Focusing Skills
Training 2026/27
British Focusing Association (BFA)
Focusing Skills Certificate* Training
with Deirdre Kennedy
Two 10-Week Online Modules
50–60 Hours of Interactive, Experiential Learning
This training is designed for anyone who wants to deepen self-awareness, strengthen relationships, and learn a practical, compassionate way of meeting life’s challenges. Whether you are joining for personal growth or as a professional wishing to bring Focusing into your work, you’ll learn in a supportive online community through guided practice, reflection, demonstrations, and partner exercises.
By the end of both modules, you will have completed the requirements for the BFA Focusing Skills Certificate and developed a solid foundation in Inner Relationship Focusing.
*equally recognised by the International Focusing Institute as Proficiency in Focusing Partnership (PFP) Award
My Approach
My strength as a Focusing teacher lies in creating a gentle, supportive scaffold that helps people reconnect with the wisdom of their own bodies.
Learning Focusing is a gradual unfolding. I offer a clear structure that enables participants to build confidence step by step while always encouraging trust in their own inner experience. Rather than teaching a technique to be mastered, I support the development of an embodied practice that becomes a natural way of relating to yourself and the world.
A trauma-informed perspective underpins everything I teach. I understand that our bodies carry the imprint of our life experiences and that protective responses develop for good reasons. This means we work at a pace that honours each person’s nervous system, cultivating safety, choice, curiosity, and self-compassion rather than pushing for change.
My intention is to create a learning environment where you feel deeply listened to, supported, and empowered to discover your own inner knowing. From this place, lasting change emerges naturally—through relationship with yourself, your body, and your felt sense.
Focusing Skills Training — Part 1
The Journey Within
Embodied Awareness, Felt Sense & the Focusing Attitude
10 Weeks | 25 Hours Group Training, Home & Partnership Practice
Part One introduces Focusing as an embodied practice of inner listening.
Participants learn to pause, turn attention inward and develop a different relationship with their bodily experience—meeting what is present with curiosity rather than immediately analysing, fixing or trying to make it disappear.
The developmental journey is:
Arriving → Sensing → Meeting → Being With → Felt Sense → Allowing → Resonating → Receiving → Life-Forward Movement
The aim is not simply to learn the steps of Focusing, but gradually to cultivate the Focusing Attitude as a way of being with ourselves.
Overall Learning Outcomes
By the end of Part One, participants will be able to:
Understand the origins, principles and purpose of Focusing.
Develop the core Focusing Attitude of curiosity, interest, sensing, welcoming and allowing.
Pause and turn attention from conceptual thinking towards embodied experience.
Resource and orient themselves before and during inner work.
Recognise sensations, feelings, images, gestures, symbols and other forms of bodily communication.
Use “I am sensing…” and “Something in me…” language to create relationship with inner experience.
Understand and practise the four foundational movements of Arriving, Meeting, Being With and Closing.
Recognise the difference between a familiar emotion or part and an emerging felt sense.
Allow a felt sense time to form without forcing meaning.
Find words, images, sounds or gestures that resonate with bodily experience.
Check these symbols back against the body for a sense of fit.
Develop Self-in-Presence and find an appropriate distance from difficult inner experience.
Recognise and welcome different inner parts without becoming merged with them.
Practise intentional and opportunistic solo Focusing.
Begin and close a self-Focusing process safely.
Participate safely in introductory Focusing partnerships and receive silent companionship.
Recognise felt shifts, emerging meaning and life-forward movement.
Begin integrating Focusing into everyday life, decisions and relationships.
Training Content
Week 1 - Meeting Focusing
Beginning the Journey
The first week begins experientially rather than through theory.
Participants are invited to notice what brings them to Focusing, what they hope might change and what their body already senses about the practice.
Topics include:
Meeting the group and creating the learning space
What brings me here?
What would I like from this training?
