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Donna Blank

Donna Blank
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About

Discovering and studying Wholebody Focusing has been an experience of ‘coming home’

My inner guidance system (that has always directed my most significant choices in learning and developing) went on alert when I encountered Kevin McEvenue and Wholebody Focusing at FISS 2010. In an instant, I knew this work would be my next step in my personal and professional development. It led to my training with Kevin, and participating in two advanced study trainings in Wholebody Focusing with Kevin and with Karen Whalen.

Stepping back now, I can see how my intuition to study the WBF process actually embodied a deep recognition of how this profound work sits at the intersection of most of my life’s interests and pursuits over many decades; work in education, somatic disciplines, creative process and the arts, meditation and authentic movement.

At a felt sense level, I had been originally led to these disciplines by something more fundamental: an attraction to an essential aliveness, direct knowing and plasticity that lives in all of us, and that is heightened through deep embodied listening, expression and human connection. Through inner guidance that did not have a name, I pursued these paths in depth and became a teacher…and at the same time, was seeking an integration of where they all pointed.

In encountering Wholebody Focusing, that essential aliveness, direct knowing, and deeply connected listening in Grounded Presence to self and other popped into the foreground and signaled more deeply that these elements are living guides in themselves. WBF has led me home to this essential wisdom process as my conscious base. I am deeply grateful. As I now practice and live WBF in my personal and professional life, I experience this work as a potent base for living in more presence and depth, and it has brought me great joy personally and professionally. And miraculously, WBF has also given me a wonderful, enlivened community of people who share this multidimensional, healing process, an unexpected gift.

I follow this process of grounded presence and embodied listening in several specific ways:

  • In my Heartfelt Conversations with my WBF partners

  • In an ongoing Heartfelt Conversation group

  • In my private practice, that includes Wholebody Focusing as well as my Feldenkrais practice of several decades, which now often integrates WBF.

  • Teaching and mentoring Feldenkrais practitioners, integrating WBF depth of experience into the Feldenkrais work. Advanced trainings I have led for that community have included ‘Friendly Hands, ‘Deepening Presence in Your Practice’, and ‘Emergent Awareness’.

I am interested in sharing in many topics through WBF and HFC, including (but not limited to!)

  • WBF and somatics

  • WBF, and HFC and spirituality

  • Elder wisdom, becoming an elder

  • Aging

  • Mothers of grown children

  • Creating a legacy through the WBF process

Bio

Donna has a Masters degree in early childhood education and certification as a Wholebody Focusing Trainer, Feldenkrais Practitioner and Trainer, Laban Movement Analyst, and in Gestalt Therapy.

She is fortunate to have learned directly from the founders of Wholebody Focusing, the Feldenkrais Method, Laban Movement Analysis and Siddha Yoga, and from many other wonderful teachers as well.

Married for 45 years, she is a mother of two grown daughters who are endlessly creative, and grandmother of another one who looks to be on that path.

Donna has taught all ages from infancy to octogenarians, in schools , universities and in professional training programs. She was a founder, curriculum designer and faculty member of the first masters degree in movement program at Wesleyan University.

She has been in private practice for 35 years, and enjoys the ongoing learning that comes from that co-creative process.

Wholebody Focusing has become the multidimensional integrative link in all of this.