About Focusing
The Focusing process brings you into connection with the deep knowing that resides within or around your body. Tuning into the body’s wisdom is an innate human skill. However, it’s one that has been mostly lost in our modern times, which favors analytical and rational ways of knowing.
Philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, along with his colleagues, first developed Focusing in the 1960s out of their observations of what really helped people heal and make shifts in their lives. It wasn’t countless hours of talk therapy and analysis of thoughts and feelings. Instead, successful clients had a different way of approaching their inner experiences. They instinctively knew how to pay attention to what Gendlin later called the “felt sense”. Gendlin and his colleagues discovered this process of internal, body-focused awareness is a skill that can be taught and learned. Thereby Focusing was born. With practice, Focusing can become a way of life; one in which you have an embodied trust in your own inner knowing, resources, and wholeness to guide your life forward.
Why do Focusing?
“Our bodies carry knowledge about how we are living our lives, about what we need to be more fully ourselves, about what we value and believe, about what has hurt us emotionally and how to heal it. Our bodies know which people around us bring out the best in us, and which do not. Our bodies know the right next step to bring us more fulfilling and rewarding lives.”
– Anne Weiser Cornell
Here are some reasons I’ve found true for me and others along my journey in being guided and guiding others in this process:
To embody “radical self-compassion” – true unconditional acceptance of your whole self, just as you are now
To grow your capacity to meet life’s challenges and sit with the discomfort of uncertainty
To bring a fresh perspective to stuck situations
To embody a more expansive sense of who you are, which allows you to respond to life with less unconscious reactivity and more conscious, inspired action
To learn to trust your inner knowing
To enhance your capacity to meet life with more energy, creativity and resilience
To learn to accept what is while at the same time, uncovering the innate “life forward” energy that is always there, wanting to move you towards growth and expansion
To improve the quality of your relationships
To enhance your overall physical, mental and spiritual well-being
To make contact with and grow the inherent freedom and joy within you, regardless of life’s outer circumstances
To embody the sense of yourself as part of a greater, interconnected web with all beings
Photo credit: Trevor Specht
“What is split off, not felt, remains the same. When it is felt, it changes. Most people don't know this! They think that by not permitting the feeling of their negative ways they make themselves good. On the contrary, that keeps these negatives static, the same from year to year. A few moments of feeling it in your body allows it to change. If there is in you something bad or sick or unsound, let it inwardly be and breathe. That's the only way it can evolve and change into the form it needs.”
— Eugene Gendlin