Introduction to the Focusing Attitude
Finding an inner resource or supportive place
Grounding and orientation
Inviting the whole question into the body
Allowing what comes—or does not come
Introduction to silent companionship
First Focusing demonstration and partnership experience
Experiential practice:
One person Focuses while the other offers silent presence, with no discussion or interpretation afterwards.
Your original exercise already establishes an important principle: the Focuser invites the whole question, allows whatever comes or doesn’t come and trusts the process rather than making something happen.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Begin orienting attention towards bodily experience.
Identify personal resources that support inner listening.
Experience a first Focusing process without needing to perform it correctly.
Experience the presence of a silent Companion.
Week 2 — Why Focusing?
The Journey Within
Participants now put some context around the experience of Week 1.
Topics include:
Why learn Focusing?
Eugene Gendlin and the origins of Focusing
The relationship between Focusing and experiential therapy
The Focusing Attitude
Living Focusing
Slowing down and honouring pauses
Resourcing
Pausing, sensing and checking
Taking Focusing home
Focusing as an intentional and everyday practice
A central principle from your material is that Focusing places attention inwardly towards meaning that has not yet been verbalised.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Describe the basic origins and intention of Focusing.
Understand why bodily knowing is different from intellectual analysis.
Begin practising pausing, sensing and checking.
Use simple resourcing practices to support self-Focusing.
Week 3 — Inner Listening
Learning the Focusing Process
This week gives participants a practical map while emphasising that the map is not the territory.
The four foundational movements are:
Arriving → Meeting/Welcome → Being With → Closing
Topics include:
Arriving in the body
Finding support and resource
Noticing what wants attention
Checking whether it feels okay to approach
Welcoming what is present
Finding words, images, sounds or gestures
Resonating/checking
Acknowledging what arises
Closing and returning attention outward
Keeping Focusing safe
Privacy and confidentiality
Choice and freedom within the process
Your safety material explicitly states that participants need not reveal the subject they are Focusing on, may keep content private, and can pause or choose not to Focus when something feels too vulnerable or raw.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Move through the four foundational phases of a Focusing process.
Recognise when something inside is asking for attention.
Use words, images or gestures to describe bodily experience.
Check descriptions back against bodily experience.
Close a Focusing process intentionally and safely.
Week 4 — Presencing
Me Here — You There
Focusing now begins to move from purely internal awareness towards relational awareness.
Participants explore how to stay connected to themselves while sensing another person.
Topics include:
Presencing
Self-awareness in relationship
I feel you feeling me
Me Here — You There
Separate and connected
Sensing the space between
Returning attention to oneself after sensing another
Embodied listening
Connection without merging
The exercise in your material moves deliberately between attuning to oneself, attuning to another, returning inward and then sensing the relational space between both people.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Maintain awareness of themselves while in contact with another.
Begin differentiating their own experience from another person’s.
Recognise the relational space without losing their own centre.
Practise returning attention to themselves after interpersonal contact.
Week 5 — The Power & Essence of Presence
Cultivating Self-in-Presence
Presence becomes a central Focusing capacity.
Rather than identifying completely with whatever arises, participants learn that awareness can become large enough to hold their experience.
Topics include:
The Power of Presence
Self-in-Presence
“I am here”
Creating an internal climate in which experience can unfold
Curiosity
Welcoming
Non-judgement
Self-compassion
Not fixing, changing or taking sides
Staying present with difficult experience
Embodied relational presence
Your material describes Focusing Presence as an inward quality of attention that creates a safer internal environment, allowing experience to be held without becoming hooked by self-doubt, judgement, dismissal or criticism.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Recognise the difference between being an experience and being present with it.
Cultivate Self-in-Presence through embodied awareness.
Meet inner experience without immediately trying to change it.
Return towards grounded presence when inner material becomes difficult.
Week 6 — Holding It All
Parts, AND & the Art of Allowing
This week introduces the multiplicity of our inner experience.
Participants discover that we can hold seemingly contradictory feelings and parts without having to decide which one is “right”.
