Our Learn Focusing Team believes Focusing skills should be accessible to those who are naturally drawn to it. 

Here is an overview of Focusing taken from The International Focusing Institute's webpage: What is Focusing? 

"Focusing is an experiential, embodied and evidence-based practice of self-reflection. During Focusing , your attention will open up to multiple layers and aspects of living.  It’s called Focusing because it requires a special kind of focus to notice what is not yet clear, fuzzy and vague, implicit in how you interact with your situations and environment.  This fuzzy dimension of experience is called the “felt sense” . Focusing on the “felt sense” allows an in-depth clarification process to happen. Sometimes this leads to an amazing experience that the body is reliable in its living-forward tendency.

For some persons, Focusing is a very natural process, while others can do it only after some training.  The subtle movements experienced during a Focusing session have the potential to transforms the framework of thinking and stuck emotional patterns.  In the speed of your daily life, and in the overflow of information, Focusing is helpful to get a clearer sense for anything that matters to you among the complexities of life. The practice has been found to enhance well-being, meaning in life, and all kind of healing and creative processes. Ongoing research since the 1960s robustly demonstrated that clients who get in touch in a Focusing way with their experiential process, are more successful in psychotherapy than those who do not know this act of embodied self-reflection."

 

Learn Focusing Founder, Certified Focusing Coordinator, Author and Neuroscience Educator. Sandy developed our training program for beginners through certification, and is developing curriculum utilizing Smartview Stories books for social and emotional learning educators working with groups ages 9-99. 

Sandy Jahmi Burg

Relational skills, including interoception, are key to everything I do. I help people of all ages become their own best friend. I help people explore living from a body in ways that empower neuroplasticity, our brains capacity to continue growing and evolving in response to life experiences. We are social beings. When we bring these skills to our workplaces and the communities we belong to, they thrive and become more resilient.

Our brains make sense. We often think we are broken, the world is broken. Yes, we are vulnerable to emotional harm which disconnects us. We are also capable of holding ourselves and each other with a kindness and clarity that resonates authenticity. It is this ability to resonate that activates our brain's natural capacity for change and healing.

Our Learn Focusing Team and Community consist of Focusing Practitioners and Trainers from around the world. We work together to make these valuable life skills accessible to all who find us.

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Certified Interactive Focusing Teacher, passionate about bringing Focusing to Schools and Educators. In addition to serving many roles as a key partner in our Focusing Belongs in Schools initiative, Barbara facilitates our Exploring Interaction Changes meetings, teaches TAE (Thinking at the Edge) in our Creating Space Part 4, and brings Interactive Focusing to our Learning Community.

Barbara Dickinson  

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Veteran Educator and Reading Teacher supporting curriculum development for Smartview Stories. Cindy keeps us moving forward on this project!

Cindy Anderson

I earned my Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from St. Lawrence University and my Master of Education in Early Childhood and Elementary Education from Wheelock College (now part of Boston University). While a novice regarding Focusing, I am a veteran educator with 30+ years of experience teaching at the elementary level. I am certified to teach Pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, as well as a certified Reading Teacher. In addition to classroom teaching experience, I have served as a Reading Specialist and a Reading Recovery teacher. I recently retired from public school teaching and now am assisting Sandy with developing the curriculum guides to support her collection of Smartview Stories.

I live in Maryland with my husband and soon to graduate from college, daughter. In addition to the humans in our home, we have two mixed labs who although they are sisters, are completely different, and a 14-year-old Cocker Spaniel who has a sweet personality. There is also a twelve-year-old cat in the house somewhere, but as a visitor, you will never lay eyes on her. I love to read, take long walks, and spend time with my family near and far.

 

Certified Focusing Professional, Experiential Educator, RN, M.Ed. Marki contributes experiential exercises and brings her love of learning and experience in Family Constellations work to the Learning Community. 

Marki Webber

I bring a myriad of personal and professional experiences to my Focusing teaching and all of it contributes to my ever evolving Focusing practice. My early discovery of a passion for experiential teaching and learning as a teenager in Outward Bound has served me in everything I have done, including teaching in a college for students with learning differences, three decades of work in in-patient settings with people finding themselves in need of a time-out for focused mental health support and working in a birthing center accompanying women as they delivered their babies into the world as well as families receiving hospice care as a loved one transitioned out of this world.  All of these experiences have taught me more than I can put into words. 

My earliest introduction to Focusing began in the late 1970’s but the process was hard for me to fully grasp until I discovered new teachers and turned towards it more seriously in 2008. My own struggle in learning this practice has fully informed my teaching. My Focusing certification course was quite emergent and interactive with an emphasis on multiple creative approaches including movement, expressive visual arts and free writing. I bring all of this to my teaching. The Focusing attitude of Curiosity, Listening, Empathy, Acceptance of what “is” and Right relationship to whatever arises has been a deep gift in all aspects of my life.

