Focusing for Spiritual Directors – Spring 2020

SoulStream is pleased to announce a continuing education opportunity for spiritual directors:

Focusing for Spiritual Directors

This event (April 25th workshop) is officially postponed. Anyone who has already registered will be contacted by the coordinator regarding rescheduling for this event.

Our bodies know more about our experience (situations, thoughts, emotional states, memories) than we are explicitly aware of. Often what we experience lies below our awareness, but not below the awareness of the body. Focusing is about entering into an awareness that is open, interior, centred in the present and on the body’s inner sensations. These inner sensations, called “felt sense”, lie behind our thoughts and feelings; they are messages from the body. Focusing is the ability to stay with the felt sense, and involves holding non-judging attention to an internal knowing which is directly experienced but is not yet in words.

Focusing teaches you experientially how to be with any suffering or hopeful place inside you. Rather than identifying with the feelings or thoughts that create an issue, you shift your attention into the grounded, non-reactive spaciousness of Presence. Spiritual Director Sue VanderWoude describes the practice of focusing as helping her grow in awareness of herself, including her body, in life and in spiritual direction. For example, she has found it has helped her move from feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with default issues to an increased ability to listen to her body and the wisdom it holds. It has helped her be more spacious and present interiorly with self and directees.

This one-day workshop will consist of experiencing Embodied Presence Focusing, a two-fold process leading to deeper grounding in and cultivation of “contemplative presence”.

In offering this workshop, we hope to introduce you, as a spiritual director, to the practice of Focusing in order to deepen your inner and body awareness so that you may be more fully present to yourself and to your directees.

Two dates, two locations, same workshop, limited registration

Saturday, March 7, 2020
35535 McKee Road
Abbotsford, BC

Or

Saturday, April 25, 2020
St. James Anglican Church Parish Center
Vancouver, BC
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ST. JAMES’ ANGLICAN CHURCH
303 East Cordova Street, Vancouver (northeast corner of Gore and Cordova)
Website: stjames.bc.ca

Enter the church at the Parish Centre door on Cordova Street (just east of the garden). DO NOT ring the buzzer (this is for the church office).

PARKING/TRANSIT:
STREET PARKING

• There is 2-hour metered parking on both Cordova St & Gore Ave (9am-10pm).
• You may be able to find free street parking further east off Cordova on side streets.

PARKING LOTS

• Cordova Street, right across from St James, between Cooper Place and St. James’ Place. Access it by the alley from either Dunlevy or Gore Streets.
• Another parking lot may be found on the corner of Powell & Gore Street
• An Impark Lot is at the corner of Main & Powell (behind the No. 5 Orange)

PARKADES

• Easy Park: 107 East Cordova (NE corner of Cordova & Columbia) one block west of Main Street

PUBLIC TRANSIT

The following bus routes stop within several blocks of St James’ : 3 Main, 4 Powell, 7 Nanaimo/Dunbar, 8 Fraser, 16 Arbutus, 19 Stanley Park and 20 Downtown

The closest Skytrain station is Main Street/Science World. Connect with the 3, 8, or 19 bus heading north, disembark at Pender & Main, cross Main, walk two blocks north to Cordova, turn right and walk one block to Gore.

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Time: 9:30 am – 4:00 pm
The workshop will begin promptly at 10 am

Registration fee: $225.

Payment options:
1. e-transfer to soulstream1@gmail.com (preferred method)
2. Cheque payable to SoulStream, mailed to SoulStream, 35535 McKee Road, Abbotsford, BC V3G 3E4
3. Online using PayPal. Please add an additional $5.00 to the registration fee to cover costs.

Food:
Please bring a bag lunch.
Tea, coffee and snacks will be provided for morning and afternoon breaks.

Background reading (not required to attend workshop):
Rediscovering the Lost Body-Connection Within Christian Spirituality by Ed McMahon and Peter Campbell
Focusing by Eugene Gendlin

“If Christians cannot help one another to experience their bodies as living membranes within the Body of the Whole Christ, giving witness by their organic presence in the world as the Continuing Incarnation of God “in Christ,” then Christianity will be experienced as increasingly irrelevant within the lives of those suffering the pain of aging, physical trauma or those carrying the insecurity and emotional-physical impact of violence, as well as the inevitable dying we all go through.”
Page xiv, Rediscovering the Lost Body-Connection Within Christian Spirituality by Ed McMahon and Peter Campbell