Topics include:
Introduction to parts
“Something in me…”
The Power of AND
Holding multiple experiences
Inner critic
Background feelings
Fearful, worried or catastrophising parts
Blocks and impulses
The Guest House
Radical acceptance
Welcoming rather than rejecting
The Art of Allowing
Finding the right distance
Not becoming merged with a part
Your course asks participants to notice the many “visitors” in their inner Guest House—including inner criticism, background feelings, pain, changing moods, impulses and blocks—and explore whether they can meet these experiences through a Focusing pause rather than blame or rejection.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Recognise different parts or voices within themselves.
Use distancing language to reduce merging.
Hold apparently conflicting experiences simultaneously.
Meet difficult parts with curiosity rather than exclusion.
Practise allowing without becoming passive or overwhelmed.
Week 7 — The Felt Sense
Listening Beyond What We Already Know
Participants now deepen into one of the central discoveries of Focusing: the felt sense.
A felt sense is not simply an emotion or sensation. It is a bodily sense of the whole of a situation, carrying implicit meaning that has not yet completely formed.
Topics include:
What is a felt sense?
Felt sense versus emotion
Felt sense versus thought
The body as a source of holistic knowing
Going beyond familiar feelings
Asking: “What does my body know about the whole of this?”
Allowing a felt sense to form
Patience and not-knowing
Felt sense as fresh and emergent
Self-in-Presence as the environment in which felt sense forms
Your material emphasises that a felt sense has to form, is fresh in the moment, and is not simply a feeling already known.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Differentiate felt sense from thoughts, familiar emotions and established parts.
Invite the bodily sense of a whole situation.
Allow time for vague or implicit knowing to form.
Remain curious without demanding an immediate answer.
Week 8 — The Murky Edge
Symbolisation, Resonating & Felt Shift
This week moves closer to the edge of awareness—where something is sensed but cannot yet be clearly explained.
Topics include:
The murky edge
Vague, fuzzy and unclear experience
Staying with what isn’t yet known
Sensations and emotional qualities
Words and phrases
Images
Sounds
Gestures and movements
Finding a handle
Resonating/checking
“Does this fit?”
“Yes… but there’s more”
Recognising felt shift
Symbolisation and carrying forward
Your material describes the felt sense as vague, intricate and holistic, with change occurring when it is accurately symbolised.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Remain with vague experience without prematurely defining it.
Allow symbols to emerge from bodily experience.
Resonantly check words, images and gestures against the felt sense.
Recognise when something feels more accurate or complete.
Notice subtle bodily shifts associated with new meaning.
Week 9 — Becoming an Empowered Focuser
Self-Guiding & Focusing in Everyday Life
The emphasis now moves towards autonomy.
Participants learn that Focusing does not have to be confined to a formal exercise or partnership session.
Topics include:
Intentional self-Focusing
Opportunistic Focusing
Self-guiding
Beginning with a life issue
Beginning with what is alive now
Body scan without making relaxation the goal
Sliding from conversation or thought into Focusing
Resourcing when the mind is busy
Nervous-system awareness
Saying hello
Welcoming
Presencing and distancing language
Allowing the felt sense of a whole situation to form
Decisions, relationships and life questions
Your final practical material offers several ways of beginning: starting with an issue or interaction, grounding and resourcing, moving from content into present bodily experience, and allowing the body to take the lead about what needs attention.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Initiate a Focusing process without relying on a fixed script.
Choose an appropriate entry point according to their present experience.
Use Focusing with decisions, interactions and everyday situations.
Resource and self-guide when distracted, activated or unclear.
Trust the body’s unfolding process rather than forcing an answer.
Week 10 — Integration
Focusing as a Way of Being
The final week gathers the course into an embodied practice that participants can continue beyond the training.
The five inner capacities already named in your teaching provide an excellent integration framework:
Resourcing → Befriending → Right Distance → Resonating → Receiving
Topics include:
Reflecting on the Journey Within
What has changed in my relationship with myself?
Resourcing
Being friendly with what arises
Self-in-Presence
Finding the right distance
Resonating and acknowledging
Receiving what comes
Felt sense and life-forward movement
Solo Focusing
Focusing partnership
Living Focusing
Developing an ongoing practice
Preparing for Part Two: The Companion Journey
Your concluding material identifies these five inner-wisdom capacities as the ability to resource, meet inner experience in a friendly way, find an appropriate distance, resonate/check and finally receive what emerges.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Integrate the main skills of the Journey Within into a complete Focusing process.
Reflect on their developing relationship with their body and inner experience.
Recognise their personal resources and ways of returning to Presence.
Receive emerging meaning without immediately turning it into action or analysis.
Identify how they will continue practising independently and in Focusing partnerships.
Enter Part Two with a strong experiential understanding of what it means to be the Focuser.
Core Principles of Training Part 1
Throughout the ten weeks:
- Pause before knowing
- Sense before analysing
- Nothing inside needs to be pushed away
- Something in me is not all of me
- Curiosity before interpretation
- The body is allowed time to find its own words, images and meanings.
- We resonate rather than decide.
- We don't force a felt sense or a felt shift.
- The process belongs to the Focuser.
- Life-forward movement emerges rather than being imposed.
Focusing Skills Training — Part 2
The Companion Journey
Deepening Listening, Relational Presence & Focusing Partnership
10 Weeks | 25 Hours Group Training + Partnership Practice
Part 2 of this training develops the transition from self-Focusing to accompanying another person.
Building on the embodied Focusing skills developed in Part 1, participants learn how to offer the particular quality of listening that supports another person’s inner process without fixing, analysing, advising or taking responsibility for where the process should go.
The developmental journey is:
Being with myself → Being listened to → Listening to another → Accompanying another → Trusting the process
Overall Learning Outcomes
By the end of Part 2, participants will be able to:
Consolidate the core self-Focusing skills developed in Part 1.
Understand the purpose and value of Focusing partnership.
Differentiate sympathy, empathy and Focusing-oriented listening.
Develop embodied, empathic presence while accompanying another.
Experience and understand the impact of being deeply listened to.
Listen for the essence of another person’s experience through words, tone, gesture, imagery and bodily expression.
Use reflective listening and Focusing-oriented presencing language.
Maintain the principle that the Focuser leads and the Companion follows.
Recognise their own impulses to advise, rescue, interpret, reassure or direct.
Establish agreements that support confidentiality, choice, boundaries and relational safety.
Follow and support the development of felt sense without forcing a process.
Use simple empathic prompts and facilitative invitations appropriately.
Recognise the importance of silence, pacing, spaciousness and allowing.
Support the Focuser to notice felt shifts, emerging meaning and life-forward movement.
Participate confidently and responsibly in ongoing Focusing partnerships.
Training Content
Week 1 — From Self-Focusing to Being
Accompanied - Why Deepen Our Listening?
We begin by reconnecting with the foundations of Part 1 and noticing what changes when our inner process is accompanied by another person.
Topics include:
Recap of solo Focusing
Embodied presence and the Focusing Attitude
Resourcing and turning inward
Felt sense, resonating and “something in me”
Why Focus with another person?
Sympathy versus empathy
The experience of being listened to
The experience of allowing another person to accompany me
Silent companioning
Introduction to the Companion journey
Experiential practice:
Solo Focusing with a silent Companion, followed by reflection on the experience of being accompanied.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Reconnect with their own embodied Focusing process.
Differentiate sympathy from empathic presence.
Begin to recognise the impact another person’s presence has on their inner process.
Experience companionship without needing the listener to actively intervene.
Week 2 — The Essence of Listening
Speaker Leads — Listener Follows
This week introduces Focusing listening as a discipline in its own right.
Participants explore what helps us feel heard, met, accompanied and understood, and what happens when listening is replaced by advice, fixing, interruption or judgement.
Topics include:
What does it feel like to be truly listened to?
What does it feel like not to be listened to?
Listening rather than thinking about what the person is saying
Listening with “heart ears”
Hearing the essence
Key words, images and meaningful phrases
Reflective listening
Simple presencing language
Getting out of the way
Listening without trying to make the person feel better
Experiential practice:
Focusing partnerships introducing reflective listening.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Identify qualities that support deeper listening.
