- Gina and Inner Relationship Focusing
- What is Inner Relationship Focusing
- About Nonviolent Communication Consciousness & Inner Relationship Focusing
I have been a serious Focusing practitionner for 7 years, and have been sharing Focusing with NVC for 2 years, every week, to groups and individuals. After deepening my own experience with every thing within me relating to PTSD and strong physical symptoms, I decided to become a certified Focusing trainer in the IR Focusing method.
Here is some info about IR Focusing from Ann Weiser Cornell, my teacher and one of the 2 co-founders of IR Focusing
What is Inner Relationship Focusing?
The following material has been taken from Ann Weiser Cornell's website
A Focusing session is an experience of deep contact with yourself
IR Focusing is a special way of paying attention to yourself, so that you sense the whole way you are feeling about situations or issues in your life. This is different from just having emotions or just getting in touch with feelings. IR Focusing involves having a different kind of relationship with emotions and feelings. It’s as if you are becoming your own good listener. The result is greater calm, wiser choices, and a deeper sense of connection to your own life and being.
It doesn’t require any special equipment or beliefs. It isn’t psychotherapy or coaching. It’s something you can learn to do by yourself, and do with friends and family members if you like.
Typically when something is distressing us, and we feel upset and agitated, we have a tendency to want to figure out a solution. Our reasoning is, if we can figure it out intellectually, we think that means we’ll be able to solve the problem and implement the solution. And this works well… until it doesn’t. Life’s toughest problems, especially the ones involving emotionsand other people, can’t be solved this way.
With IR Focusing you bypass the intellectual analyzing. You go directly to the place where you have a deep body knowing about the situation. There is wisdom in our body-mind which we tend to ignore, partly because our modern, fast-paced, head-oriented culture is just not set up that way.
How It Works
In Inner Relationship Focusing what we show people is how to have an inner relationship with your feelings. . . and how, if you do that, they change naturally, and bring you gifts of insight as they do.
What are the essential qualities of IR Focusing?
It is gentle and respectful. We think we need to be forceful with ourselves in order to make something change – but force just creates resistance. Gentleness can be the most powerful force in the inner world. Likewise, self-criticism sets up resistance to change. Treating ourselves with kindness and respect is key.
IR Focusing is based in body-sensing. Your body can give you guidance about every situation in your life. Sometimes, the body sense is there already, and other times you would invite it to come.
With IR Focusing, you learn a series of steps of inner contact, from describing what something feels like, to saying hello to it, to sensing what it has to show you. It’s like a conversation with yourself, a conversation where you do all the listening. And finally, it is not therapy (though it can be therapeutic) because it is something that you can do yourself and have with you through all the ups and downs of your life.
How do you learn it?
That depends on you. As in therapy or coaching, you can get positive change on deeply held, long term issues, as well as releasing blocks to taking practical action. But unlike therapy or coaching, you do IRF on your own or with partners in a free exchange. You learn a way of being that you have with you at all times, and once you learn it, it costs you nothing more.
As in meditation, IR Focusing has an essential quality of acceptance, and you can find greater inner peace and detachment from stressful emotional states or thoughts. But unlike meditation, IRF is more engaged, practical, issue-oriented – being about a particular life situation.
As in positive self-talk or visualization, you can access the very best of your potential for moving forward with your life without getting stuck in negative emotions. But unlike positive self-talk or visualization, IRF is grounded in your whole self, inclusive of all your feeling states, so you aren’t leaving out aspects of yourself that can return in a backlash
Who can Inner Relationship Focusing really help? See if one or more of these scenarios feel familiar to you.
- You feel blocked. You can do anything except what you most need to do. When you put some task Number One on your priority list, you find yourself doing anything but that. You’re so far behind on the important things, you feel like you’ll never dig out.
- Your life is going very well externally, but deep down you feel unworthy, like a faker. People seem to look up to you, even depend on you, but you keep thinking, if only they knew! And then you feel like you have to work even harder, to hide that.
- You’re reactive out of proportion to what’s actually happening, blowing up or bursting into tears at little criticisms or panicking at little setbacks. Too often your family makes you feel crazy or your clients irritate you. You’ve tried talking yourself out of the feelings but they persist anyway.
- You’re in a life transition, and you’re feeling overwhelmed by too many decisions. A lot hangs in the balance and you feel a sense of inner pressure that doesn’t help at all. You need to find some way to navigate between the different choices, some way that lets you trust yourself.
