
12/01/2022
True gentleness in healing has a warrior like quality to it. A gentle warrior — but a warrior nonetheless.
Our practitioners in Focalizing have to often educate our clients around the benefits of taking a gentle approach. And we have to learn to embody this ourselves for this to feel safe and available to our clients.
When we do this we are steering our clients away from two things that can get in the way of sustainable healing.
1. The desire to ‘heal fast’
This is when we, as practitioners, see clients seeking cathartic experiences or even looking at the practitioner as the 'one with all the answers'.
‘The slow way is the fast way’ is a phrase Michael often used and it describes much of the atmospheric feel of a Focalizing session.
This slow and gentle atmosphere is often the opposite energy of the velocity of the traumatic event that a client may be working with.
This velocity is often what fuels the desire to fix quick and to go against that desire takes a gentle determination from within both the practitioner and the client.
A radical act of gentleness.
2. The toxic wellness messages of ‘fixing’
It is hard to look anywhere in the wellness industry without seeing marketing messages heavily geared towards fixing.
Sure, many of your clients may want or desire to have more conscious relationships, easeful lives etc but the idea of fixing simply adds more shame and goes against one of the core conditions in Focalizing – no blame, no shame.
To go against this message of fixing takes a compassionate and curious practice — and a practitioner with a gentler approach to healing that doesn’t see healing as fixing the individual.
Core to Focalizing is that the practitioner is a human meeting another human with the belief that the individual’s innate inner wisdom can be brought forward in order to heal.
Another radical act of gentleness in healing.
Thanks for reading. If you're a therapist, coach, wellness practitioner or bodyworker, there's an opportunity to get trained in Focalizing practices in the new year. The Focalizing Practitioner program is a 10-week certification course in using trauma informed embodiment tools to help clients get unstuck, heal unprocessed trauma, and connect with life in a more purposeful manner. Starts in February and more information can be found here: https://www.theinstitute.org/the-practitioner-course
- The Focalizing Institute Team