This interactive workshop invites participants to experience and explore Focusing – a bottom-up (somatic) process that supports and helps to shift the psychological and emotional landscape related to climate change and the broader polycrises. Focusing is one of the original modern somatic-oriented therapies and its wisdom and approach are embedded in many popular healing modalities. Through guided exercises and breakout sessions, attendees will experience how Focusing connects us to our inner knowing in a way that helps us find the clarity and heart to engage with the world in whatever way we can best be of service. Focusing is a powerful tool for peer-to-peer listening, whether in therapy, Climate Cafés, or group settings.
This event is hosted by the Climate Psychology Alliance-North America.
A 1.5 hour session introducing Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing as an embodied practice and intervention for ecological distress
Hosts: Annette Dubreuil and Jenn Wesanko
Date and Time: 7-8.30pm ET, Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher and psychologist, first wrote about the felt sense as a guide or "inner knowing" that, when allowed to formbrought to the surface and be explored, leads to significant shifts in understanding and emotional processing — ultimately promoting therapeutic change. Key to this is being welcoming to whatever comes, with acceptance and self-compassion.
In this 90-minute workshop, you will learn about and experience Gendlin’s felt sense and Focusing, his six-step embodied inquiry process to access it. Focusing underpins most contemporary somatic, embodied, and holistic therapies. It is also a process that can be learned and practiced in partnership between peers, providing opportunities for self-care in community.
When we learn how to listen to and work with our felt sense we experience transformation and can claim our personal and collective power.
The reason we do this work and the reason we do it together is so that we can build the world we want to belong to.
Our time together will include practice time and skills building so that you have a felt experience and can teach it to others, including your clients.
You will have an introduction to the Focusing practice, including the gentle attunement and curiosity needed for it to unfold. We’ll lead you in a guided experiential group activity to make contact with a felt sense related to your climate distress. We’ll then offer some listening skills to experience accessing and working with a felt sense with a partner in a breakout room practice. Finally, we’ll come back together to share and discuss what we’ve experienced and how we could bring it into our personal work, community support, and professional practice.
This workshop will show the wisdom and changes that emerge when we listen to our bodies.
Participants will:
Learn key Focusing skills, including how to identify and engage with a “felt sense”
Experience the six-step Focusing practice via short, guided Focusing prompts to tune into your inner wisdom related to the ecological crises
Reflect in group discussions or in personal journaling about incorporating Focusing, as a resilience-building practice, into your personal life and professional work
Workshops Hosts
Jenn Byrne Wesanko is building opportunities for embodied communication that support a sense of vital connection and healing for all. She is a certified Focusing Trainer offering personal and group training, a Focusing-Oriented therapist, and Somatic Experiencing practitioner.
Informed by decades of climate and social change work, somatics, and scholarship in psychology and communication, Jenn holds multiple roles as a psychotherapist, group facilitator, organizational advisor, and educator. Jenn’s understanding of climate change, biodiversity loss, and a changing social landscape includes advising federal cabinet ministers on policy, communications, and political strategy, collaborating with Indigenous leaders and communities in support of land protection, rights and title, and, more recently, facilitating community healing circles following catastrophic wildfires. Jenn also facilitates group workshops and trainings with organizations working on climate and nature-related issues. She is committed to helping others see themselves in the world more clearly, and she supports people to feel at home in their bodies, awaken their power, and claim their voice to live in greater alignment with their values.
Annette Dubreuil is an Embodied Creativity Facilitator, Coach and Focusing Teacher at PUPA. She teaches individuals and groups, including future Focusing Teachers through her two-year program as a Certifying Coordinator with The International Focusing Institute. Annette trains her students and clients to strengthen their access to their intuition—especially the intuitive knowing that whispers to us in our bodies—before the sensations become emotions, images, concepts, words; in short creativity. Annette uses different tools to access this inner knowing, most notably Focusing. Through Focusing, we can also access our inner resources, to gain the confidence and courage to act on our new ideas. Her clients include academic research projects environmental not-for-profit organizations. Annette developed the PUPA process, a crossing of Gendlin’s Focusing and MIT’s Theory U to help support her students and clients as they undertake transformative change. Annette is especially passionate about working with people who want to transform themselves to change the world—to make it more sustainable and equitable. She has a special interest in climate change, and hosts Climate Circles that enable climate action. Annette has an undergraduate degree in environmental science from the University of Waterloo and a MBA in sustainability from the Schulich School of Business. Her previous work was dedicated to sustainability and climate change research, most recently as communications director at Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission. She enjoys gardening, rock climbing, cycling, and cooking.
Other climate change offerings by Jenn and Annette:
