Focusing Level 1 — Foundations

Feb 17 - April 21 | Online

What is Focusing?

Somatic Focusing is a practice of deep inner listening — a way of attuning awareness to the body’s extraordinary inbuilt intelligence.

Originally discovered in the 1950s by philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin, Focusing arose from a simple but profound insight: lasting change happens when we listen into experience, rather than thinking about it.

At the heart of Focusing is the Felt Sense — a subtle, whole-body knowing that arises in response to life. It carries far more information than the thinking mind alone can access, offering insight, movement, and clarity where we feel stuck or fragmented.

Focusing teaches us how to relate to this bodily knowing directly — allowing meaning, insight, and healing to unfold from within.

Focusing 1 is the foundational training in this approach, offering a full introduction to the practice and supporting participants to develop a stable, lived relationship with the felt sense. It also establishes continuity for those who later choose to deepen their practice through Focusing 2.

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Why Focusing?

Through sustained practice, Focusing opens three interwoven dimensions of transformation:

Inner Healing, Wholeness & Self Knowledge

As an inner work practice, Focusing offers a profound pathway toward healing and integration.

Through dynamic practices of listening, you learn how to:

  • tend wounded, disavowed, or lost inner parts

  • metabolise emotional pain without overwhelm or bypass

  • access fresh insight into your life, relationships, and long-held patterns

  • cultivate a growing sense of inner coherence and self-trust

Focusing restores relationship — allowing what has been exiled to come home into the family of wholeness

As an embodied way of knowing, Focusing also allows us to connect more deeply with the natural world. From a regulated nervous system, it becomes possible to sense into the felt sense of the land itself.

This opens a doorway into Earth-Based Listening — a practice of somatic conversation with the more-than-human world. Through this form of listening, people often experience:

  • a lived, bodily sense of belonging to the land

  • relationship with place as sentient and responsive

  • a felt knowing of one’s place within the wider web of life

  • repair of the deep ruptures of disconnection & dispossession

Embodied Connection & Belonging

Embodied Spirituality Through Direct Experience

Focusing can also open a doorway into embodied spirituality. By sensing into experience as it unfolds in the body, practitioners often touch deeper ontological ground: states of presence, peace, reverence, love, or vastness that arise organically from within the listening itself.

In this way, Focusing taps into the alchemical function of awareness, which illuminates, metabolises and transmutes ordinary experience, revealing the deeper reality from which it is made.

Here, the sacred is not sought elsewhere.
It is encountered through the body, in lived immediacy.

An Invitation

This training is a guided entry into deep, embodied listening — offered slowly, relationally, and in community.

Whether you’re new to this powerful process or looking to deepen your inner work, this course will guide you in cultivating a profound connection with yourself, unlocking tools for healing, clarity, and personal growth.

You do not need prior experience.
Only a willingness to pause, turn inwards, and listen.

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Focusing 1: Foundations — Course Overview

A 10-week experiential training introducing the core practices of Inner Relationship Focusing.

Format

  • Duration: 10 weeks (9 classes + 1 integration week)

  • Class Length: 2.5 hours per week

  • Weekly Practice: 1hr Focusing dyads between classes to deepen skills

  • Class Size: Small groups to ensure personalised attention

  • Resources: Comprehensive manual and exercise cards for each week

  • 1:1 Orienting Session: 1 x private 60-minute Focusing session with me before or during the course, offering a lived, felt-sense experience of the Focusing process

This course is suitable for:

  • People new to Focusing who want a clear, well-held introduction to the practice

  • Therapists, guides, and practitioners seeking a somatic foundation that deepens their existing work

  • Anyone sensing a gap between thinking about life and actually feeling it from the inside

It may be especially supportive if you:

  • Feel cut off from your body, or unsure how to listen to it with trust and steadiness

  • Notice a tendency to overthink, analyse, or stay “in the head,” even in personal or spiritual work

  • Struggle to stay present with emotional material without becoming overwhelmed or shut down

  • Sense that something important is trying to be felt or known, but don’t yet have a way to meet it

  • Are doing inner parts work, trauma healing, or therapeutic work and want a deeper bodily anchor

  • Long for a more grounded, embodied spirituality rather than abstract or disembodied approaches

  • Feel drawn to nature connection or ecological work and want a practice that opens felt dialogue with the more-than-human world

Focusing offers a gentle, teachable way of listening that helps people slow down, stay close to experience, and allow meaning to emerge organically — from the body outward.

  • "Rob is a gifted teacher and a calm presence. I feel grateful for what I've learned — a technique that gives me the enriching experience of accessing the felt sense"

    Manda, NSW

Curriculum Overview

Click the drop down menus beside each week to learn more about your Focusing 1 journey.

  • Learn to cultivate Self in Presence—a compassionate and grounded state that allows you to meet inner experiences without judgment. Begin to notice and acknowledge your body’s subtle signals and the profound art of turning towards your inner experience.

    Benefit: Develop a foundation for emotional regulation and connecting to the family of inner parts.

  • Deepen into the Felt Sense—the unique language of your inner world, which holds rich layers of unfolding meaning. Learn the art of putting what is emerging in the body into language to create a bridge between your inner experience and conscious understanding.