Reflect the essence of another person’s experience using their own words.
Use simple phrases such as “You’re noticing…”, “You’re sensing…” and “Something in you…”.
Recognise behaviours that interrupt or diminish another person’s process.
Week 3 — The Focusing Companion
Presence, Safety & Autonomy
This week explores the role and responsibility of both Focuser and Companion.
The Companion is not directing a session. Their role is to help create the conditions within which the Focuser can remain in relationship with their own felt experience.
Topics include:
The role and qualities of the Companion
The Focuser remains responsible for their own process
Choice and autonomy
Confidentiality
Agreeing the length of a session
Time-up agreements
How much interaction the Focuser wants
Permission before guiding
Pause and Stop signals
Allowing the Focuser to correct a reflection
Trust and relational safety
Experiential practice:
Setting up and practising a complete Focusing partnership agreement.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Establish a clear and safe Focusing partnership.
Respect the autonomy and privacy of the Focuser.
Check what kind of listening or interaction the Focuser wants.
Use Pause and Stop agreements to support choice and safety.
Week 4 — Listening With the Whole Body
Beyond Words
Focusing listening involves more than hearing the story.
Participants begin to notice gesture, movement, tone, pauses, images, symbols and bodily expression, while remaining connected to their own embodied presence.
Topics include:
The body as experienced from within
Bodily knowing
Wholebody Focusing
Following gestures and movements
Listening to tone, rhythm and silence
Staying connected to one’s own body while listening
Recognising when we move into thinking or analysis
Me Here — You There
Allowing what is alive in the moment
Experiential practice:
Companioning with particular attention to gesture, movement and non-verbal expression.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Remain embodied while listening to another.
Notice meaningful non-verbal communication without interpreting it.
Reflect gestures, movement or bodily language when appropriate.
Differentiate bodily listening from intellectual analysis.
Week 5 — The Art of Facilitative Language
Supporting Without Taking Over
Having established presence and reflective listening, participants begin to learn how small verbal invitations can support a Focusing process.
Topics include:
Reflective listening versus guiding
Facilitative rather than directive language
Bringing attention back towards bodily experience
Connecting emotion with bodily felt experience
Empathic prompts
“Maybe you could…”
“Perhaps you might notice…”
Inviting rather than instructing
Permission before offering suggestions
Less is more
Experiential practice:
Reflective listening with one or two carefully chosen facilitative invitations.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Distinguish reflection from facilitation.
Offer gentle invitations without directing the Focuser.
Support a Focuser to return to present bodily experience.
Hold suggestions lightly and allow them to be declined.
Week 6 — The Felt Sense
Listening for the More
This week returns to the felt sense at a deeper level.
A felt sense is not simply an emotion or physical sensation. It is the body’s implicit sense of the whole of a situation, carrying meaning that has not yet fully formed into words.
Topics include:
Felt sense versus emotion
Felt sense versus thought
Allowing a felt sense to form
Vague, unclear and not-yet-known experience
Sensation, image, gesture, movement and symbolisation
Resonating and checking
Finding a “handle”
Whole-situation knowing
Trusting what has not yet become explicit
Felt shift and emerging meaning
Experiential practice:
Guided felt-sense exploration and demonstration.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Differentiate a felt sense from a familiar emotion, thought or part.
Give sufficient time and space for a felt sense to form.
Support words, images or gestures to emerge from bodily experience.
Recognise the importance of resonating and checking for a bodily fit.
Week 7 — Deepening the Felt Sense
Staying With What Does Not Yet Have Words
This week develops greater confidence in staying with the unclear, uncertain and emerging edges of experience.
Topics include:
The willingness not to know
Felt sense as fresh and emergent
Staying with vague, fuzzy or murky experience
Multiple aspects of a situation held simultaneously
Allowing rather than searching for an answer
Meaning as interaction between felt sense and symbol
Recognising movement and change
Supporting life-forward carrying forward
Trusting that the process can find its own way
Experiential practice:
Deeper Focusing partnerships with attention to the formation and unfolding of felt sense.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Stay present when neither Focuser nor Companion knows what comes next.
