, we are offering a series of short training videos. The videos demonstrate what happens in a Wholebody Focusing session.

This first clip is from a session between Kevin McEvenue and Diana Scalera. It is from the end of a meeting whose theme was of being with what is new in our lives while honoring what was there before. What you will see in this video is how this situation lives in Diana’s body and how Kevin supports the forward movement of how these challenges live in her body.

Please consider sharing what you notice about the session, what you learned, or maybe that which you want to know more. Use the link below to send your comments, and we will respond.

In the week after this session, my right shoulder pain that would show up after a night’s sleep in the same position disappeared. There is still pain on the left side. What did change in a big way was that I have a broader capacity to face challenges with more confidence and clarity.

Let’s see what happens when my left arm has a chance to be fully heard and becomes more aware of itself.

To leave or read a comment, click here and go past the end of the post.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

How to Start Wholebody Focusing with a Partner

This is a description of the steps of a session with Cristina Griggio via Skype. It can be a starting point for focusers who would like to add some Wholebody sensibility to their practice.

Photo Credit: Diana Scalera

When I attended the Scambi 2019 in Albano Terme, Italy this past summer, I presented my workshop Focusing Around the Dinner Table using mostly Wholebody Focusing as the vehicle to access this theme in our bodies. Since then, some focusers have been asking for help to learn Wholebody Focusing. I have begun working with some of the Italian focusers and have come up with a way for them to get started on their path to incorporating Wholebody Focusing into their Focusing practice. Below is a description of the steps of a session with Cristina Griggio via Skype. It can be a starting point for focusers who would like to add some Wholebody sensibility to their practice.

Both partners need to be willing let go of the need to have an agenda for their session and actively hold space to what your body prioritizes. Each partner can take a turn being the person who is focusing, and the other person is mostly silently holding energetic space for their partner while noticeing how what happens to your partner impacts your body.
Establish your energetic connection with your partner. If you are in person, make sure you have a sense of each other’s energy. If you are working via the internet, find your way to connect in this situation.
The Focuser asks her body a simple question “Where does my body need attention now?” Let your body choose what it needs. Let go of any narrative and your thoughts about what is necessary in this moment. Your body might have a different point of view.
Wait and hold space for whatever comes.
1. Acknowledge the body’s sense of what is there without adding a narrative. Stay with the bodily sensation.
2. Let what is there know that it can be just the way it is and has all the time it needs to be present to itself.
3. Give your body permission to move, especially your hands, which may be able to support parts that are struggling.
Stay with whatever comes. Ask for help from other parts of your body, from the earth below you, the sky above, the air you breathe, or the chair in which you sit.
Let your body indicate when it has found a resting place (or ask your body to find a resting place).
When the Focuser has come to a resting place, the partner can share how that experience with her partner impacted her body. The Focuser can also share more if they choose with their partner about their experience.
After the session, both Focuser and Listener should pay attention to whatever comes that relates to what happened in the session. According to Addie van der Kooy, each opportunity we take to spend time with our bodies in grounded presence causes changes (from minor to monumental). Our lived experiences after our sessions let us know what has changed.

To leave or read a comment, click here and go past the end of the post.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

The “Holding Both with Equal Regard” Challenge

Photo Credit: Pixabay

How do we live day to day with so much evidence that our society does not support basic human needs? It is like being children and having families that do not meet our needs. I propose that our readers practice “holding both with equal regard” when we are encouraged or disturbed by what is happening politically. Take time to be with the body sense of your experience and share the results in the comments section of this blog.

Election night 2016, my friends and I went to a performance of Coriolanus, a Shakespeare play about governmental corruption and abuse of power. At the end of the play, everyone in the audience turned on their cell phones at the same time and collectively groaned. The news said, much to everyone’s surprise in NYC, that Donald Trump had won the election for president.

From that night on, most Americans have had their concept of being an American undercut in some way. We all do not share the same ideas. For examples, some of us have been horrified by the growth of white nationalism, while others are firmly against the radical changes that some groups propose.

One thing that has happened, as a result, is that more people are taking an interest in politics and discussing it, arguing it, and feeling it in our bodies.

How Can Wholebody Focusing Help?

I propose we do a mini-research on how “holding both with equal regard” can help us to move forward in this challenging environment. This activity is not limited to people who live in the USA. There are many reasons people in other countries are experiencing the same instability. I recommend the following:

Notice when you see, read, or hear something that is accompanied by a body reaction.
Connect to your grounded presence.
Pause to be with that reaction by holding both with equal regard. If it is something we like, give your body time to process it. If it is disturbing, also welcome it and allow your body to process this new information.
Let your body show you when it is complete. You might notice that the strength of the reaction has lessened or you have moved on to another idea.
Over time, notice if there is anything different in how you are experiencing the ups and downs of the current political situation.
Send comments to the blog about what you are noticing.

We look forward to hearing from you.

To leave or read a comment, click here and go past the end of the post.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

The Inner Core Muscle of “Holding Both”

In this part of the conversation the excitement and experience of the practice of “Holding Both” naturally comes alive when you not only make space for a body sense of your suffering, but also include the bodily felt aliveness of “Me Here.”

Welcome to the third video blog of a heartfelt conversation between Kevin McEvenue and WBF trainer Addie van der Kooy. In this part of the conversation both share their excitement and experience of the practice of “Holding Both” – an inner dynamic that naturally comes alive when you not only make space for a body sense of your suffering, but also include the bodily felt connected-ness and aliveness of “Me Here.” This inner core muscle of Holding Both opens up new possibilities of deep healing and even transformation. Enjoy,

Addie van der Kooy (email: avdkooy@outlook.com)

Category: WBF Training