    Benefit: Gain tools for identifying and articulating inner experiences, fostering inner relationship and deepening intimacy.

  • Learn how to stay with your felt sense as it evolves, listening for what it wants to communicate. Develop patience and curiosity for inner dialogue, allowing the process to naturally reveal new insights or shifts.

    Benefit: Begin to unlock the body’s wisdom and uncover deeper emotional healing.

  • Develop the art of listening to yourself and others in Focusing partnership in a way that invites safety and facilitates the unfolding of bodily wisdom. Explore how to maintain rhythm and flow in inner and external dialogues. This week we also learn how to engage the body’s natural positive resources.

    Benefit: Enhance inner and outer relational skills while building trust in your inner process

  • Understand how to feel empowered as a Focuser, creating a container that best supports you in unfolding the Felt Sense. Explore the dynamics of a successful focusing partnership and initiatives that help Focusing support you for life.

    Benefit: Strengthen your ability to hold space for others and feel supported in return

  • This week consolidates all the foundational skills you’ve learned so far, supporting an embodied learning of Somatic Focusing. Engage in extended practice sessions that reinforce Presence and the core elements of the Focusing process.

    Benefit: Build an embodied confidence in the art of inner listening

  • Explore "The Edge," where transformation begins. Learn to dwell in the generative space of the unknown with patience and curiosity. This week emphasizes the potency of the beginner’s mind and deepens an awareness of how to ‘find’ the Felt Sense in the white noise of mental story.

    Benefit: Harness the alchemical ground of the emerging edge of the inner process.

  • Learn how to guide others into a co-regulated, alert and peaceful state that supports the emergence of the Felt Sense. This week focuses on building trust with your inner parts, allowing for a more profound connection to your inner wisdom.

    Benefit: Cultivate Presence for yourself and others as the ground of the work.

  • Hone your listening skills by deepening your ability to hold space for nuanced, complex inner experiences, and find the living edge of the process that is wanting to unfold. Explore practical approaches to using Presence language effectively

    Benefit: Strengthen your capacity to support others in exploring complex emotional landscapes with compassion and depth.

  • Anchor your journey with six essential recommendations that serve as your compass for integrating Focusing into daily life. Reflect on your personal growth, celebrate your progress, and prepare for the onward path of discovery and transformation with this profound practice.

    Benefit: Leave with confidence in your ability to tune into the inner guide on the voyage onwards.

What You’ll Receive

9 x live 2.5hr Classes + 1 week of integration

Join me and a small group of students for highly experiential sessions. Each week, we’ll build a safe container using nervous system regulation practices, explore core pieces of Somatic Focusing theory from Anne-Weiser Cornell’s manual, watch live demonstrations, and practice the tools with fellow students.

Get easy-to-follow handouts with exercises to practice between classes, ensuring your learning remains embodied.

Weekly Practice Handouts

The Focuser’s Manual

Focusing theory from Anne-Weiser Cornell’s manual, watch live demonstrations, and practice the tools with fellow students.

Supportive Community

Become part of a dedicated community of fellow students on the path of inner growth, healing, and discovery. Focusing partnerships often lead to lifelong friendships and co-discovery.

1hr individual Focusing Session With Me

An opportunity to experience the richness of Focusing before or during the program. A full hour where you’ll be guided to connect with the felt sense and your own inner knowing.

Upon completion of the training, you’ll receive a Certificate of Completion for Focusing 1: Foundations, acknowledging your participation and learning across the 10-week program.

Certificate of Completion for Level 1

Investment

The Focusing 1: Foundations course is an investment in your inner growth and healing.

The total cost of the 10-week program is $1150, which includes all course materials, tuition, the Focuser’s Manual, together with a private 1hr Focusing session with me so you can get a feel for the terrain.

To make this accessible, a payment plan is also available:

  • Pay $575 upon enrollment.

  • Pay the remaining $575 five weeks later, at the midpoint of the course.

Choose Your Payment Plan

Choose the option that best supports your circumstances. Both secure your place in the full 10-week training.

Pay Upfront: $1150

Enroll - Full Fee

Payment Plan: 2 payments of $575

Enroll - Payment Plan

What Past Students Are Saying

“Learning how to access this extraordinany thing called the felt sense has enabled me to shift some very old, rusted-on behaviours. Instead of listening to the brutal assessments of my inner critic, I can now listen to the felt sense and get in touch with other parts of me that I can now listen to and honour. Focusing allows me to be gentler with myself and opens up space for insights and change.”

— Manda, NSW

“This course has greatly changed the way I connect with my body, emotions, and inner experiences by teaching me how to stay present with them in a truly helpful and enriching way. I’ve learned to be with sensations and emotions…with a sense of curiosity and gentleness… asking the right questions to help [them] unravel and shift…Now, when I encounter strong emotions, frustration, or challenges, I have a clear method to turn to—one that allows me to feel more deeply, stay connected, and ultimately help the experience move through me rather than stay stuck.”

— Basia, NSW

“Rob is a fantastic teacher and role model for harnessing the power of Focusing, teaching from a lived experience and love of focusing. He creates a truly nurturing space that allows everyone in the class to progress and unlock their inner wisdom at their own pace.”

— Ronan, NSW

“Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people, in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside”

— Eugene Gendlin