Focusing and Dreamwork
Embodied introspection for self-connection and transformation
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I’m Carrie. I offer guided Focusing and Dreamwork sessions to help people access deeper levels of self-connection, self-compassion and self-awareness. In strengthening this relationship to yourself, you’re able to engage the outer world with greater presence, empathy, courage, and clarity.
Hello and welcome!
WHAT IS FOCUSING?
Focusing is a powerful and gentle practice of learning to listen to the body’s “felt sense” for deeper insight, emotional healing and confirmation of your inner knowing. In Focusing, the felt sense is a subtle, unclear and elusive sensation in or around the body. It’s preverbal, and it’s often hard to describe. However, it shows up wanting your attention. In giving it your attention, it becomes clearer and you’re able to put words, emotion or imagery to it. Making contact with the felt sense is like passing through a portal into the vast and rich world that resides within you. Here you encounter and get to know various aspects of yourself that you are often unconscious to yet are running your life in the outer world. The practice of Focusing teaches you to meet these various parts with an attitude of openness, curiosity and acceptance and hold a bigger, more expansive sense of YOU, as a sum of all these parts. Every part of you belongs and ultimately wants your well-being and understanding. From this place of embodied wholeness, shifts can occur.
EMBODIED DREAMWORK
As the terrain of the unconscious mind, the dreamworld speaks in symbols - beautiful and vibrant, frightening and ghastly, mysterious and bizarre, sometimes seemingly literal and ordinary. Dreams, even the ones that appear to be obvious re-creations of aspects of waking life, offer deep insight and wisdom. Learning to give them your attention and engage with them opens the door to the rich, fluid and vast world of the imaginal realm, where possibilities abound.
I love working with dreams! I guide people in Dreamwork using a Focusing approach and Active Imagination. In this body-based approach to dreamwork, YOU are the authority on your own dreams. This is not an approach of intellectual analysis or of extracting meanings from your dreams. Instead, this is an interactive method in which you get into relationship with a dream or dream aspect through the body’s felt sense and active engagement with the dream. Dreamwork in this way is intimate and empowering. It honors your dream as a living, breathing entity, which shows up to offer guidance, healing, and insight about your life or the world at large. It connects you deeply to what is operating below your everyday, conscious awareness. Among the many benefits of Embodied Dreamwork are: connecting to empowering energies that help guide your life forward; processing of difficult emotions and traumatic experiences that often show up in dreams; discovering out-of-the box-solutions and insights; enhancing intuition and creativity; getting to know your inner life more deeply, especially your blind spots; and connecting you to purpose and meaning, what you’re being called forth to be or do in the outer world.
Ready to take a journey into your inner world?
"Our sessions make such a big difference in my life….Thank you for sharing your wonderful gifts with me. I am super grateful that you have always allowed me to show up just as I am and have created such a safe space for healing."
- Diane C., Salt Lake City, Utah
“Through Focusing we can unlock doors and move into dimensions that cannot be entered through the intellect alone.”
— Eugene Gendlin