Psychosocial Support and Community Wellness

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 […]

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 […]