- You feel you are in a kind of spiritual wasteland, a darkness of the soul, where nothing feels true or right, but you can’t even explain what the problem is, and everywhere you look for answers seems just as empty as you feel.
- You’re facing a health challenge and you realize that this is absolutely the time to be able to listen deeply to yourself and your body, because not listening to your body is probably part of why you’re in this situation. Maybe you’re in physical pain, having trouble sleeping, anxious about the symptoms you’re experiencing.
- You want to be able to follow your inner journey, perhaps through a practice like meditation, but you don’t know what to do with the intrusive thoughts and distractions. Or you might want support in learning a new practice that has the acceptance and quiet mind of meditation, yet allows you to engage with emotional issues and resolve them.
- You might be:
- A high achiever fundamentally doing well but with a few areas of blockage that persistently get in the way
- Someone who is doing OK but you feel you are not living up to your potential and you have periods of self-doubt and low mood
- A person who seriously struggles with the results of early trauma and needs more ways to self-support when the reactivity gets triggered, as well as wanting genuine healing over time
- Someone who is in psychotherapy now and would like to learn a process that you can do yourself between therapy sessions
- Someone who has benefitted from psychotherapy in the past but who is now looking for a way to take more personal charge of your emotional healing
- A person who would like a method for greater self-awareness and self-alignment that can be used daily and potentially shared with family and community
But will it work for you? It will, if you have these values:
- You are committed to your own growth as a person
- You are willing to face and get to know your emotional reactions to your life
- You are committed to bringing your gifts into the world
- You value living with integrity and self-awareness
- You know there is more to you than this!
On the other hand, we wouldn’t be a good fit for you if:
- You are looking for a quick fix
- You aren’t interested in knowing yourself better
- You want someone else to solve your problems for you
Three Key Aspects of Focusing, by Ann Weiser Cornell
About Nonviolent Communication Consciousness
& Inner Relationship Focusing
by Gina Cenciose
NVC skills and consciousness have supported a deep clarity about what’s most important to me, how I want to live, and how to live my values in relationship with others. I cherish how needs-based consciousness works on many levels – as a way to support authenticity and efficiency in meetings and workplaces, as a conflict resolution process, and as a guide towards becoming that which I value most.
To me, the skill and practice of empathy and its call to the present moment is an effective way to deepen my awareness of life inside and outside of myself. It keeps me focused on the quality of presence in the present moment, and this enriches my life.
I have deeply cherished the self-connection/self-empathy aspect of NVC. I’ve also noticed that the self-accompaniment that was longed for inside of myself and with others has wanted to shift in some ways. Translating inner voices of judgment, anger, blame, and criticism into feelings and needs has been very helpful, and I’ve been called to deepen and broaden my ability to embody self-compassion and self-accompaniment. This is what I found in the process called Inner Relationship (IR) Focusing.
For me, the combination of NVC with this type of focusing is very rich and complimentary. In placing attention on places within me that are creating intensity, inner conflict, or shame, (jackal voices) and taking all the time and space we need to actually touch these places with awareness, I have found that the unfolding of what is alive in me and those I work with is not always a linear process. In IR Focusing, we learn to become aware of the "felt sense." By mastering the stages, skills, and clarity of this process, each person learns to become the container of safety and nonjudgmental acceptance for whatever shows up and to invite its unfolding.
When we put our awareness on a need, I believe we are touching into our natural state of being. Part of my practice in Inner Relationship Focusing is to bring my attention to how needs live inside of me, moment by moment. With the tools of IR Focusing, we learn to go inside and befriend whatever is there. IR Focusing is a deeper and more concentrated form of self-empathy where we invite whatever wants our awareness inside of ourselves, connecting to the felt sense and befriending whatever is there; we can also accompany the felt sense in relation to an issue, belief, jackal voice, need that calls for our presence.
The ability to focus our awareness on needs as alive, present moment qualities of our being is one of the most important skills we develop as we learn to embody NVC consciousness. In my view, the tools and presence language of IR focusing enables us to deeply connect to that aliveness inside us.
I now combine Inner Relationship Focusing in many of my NVC year long and 6 month programs and teach focusing to individuals and groups every week, as well as maintainig my daily NVC and Focusing practice with many different partners.
Ann Weiser Cornell is my IR Focusing teacher and head of my certification process. You can go to her website, where you can get many interesting book chapters and articles about IR Focusing and listen to free audios of her phone classes.
To know about the next upcoming program combining NVC and IR focusing please send me an email.