Coming soon—register now!

Come join us for a weekend drawing retreat with Focusing, good food, sauna, walks in the woods and surprises galore. See workshop description.

Future Workshops

A Taste of Ger Y U Nant

An experiential overview of what we do at Ger Y U Nant. Dip your fingers in paint, tap your feet to rhythms, allow the magic of dreams and words to unfold. $10

Introduction to Focusing

Come Frolic with Your PIGS (Personal Inner Guidance System) at Ger Y U Nant while learning a way to access brand new information not available in books, brains, or past experience. $65

For a detailed description of Focusing, see Focusing: The Body’s Understanding of How It Is Now.

Focusing: The Body’s Understanding of How It Is Now
led by Gena Corea and Helen Hawes

In the 1960s, philosopher Dr. Eugene Gendlin, working at the University of Chicago, discovered Focusing, a gentle process for accessing a bodily knowing. With training in attending to the “felt sense,” you can find the entry point to your embodied knowing. The felt or body sense contains everything your organism has sensed as it has lived in its human situations. Consisting of the unconscious mind, feelings, desires, memories and thoughts, the body sense is more complex than rational thought alone.

Gendlin developed specific steps for attending to this body sense and tapping into its vast source of data. These Focusing steps enable you to get a “gut feeling” about anything.

Focusing bring brand new, fresh information—not yesterday’s stale facts, not data you can find on the internet, but creations born of your own experiencing, right now. Come find your Personal Inner Guidance System (pigs) to help in:

Decision-making and problem-solving; working for social justice; life transitions such as parenting, career changes, death and divorce; managing stress; attending to troublesome feelings without being overwhelmed by them; breaking through action blocks and creative blocks; listening to physical symptoms from the point of view of the symptom itself; finding lost parts of yourself; bringing the body’s wisdom into writing, painting and all the arts; deepening intimacy in relationships.

Focusing gives you the pleasure of discovery. Since you are accessing what you know in your gut before it has been sent upstairs to the brain, what emerges in a Focusing session is often surprising and refreshing.

Places you will find Focusers:

• In corporations and art studios
• In schools and monasteries
• In prisons, malls, and medical practices
• In churches and temples
• In support groups and emergency rooms
• Outdoors and indoors, in rain, snow and sunshine
• In countries all over the world

Participants are asked to arrange for one guided Focusing session before September 15, at the half-price of $30, with either Corea or Hawes in order to facilitate the deepening of your experience during the workshop. For those living at a distance from Vermont, the session can be conducted over the telephone.

Walking in the Woods
led by Helen Hawes

For years, I have taught drawing workshops in the studio. In these weekend workshops, the studio has vanished and with it, the polarities between art and life, product and process. In the studio's place stand the woods, mountains, and rivers of Vermont. Participants will have the chance to walk in the woods at sunrise ,sunset, dawn ,dusk, at midday and midnight, in rain and shine. We will watch, listen, and feel as the metaphors, like living dreams, arise. Here in this new studio we will explore our fears of being alone, being lost, being in the dark, being in the wild. Here in this new studio we will discover the thrills of being alone, being lost, being in the dark, and being in the wild. Using Guided exercises, free walks, mapping, and journaling, we will create a safe place to play and learn the skills we need to navigate in the realm of the unseen reality.

Writing Your Bodystory
led by Gena Corea

Participants will keep a journal in which we will do guided exercises in a safe atmosphere. At the end of the workshop, we will have a written story of our body. We will give attention, in a focusing way, to the story of our hair, skin, scars and birthmarks, eyes, ears, nose, voice and voicelessness, internal organs, experiences with movement, violence, fighting, birthing, sexuality, illness, surgery. We will welcome the unfolding growth and greater sense of embodiment that emerge in the process.

Dream Group
led by Helen Hawes and Gena Corea

Weekend retreats to be with our dreams in a Focusing way. First we will explore a series of each participant's dreams. Then as a group we will map them,using dance, music imagery, drama, poetry. "Mapping" is an intuitive reconfiguration of separate parts into a new kind of whole. This new thing points the way to future growth.

