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Have you heard of Focusing? This is a process aimed at accessing the deeper "knowing" that lies beneath everyday awareness. This just one exercise I utilize to facilitate therapy with outstanding results. Since being trained in Focusing, it's hard for me to imagine conducting therapy without it. Here is a more a description of Focusing as described by The Focusing Institute:
“Focusing” is to enter into a special kind of awareness, different from our every day awareness. It is open, turned inward, centered on the present and on your body’s inner sensations. When doing Focusing, you silently ask, “How am I now?” Perhaps you feel just fine. Or perhaps there is something in the way of feeling fine. That inside place might not respond quickly, but it does respond. It will give you a bodily sensation that is more rich and complex than a simple “feeling good” or “feeling bad.” As you wait attentively, something forms inside you that is vague, indefinite, difficult to put into a words. You try to describe this sensation and maybe a sentence comes, or an image, maybe a word or two which describes this sensation, and lets you know that it has something to do with a certain situation or experience in your life. For instance, a depressing problem might cause you to say “I feel heavy,” or “It’s like an empty cave inside,” or “there’s a huge ball there, dark, fiery, no, it’s more like--” etc. This sensation in your body is called a “felt sense.” It lies behind your thoughts and feelings and is significant and full of meaning. It is a message from your body to you, and will speak to you when you listen. Contacting the felt sense is the important first step of Focusing. Focusing is the ability to stay with the felt sense as it develops, to look at it with curiosity, without judging. Focusing is the ability to welcome what comes, to maintain a friendly attitude to whatever is inside you. Focusing is the ability to listen to that place that is trying to tell you something and to be ready to be surprised. Staying with the felt sense helps you learn that which you don’t already know. As you pay attention to the felt quality of your current experiencing, you develop new expressions, words that are fresh, appropriate and alive. The felt sense talks to you in words and symbols that are not separate from your experience, but which evoke that experience for you in the present moment. That experience was below your awareness, but not below the awareness of the body. When in contact with this sea of experience which you carry in your body, you come to understand how you are living a situation, a relationship, a problem. As you search for a name for what you feel, there is often a wonderful result. Something inside you changes. You relax; your body is energized, grateful tears may come and a deep breath. This change, which is perceived directly in the body, is called a ”felt shift.” You feel better and different in a good way. Focusing gives you a better capacity to confront difficult situations and find creative solutions.
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"Life begins on the other side of despair."
- Jean Paul Sartre "The destination of life is this eternal moment."
- Alan Watts "We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain."
-Alan Watts "To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float."
- Alan Watts "Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance."
- Epicurus "No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."
-Alan Watts "The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence."
-Jiddu Krishnamurti "It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
-Virginia Woolf "Both what you run from and what you yearn for are within you."
-Anthony De Mello |
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