About Feelingwork:
Resonance Feelingwork is a practice by which people bring enhanced awareness to their sense of feeling, mood and emotion in order to integrate conflicting parts of themselves and strengthen their personal experience of inner resonance. One of the best ways to learn this practice is through skilled, one-on-one facilitation.
Benefits of participating in Feelingwork Facilitation include reduced stress responses and a greater sense of well being. For example, one recent student, an ER doctor, greatly reduced his inner anxiety, a feeling of being in a “battle zone” on the job. He became more present, more calm and focused at work, but also aware of deeper motivations beneath the anxiety. As a result he was able to consider a larger career change he had been avoiding, and contemplate moving into work that would be both more satisfying to himself and make a greater contribution to his community.
Prior to founding the Institute, founder and Executive Director Joe Shirley worked with hundreds of students while developing Feelingwork. Here are a couple of typical testimonials speaking to the benefits in individual’s lives:
“The first set of feelings that I moved had to do with feeling unsupported in my work, feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and alone with it all. Within weeks I felt a spaciousness in my life. I didn’t feel stressed out any more. I wasn’t getting overwhelmed. All of that just kind of stopped happening. Without any conscious effort, I was just living differently, naturally, without even having to think about it.” – T.W.
“In my past, I learned some coping skills, but there was a feeling that would pop up from time to time. It was the scariest feeling that I’ve ever experienced, and my body would just get trapped in that terror. When we transformed that feeling, it was like I just created a bridge to a higher power. That, wow, this is on the other side of that fear, this unconditional love and safety, and everything is OK. To this day, and it’s been a year, I can’t even remember what that feels like, to have that fear. That was the biggest limitation I’ve had in my entire life. I’m now a budding film director, producer and writer. That is where I’ve always wanted to go since I was a little kid.” – G.R.
Contact us if you are interested in personal, in-depth Feelingwork sessions with Joe.
About Fieldwork / Resonance Circles:
Benefits of participating in Fieldwork groups include strengthening intuition, becoming more connected with one’s body, experiencing a group energy or flow, enhancing creativity, and others. In the months leading up to founding the Institute, the founders conducted a pilot program testing their ideas. This program was called Resonance Circle. It ran once a week, two-hour sessions, for two eight-week series and was open for people to drop in to experience Fieldwork. Here are a few quotes from interviews with participants a month or two after the first series:
“There were times we were asked to put aside our thinking mind and only pay attention to our body or intuition, that was very helpful for me personally because I tend to use my mind too much. I tend to analyze a lot. So that was a really good practice to develop this faculty that really explores another dimension of human consciousness, another dimension of the world.” – J.H.
“It was kind of like exploring another way of being; what is it like to be in your senses, in your felt perception, and sensing others around you but also staying really connected in here, and then seeing what happens. It’s magical what happens out there when you’re staying connected in here.” – R.M.D.
“The most powerful thing about the image sculptures [a Fieldwork method] was the ability to stand back and experience the physical manifestation of forces inside yourself from a third-party perspective. I mean, when do we get that opportunity?” – J.H.
We’re intending to open up a new series of Resonance Circles in the Seattle area in fall of 2016. We hope you can join us!
About Fieldwork for Organizations and Communities:
The benefits of doing Resonance Fieldwork for communities and organizations include more cohesive identity, greater creative collaboration to solve common challenges, reduced group conflict, enhanced integration of differences into the diverse texture of the group, increased loyalty and retention, among others. These benefits ripple outward to the public at large.
About eight months before founding the Institute, the founders tested their methods with a small group of people who were working to create a new retreat center in the foothills of the Cascade Mountain Range. The founders conducted a strategic visioning session with this group for a single day, about six hours in total, using Fieldwork techniques. Here are a few quotes from a followup interview one month later:
“Some of the hardest intellectual work I’ve done for a long time, some of the hardest emotional work I’ve done for a long time, but the results at the end of the day, I was just… I was so excited about the results at the end of the day that I could hardly move. [laughter] And then we’ve done the work since the session with you, just building on it, and it’s gonna be marvelous.” – L.M.
“You know, identifying in myself what core fear I have, what thing I have that I do not want to experience, that runs much of what I do. … And now, in the light of that, when I have different emotional reactions to situations, or when I’m examining what’s happening in my life, I have a completely different context to look at it in. And it’s just an amazing new way of looking at the world.” – J.S.
“A lot of the techniques that I’ve used are things that you do to take your logical brain out of the picture. This was better, because it took the logical brain and turned that into really deep introspection. So I was surprised that it worked at all. It actually worked really really well, and … it’s something that’s continued to give me insight in the month or month and a half since we’ve done it. So that was really surprising. I wasn’t expecting that. And I definitely wasn’t expecting to get long term benefits out of a day of doing strategic visioning.” – D.M.
“I guess the biggest part that surprised me was how the experiential work that you did enhanced the more traditional planning. I don’t think we would have come up with the same number of ideas. … The work that you did going back and forth between the nonlinear and the linear, and the experiential and the more strategic planning stuff, I think it teases up more ideas, and makes you think in different ways.” – W.W.
Let us know if your organization or community can benefit from this kind of groundbreaking work.