Art Appreciation Using Focusing
led by Helen Hawes

In this one day workshop we will explore art appreciation using focusing as a teaching tool. Though art viewing can be as creative and fulfilling as art making , something often gets in the way. Certain misconceptions about art often limit the depth of our connection. We stand in front of a piece of art work, and we just don¹t "get it " . Actually , below the conscious level, a great deal is going on in this place of "not getting it". It is through this door that we can enter into a creative relationship with the Art Work. After exploring our personal myths about art, we will select drawings, from original works by New England artists, with which we wish to dialogue. Next we will break up into triads and gently move through our experiencing with the drawings, respecting all that we encounter along the way. Powerful shifts in our perception can grow and heal us when we allow ourselves to actively participate with the drawings.

The Listening Writer
led by Gena Corea

A writing workshop in which we learn to listen to the voices and senses inside, bringing the body's intricate knowledge into whatever we write. Help with writer's block for any participants experiencing it.

Collaborative Drawing
led by Helen Hawes

If you are intrigued by the concepts of: letting go of ownership, trying on other¹s marks, group mind, acceptance versus expectation, and seeing the whole of it, come join us on the cutting edge!

Collage Workshop
led by Helen Hawes and Kata Hull

There is a part of everything living that wants to become itself. This process is about finding it and setting it free, leaving us room for new growth. Using many colored tissues, we will create a series of translucent collage images. Playing allows the images to emerge effortlessly from their source. When we put the individual collages together, like the steps of a journey, they tell us stories that can make us whole, whispering "Welcome Home! We are here for you!"

Drawing Workshop I
led by Helen Hawes

Drawing was something you once took for granted and was done as easily as breathing. It was a way of connecting yourself with the world, based on total trust and a sense of no limitations. Problems could be solved because your resources came from the infinite creative potential of the unconscious.

Westerners have spent the majority of their lives in educational institutions and later in corporate cultures, most of which emphasize intellectual achievements at the expense of intuitive learning, These drawing workshops are for those adults who still remember the joy and power of their early childhood and wish to exercise and strengthen their intuition.

The Workshops will consist of 1½ hours of studio drawing and one hour of observation and discussion. During the studio time, a variety of materials and subjects will be introduced and we will play! During the discussion, we will closely examine the nature of the drawing process, identifying and supporting each class member's individual style as it begins to reveal itself.

Drawing Workshop II
led by Helen Hawes

Drawing Workshop II is for anyone who has taken the original eight week workshop one or more times and wishes to continue on the journey. We win look at choices around media, content, process and awareness and alter these in ways that take us deeper. The search is for brand new marks and felt lines that reflect undiscovered inner realities. By staying connected to what we experience while in these intentionally altered situations, we can change habitual patterns that sabotage our growth.

We will continue to explore our. felt experiences, practicing drawing and seeing with the energy from different body centers. We will expand our awareness, learning to hold simultaneously more than one type of experience as we work towards drawing that reflects our wholeness.

The first half of the Workshop will follow the same format as Workshop I. The last half will be designed by the participants themselves. Each individual will have the opportunity to share with the group a series of drawing exercises which have consistently helped them go deeper.

Drawing Workshop III
led by Helen Hawes

In Drawing Workshop III we will explore drawing as dialogue. Dialogue is about conscious relationship and involves an equal exchange of information from two or more distinct sources. We learn to give our drawings autonomy and let them speak for themselves.

Our society often thinks in either / or terms, right or wrong, good or bad, night or day. This drastically limits the texture of our experience. By combining words and marks in the same exercise, we can embrace the conscious and unconscious as equals, simultaneously. This enables us to build a relationship of trust between the two, expanding our repertoire of felt experiences and bringing us more alive.

PO Box 42
West Dummerston, Vt. 05357