I live in Southern Vermont where I begin every day spending some time in the woods listening to a nearby stream and other sounds in nature. My greatest joys in life arise when I am engaging my curiosity and discovering something new and/or witnessing and able to be part of this process with others. I share my home with my partner of over 25 years and a sweet and quirky rescue mixed breed herding dog.  

 

Retired Emergency Physician; Practitioner and Designer of processes that involve receptive awareness and “sharing of nervous systems”. Bruce brings a myriad of exercises that expand our understanding of Focusing to the Learning Community several times a year. 

Bruce Nayowith, M.D.

I learned Focusing in 1986, by reading Gendlin’s book and trying it out. After a few initial successes, many initial difficulties, and a great deal of practicing, I slowly gained proficiency with it.

While experimenting with variations that felt more user-friendly to my own system or to others, I developed three non-traditional ways of teaching Focusing (teaching by principles, by instancing, and by discrete separate modules).

Excited by the aliveness and vitality that Focusing can animate in self, others, and other life forms, I often stretch the depth and scope of the Focusing process in hopes of making it more powerful and robust. Some writings about these are available on the Focusing section of my website. http://serviceoflife.info/focusing/findex.html.

Other processes inform and blend into my Focusing practice: meditation, depth and developmental psychology, whole-brain education, emergent group processes including Dynamic Facilitation, Open Dialogue, Community Building, and thousands of hours of ‘shared nervous system’ [We-Space] practices such as Constellations work (10 years), Co-presencing, and Transparent Communication in dyads and group retreats.

From 2017-8, I was in the first training cohort of The Pocket Project - an international exploration intended to engage with and integrate collective and intergenerational trauma - and am currently a participant in the Pocket Project Lab group “Healing the Masculine and Feminine with the Earth.”

After housesitting in rural New Mexico from March through September 2024, I am moving to Santa Fe to live with my partner. The experience of living for a half of a year in the Jemez high desert formations has been profoundly grounding and deepening personally, and has further expanded my awareness of what is possible to experience and receive through felt-sensing.

Beth Mahler,  LCSW, CFT, FOT

Internationally recognized Certifying Coordinator for The International Focusing Institute, Beth brings a deeply integrative Self Care and Focusing Practice to the Learning Community. 

 

Beth integrates a creative process into her teaching which helps people to discover their own embodied sense of the Focusing experience.  Inviting her students into a deep exploration at a pace that is slow, steady, and grounded in a full bodied mindfully aware practice.  Beth has over 20 years experience as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in hospitals, schools, and mental health clinical settings, which also informs her caring presence as curious beings embark on learning this practice.  Energized by learning and growing, I continually enrich my own contemplative practices in yoga, meditation, chakra and energy fields of study.  

Offerings include:  

*Group workshops, retreats, and 2 Year Focusing Trainings

*Individual guided Focusing sessions by Zoom and in person

*Individual, Marital, and Family Therapy (Psychology Today reference),

*Free Changes meetings offer a place to practice Focusing in a supported environment facilitated by the NJ Focusing Trainers team

An integrative experience uniquely tailored for your needs.  For more information and to contact me, visit HERE. 

The Self Care & Focusing experience that I provide to Sandy Jahmi Burg's learning community is an integration of meditative, attentiveness to locations of the body for felt sensing while lying supine and fully supported, sitting or standing in an upright & grounded length to the Self.  I teach a basic understanding of the elements of Neuroscience, Wholebody Focusing & the integration of the Sufi Meditation before engaging in an experiential exercise where participants will be guided in the practice.  A breakout space for Focusing Partnership will also be included in the Self Care and Focusing Practice.  

 

Teacher and Psychotherapist specializing in Mindfulness Therapy. Peter's approach with Mindfulness Therapy is deeply valued in the Learning Community where he joins us at least once a year. 

Peter Strong, PhD

I specialize in the application of Mindfulness Therapy and Mindfulness Meditation Therapy offered online via Skype for help overcoming anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, and for help with addiction recovery. 

Mindfulness Therapy teaches us how to develop a non-reactive conscious relationship with painful emotions and memories, creating a therapeutic space in which healing takes place. 

Mindfulness Meditation Therapy teaches us how to meditate on the mind to overcome habitual reactivity and to cultivate that therapeutic space. This also involves working with emotional imagery, which is at the heart of all emotions, allowing that imagery to change in a direction of healing and resolution.

I work with individuals and groups, offering online therapy session via Skype.

You can learn more about this Mindfulness Therapy Service by visiting my website: https://pdmstrong.wordpress.com.

Originally from the UK, I now live in Colorado with my wife and two grown children.