thefocusingspace
What is Focusing? [thefocusingspace] [Articles] [Links] [Focusing Workshops] Consider this situation. I begin to leave my room in winter. As I near the door, something makes me stop. I don't know what it is, but something in me feels "not okay." I turn back and see that I've left the bar radiator on. (Bar radiators are not illegal in Australia.) In itself, this isn't a problem; but I notice that my scarf is hanging too close to the radiator for comfort. Straight away the 'something' in me relaxes. If I were to stop and check inwardly, here, I would be conscious that the vague sense that had stopped me previously 'added up' or pointed to this. There is the outer situation, and it explains my present shift - the ease that has come about in that 'not-okay' place. Now I can fix the situation, and relax even further. My intention was to walk out, but at the door the something arose in me, in the middle of my body. What was that? A sense of not okay, sure... but this vague 'not-okay feeling was more than any old vague something. It was a specific vagueness. It wasn't about a million other things that are not okay in my life - when I saw the heater, my body knew it was that exactly. Here's another example, from psychotherapist and Buddhist writer John Welwood:
"Focusing is a mode of inward bodily attention that is not yet known to most people.... General descriptions do not convey focusing. It differs from the usual attention we pay to feelings because it begins with the body and occurs in the zone between the conscious and the unconscious. Most people don't know that a bodily sense of any topic can be invited to come in that zone, and that one can enter into such a sense, " says Gendlin. A bodily-felt sense, and the felt-sense-attending process that follows it, named Focusing by Gendlin, indicate a distinct level of human process. Such process arises out of the interactional nature of humankind. When we put an organism into a system, the system enters the organism in many ways. So, it isn't just that my body interacts with its environment (recalling Alan Watt's comment, that the outline of my body is the in-line of the environment), but, actually, the environment is in me, just as I am in the environment. One form of this entering in, is in my bodily-felt sense of a situation. When I close the door to my room, and I have unwittingly left the bar radiator on, I have the environment in me at that moment, in the form of a felt sense, which in this case tells me something like, "Things are not okay..." Knowing this, I can take a step toward changing the situation. Gendlin did a great amount of research into the existence and value of the felt sense, a level of human process that is often ignored because it is subtle. To quote from an interview with Ann Weiser Cornell:
1) John
Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening, [thefocusingspace] [Articles] [Links] [Workshops] Christopher McLean |