Resist the impulse to prematurely explain or interpret experience.
Support the Focuser to remain with an emerging felt sense.
Recognise subtle signs of movement, change and felt shift.
Week 8 — The Art of Allowing
Self-in-Presence & Finding the Right Distance
Deep listening depends on our ability to allow experience to be present without becoming overwhelmed by it or pushing it away.
Topics include:
Self-in-Presence
Being friendly towards what arises
“Something in me” rather than becoming merged
Finding the right distance
Too close: overwhelm and merging
Too far away: disconnection and avoidance
Resourcing
Acknowledging different inner parts
The inner critic
Allowing without arguing, reassuring or fixing
Receiving what an inner experience needs us to know
Experiential practice:
Focusing with something that needs a little more space, distance or companionship.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Recognise when they or their partner are becoming merged with an experience.
Support appropriate distance without disconnecting from the process.
Use Self-in-Presence language to support relationship with difficult experience.
Accompany rather than suppress, reassure or argue with what arises.
Week 9 — Deeper Companioning
When the Process Needs Support
Participants now bring together presence, reflective listening, bodily listening and facilitative language.
The emphasis remains on supporting rather than solving.
Topics include:
Recognising when a Focuser has moved into analysis or story
Supporting return to present bodily experience
Empathic prompts
Supporting someone to stay with something meaningful
Silence and pacing
When to reflect
When to offer an invitation
When to say nothing
Recognising the Companion’s impulse to rescue or make something happen
Staying with strong emotions
Supporting integration and emerging movement
No interpretation
Experiential practice:
Longer Focusing partnerships integrating reflective listening, embodied presence and carefully timed invitations.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Recognise common places where a Focusing process may lose contact with embodied experience.
Respond without taking responsibility for fixing the process.
Use empathic prompts and invitations selectively.
Trust silence and the Focuser’s own capacity for unfolding.
Week 10 — Integration
Focusing Partnership as a Way of Being
The final week integrates the Companion Journey and supports participants to continue Focusing independently with partners.
Topics include:
Reviewing the journey from Focuser to Companion
Resourcing
Being friendly with what arises
Finding the right distance
Resonating and acknowledging
Receiving
Beginning a session with another person
Different ways of leading into Focusing
Body awareness
Awareness of what is here now
Sliding naturally from conversation into Focusing
Clearing a space
Following one’s own in-the-moment felt sense
Partnership agreements
Giving and receiving safe learning feedback
Continuing Focusing partnerships after the course
Experiential practice:
A complete Focusing partnership followed by reflection and integration.
Learning outcomes
Participants can:
Bring together the core skills of Focuser and Companion.
Begin a Focusing session flexibly according to the person’s needs and present experience.
Maintain presence, autonomy and embodied listening throughout a partnership.
Reflect on their own development and identify what they need to continue practising.
Continue independently within peer Focusing partnerships.
Core Principles of Training Part 2
Throughout the ten weeks, the following principles underpin the training:
- The Focuser leads. The Companion follows.
- Presence before technique.
- Listen before guiding.
- Less is more.
- No fixing, analysing or interpreting.
- Everything offered is an invitation.
- The Focuser may pause, stop, correct or decline at any time.
- The Companion remains connected to themselves while accompanying another.
- We trust the body's capacity to carry experience forward.
Training Dates
The Journey Within
Start date is Thursday, 10 September 2026 and sessions run from 7.00pm till 9.15pm on ten consecutive Thursdays.
Training Fee: 444 EUR
The Companion Journey
Start date is Thursday, 7 January 2027 and sessions run from 7.00pm till 9.15pm on ten consecutive Thursdays.
Training Fee: 444 EUR
Would you like to know more and find out if this training is for you?
Copyright © 2026 Life Solutions. All Rights Reserved