Day 129 of 365 - Mind, Body, Emotions - Part 3
A book called Focusing was on my recommended reading list for a program I took several years ago. It's just a little paperback, originally published in 1978 as a Bantam New Age Book. :) The author was Eugene T. Gendlin, Ph.D., who I originally thought was a psychologist, but was actually a philosopher at the University of Chicago. He studied under Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy and became a psychotherapist himself.
In relation to the discussions of my last few posts about emotions stored in the body, how the nervous system works and what to do with uncomfortable feelings, I want to present here Gendlin's technique, which is simply called Focusing. It is a tool anyone can learn to use, on their own, with a friend or a therapist.
To quote from the book, "Focusing is the next development after getting in touch with feelings. It concerns a different kind of inward attention to what is at first sensed unclearly. Then it comes into focus and, through the specific internal movements I am about to present, it changes in a bodily way."
The focusing technique is not meant to feel like work, but more a friendly time within your body where you welcome anything that comes, but stay a little distance from it. You make contact with a kind of internal bodily awareness called a felt sense. It is a body sense of meaning.
Here are the steps from the appendix of the book:
1) Clear a Space - First, get into a relaxed and comfortable position. Then ask inside, how are you? What's between you and feeling fine? Let what comes into your body do the answering. Greet each concern that comes and then put it aside, like stacking boxes to clear a space in a room.
2) Felt Sense - Pick one problem for focus. What do you sense in your body when you recall the whole of it? Sense all of that, the sense of the whole thing, the murky discomfort. At first it is unclear and fuzzy. It is not an emotion.
3) Get a Handle - What is the quality of the felt sense? Sit with the unclear sensation until a word, phrase or image comes up. What quality word fits?
4) Resonate - Go back and forth between the word or image and felt sense. Is it right? If they match, have the sensation of matching several times. If the felt sense changes, follow it with your attention. When you get a perfect match, let yourself feel it.
5) Ask - What is it about the whole problem that makes me so ? (using the matched word or phrase) When stuck, ask - what is the worst, what's so bad about it? Let the feeling give you an answer. What would it feel like if it was all okay? Let the body answer. What's in the way of that?
6) Receive - Welcome what came. You can do another round or can leave it and come back to it later. Protect it from critical voices in your mind.
The key to having a successful experience with this practice is to aim to get out of your analytical mind and into the body. Your body knows much that you don't know in your mind. The release comes from the once-hidden knowledge becoming available to the conscious mind. Even if you can't make immediate use of it, the body shift makes your whole body different. It is natural to the body and feels good.
Once the body shifts and is released from the tense and hurting place, we are able to take practical steps that were hard before, and in a new way. The problem is not solved when you finish, because this is not a rational problem solving process of the mind. The felt sense of the problem changes. The feeling shift is what is important. It is a physical experience that comes to you as a single bodily feeling, a deep down level of awareness. It contains emotional and factual components but is bigger. You can feel it, like something coming unstuck. The coming unstuck is the body shift.
"If, when following the instructions, somewhere you have spent a little while sensing and touching an unclear holistic body sense of this problem, then you have focused."
I think that a process like this could be helpful in that ninety seconds referred to in the previous posts. Following the sensations in the body and letting words or images flow out from that can make a freshly felt difference from just mentally ruminating over and over on a 'bad' feeling.
It's an exercise that only takes a matter of minutes. At first, your mind may want to be heavily involved. Just acknowledge it and then drop your attention down into your body where the feeling resides. Allowing the body to speak and then finding that right word to match the sensation helps with that integration of communication between body and brain that was discussed before. When you are done, mentally it may feel unfinished, but your body will feel like something shifted.
All I can suggest is trying it out for yourself. Be patient. You may be surprised.
In relation to the discussions of my last few posts about emotions stored in the body, how the nervous system works and what to do with uncomfortable feelings, I want to present here Gendlin's technique, which is simply called Focusing. It is a tool anyone can learn to use, on their own, with a friend or a therapist.
To quote from the book, "Focusing is the next development after getting in touch with feelings. It concerns a different kind of inward attention to what is at first sensed unclearly. Then it comes into focus and, through the specific internal movements I am about to present, it changes in a bodily way."
The focusing technique is not meant to feel like work, but more a friendly time within your body where you welcome anything that comes, but stay a little distance from it. You make contact with a kind of internal bodily awareness called a felt sense. It is a body sense of meaning.
Here are the steps from the appendix of the book:
1) Clear a Space - First, get into a relaxed and comfortable position. Then ask inside, how are you? What's between you and feeling fine? Let what comes into your body do the answering. Greet each concern that comes and then put it aside, like stacking boxes to clear a space in a room.
2) Felt Sense - Pick one problem for focus. What do you sense in your body when you recall the whole of it? Sense all of that, the sense of the whole thing, the murky discomfort. At first it is unclear and fuzzy. It is not an emotion.
3) Get a Handle - What is the quality of the felt sense? Sit with the unclear sensation until a word, phrase or image comes up. What quality word fits?
4) Resonate - Go back and forth between the word or image and felt sense. Is it right? If they match, have the sensation of matching several times. If the felt sense changes, follow it with your attention. When you get a perfect match, let yourself feel it.
5) Ask - What is it about the whole problem that makes me so ? (using the matched word or phrase) When stuck, ask - what is the worst, what's so bad about it? Let the feeling give you an answer. What would it feel like if it was all okay? Let the body answer. What's in the way of that?
6) Receive - Welcome what came. You can do another round or can leave it and come back to it later. Protect it from critical voices in your mind.
The key to having a successful experience with this practice is to aim to get out of your analytical mind and into the body. Your body knows much that you don't know in your mind. The release comes from the once-hidden knowledge becoming available to the conscious mind. Even if you can't make immediate use of it, the body shift makes your whole body different. It is natural to the body and feels good.
Once the body shifts and is released from the tense and hurting place, we are able to take practical steps that were hard before, and in a new way. The problem is not solved when you finish, because this is not a rational problem solving process of the mind. The felt sense of the problem changes. The feeling shift is what is important. It is a physical experience that comes to you as a single bodily feeling, a deep down level of awareness. It contains emotional and factual components but is bigger. You can feel it, like something coming unstuck. The coming unstuck is the body shift.
"If, when following the instructions, somewhere you have spent a little while sensing and touching an unclear holistic body sense of this problem, then you have focused."
I think that a process like this could be helpful in that ninety seconds referred to in the previous posts. Following the sensations in the body and letting words or images flow out from that can make a freshly felt difference from just mentally ruminating over and over on a 'bad' feeling.
It's an exercise that only takes a matter of minutes. At first, your mind may want to be heavily involved. Just acknowledge it and then drop your attention down into your body where the feeling resides. Allowing the body to speak and then finding that right word to match the sensation helps with that integration of communication between body and brain that was discussed before. When you are done, mentally it may feel unfinished, but your body will feel like something shifted.
All I can suggest is trying it out for yourself. Be patient. You may be surprised.
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