My fear kept me safe from Ebola. I worked in Liberia when Ebola was on the rise, then again when it was almost gone. As I sit here today thinking about these experiences and about the current warnings about a global pandemic from the coronavirus, […]

As she spoke, all I did was to listen to her, reflecting where required. As soon as she completed the narration of the complete ordeal, she stood up and said: “My brain has started working and I need to go to my unit to support my team.”

The walled city of Multan, Pakistan,  is a warren of narrow streets where the rays of sun seldom reach. Yes, before 1947, when the city was inhabited by the Sikh and Hindu business community, it was thriving with merchants, shops and more spacious family homes. […]

An Interview with Anna Willman, in conversation with Dana Hercbergs I met Anna in 2021 through the Focusing community and occasionally attended her weekly Saturday Listening Space, an online peer support group.  Her facilitation style melds her own grounded attention with her wonderful sense of […]

Each of us lives in community. Our family is our first one. In Focusing, we learn to create a space of radical acceptance for our inner community. FII is now offering a series of bi-monthly gatherings “Creating Space for Community”, to explore concepts around inner/outer community […]

We have learned a lot about fear these past few years.  It’s a very powerful reaction that comes from many different directions and in many forms. The pandemic, storms, droughts, climate change, political unrest, wars… Of course we are justified in being afraid. Fear is […]

Finally, we did it!  We converted our in-person and online webinar coursesfor Psychosocial Support and Community Wellness (PSSCW) and Psychological First Aid into self-paced (work at your own speed) courses that you can access from any device.  These courses bring together many of my favorite […]

Focusing showed me how to process my emotions and my experience in the world in a way that I had not done before. I wanted to share Focusing with my friends so that we could grow alongside each other and support each other. At the […]

Nine-year-old Joseph has been living on his own since he was seven, when his parents were killed by soldiers in an attack on his village.  He recently came to live in a refugee camp in Uganda, where he is fed and educated by community workers, […]

Asad’s father is a daily wage laborer without any skills. Every morning he goes to the city center after dropping his seven-year old son off at the machine shop where Asad works. The city center is the spot from where people hire unskilled and semi-skilled […]

Syed Wajid has a round face and a trim white beard and a smile that lights up his eyes and warms the hearts of his companions. Child labor is a huge problem in Pakistan, he tells us. Some provincial governments have passed laws forbidding the […]

Yesterday was the first day of April. April’s Fool. And the launch of CoronaPlaza.Life. The Fool is a very ancient Archetype (“archetype” comes from ancient Greek “arché” that means “principle”, “basic entity” and “typos” that means “a model”, “a form/shape”) and from this Archetype comes […]

One activity we have found in all our work at Focusing Initiatives is the importance of centering into the body and remembering something one can be grateful for. In ancient philosophies and religions, gratitude is a common theme. Modern psychologists consider it an essential tool […]

I am working with Pat Omidian to train refugee workers and administrators in Uganda to improve their psychosocial work and incorporate aspects of Focusing into daily life.  We are teaching this course online. One session was about reflecting on what we are experiencing in a […]

Communication can be a problem at the best of times, with us all living in different time zones and some of us traveling for long periods of time and checking in from ever more distant and shifting time zone addresses in a multitude of countries.

This is one of nine articles from our recent Journal: Resilience Initiatives.  A donation of any amount will give you the complete e-Journal.  Please click here. I have volunteered to work with Afghan refugees for three years now. One of my clients came to me, […]

Pat Omidian discusses ‘Balance of Blessings”, from Reaching Resilience. We need to recognize that, even in the worst situations, there are good things in our lives.  Please click here to help us bring this work to more communities.

Join Lynn and Charlotte on November 15, 2016. In this video they explain their upcoming workshop and how they will explore how we can sense into our relationships as well as ourselves, and the other. We will show how giving voice to all three dimensions (the […]

Just outside of the city of Peshawar in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan is an orphanage, actually a residential boarding school with 180 boys, ages 5-12, who had lost their fathers and were street beggars. The facility, called Zamung Kor, Pukhtu for ‘Our […]

Being aware of our internal signals is the core of Focusing. It’s also the key to handling our difficult emotions or just feeling better. Usually, to sense our felt wisdom inside requires a slower pace than we can find in our hectic lives. Using the […]

Nasser ben Hassen discusses who Focusing Initiatives International helped him learn focusing and how he has shared those skills with his community. He talks about how the teaching and learning of focusing is organic and not linear. #Community Wellness #

As an anthropologist, I am trained to listen to people and understand their point of view. In Liberia, I and my team of local researchers went into communities and said, “We are from WHO (the World Health Organization) and we need to know what you […]

FII’s newly published Reaching Resilience is rich with fresh, living stories and activities, such as ‘dry stick green stick’, ‘inner guests’, and ‘the story listener’.  As people have used these activities, they have adapted them to different cultures and situations around the world. Here is […]

THE POWER OF METAPHORS FOR WRITING, FOR LIFE, FOR COMMUNITY You probably think you learned about metaphors in your freshman literature class, but, really, you’ve been using them from the time you began to talk.  If your mother kept a ‘baby book’, you will find […]

Building a community wellness program reminds me of my recent experience knitting my grandson’s sweater. Here I was happily knitting away and I was almost finished with the body of the sweater when I realized the front was completely wrong. 

Pat Omidian spent about 20 minutes with one woman, showing her the Guesthouse poem (translated into Urdu) and having her say As-salamu’alaikum (saying hello–literally offering the wish for peace) to her inner guests. The woman came away amazed and told everyone in the household about […]

I am troubled by the news each day. And at the same time I cannot wait to read the next horrible thing. It’s like I have a toothache and my tongue just has to rub it to make sure it still hurts. It’s not a […]

When Wajid Syed and Pat Omidian of Focusing Initiatives International began working with community leaders from the war-torn Western region of Pakistan, they found that these leaders were often as traumatized as the people they were being trained to help. Their first task, then, has […]

This book, co-authored with Nina Papadopoulos,  documents the training of teacher trainers in the IRC’s Female Education Program (FEP) in psychosocial wellness models. and the development of teacher training materials for Pakistan-based Afghan refugee teachers in 2002. A reflective process was used to raise awareness, […]

Community wellness is based on a public health approach with two assumptions. First, most illnesses are preventable, including various types of mental illness. Second, the community itself contains many solutions to its own health needs and already has many techniques to encourage resilience and wellness. […]

This short video explains how simple Focusing is to learn and to use. It is written by Cynthia Spellman, MD and animated by Ruslan Mityayev.

As a medical anthropologist, just back from two months in Liberia working on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO), I was featured as one of five experts in the September 25 issue ofTime Magazine, a prominent American weekly news magazine. Click here to see the […]

Focusing International fosters social change by supporting community wellness and psychosocial wellness using a public health approach. One of the best description of the public health approach comes from The Public Health Agency of Canada, which describes this approach as follows: “Important values in public […]

Community wellness is based on a public health approach with two assumptions. First, most illnesses are preventable, including various types of mental illness. Second, the community itself contains many solutions to its own health needs and already has many techniques to encourage resilience and wellness. […]