This journal directive, excepted from my course, 100 Days of Art Journal Therapy, will support you in finding your next positive growth step by sensing it in your body.
Introduction to Focusing
Philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin discovered Focusing in the late 1950s while asking: “Why is psychotherapy helpful for some people but not others?”
Gendlin and his colleagues studied recordings of hundreds of therapy sessions. They made an important discovery: successful therapy clients could pause and pay attention to what was happening in the present moment, in their bodies, in response to the problem at hand.
Often, this feeling into the body’s growth edge is preverbal. Gendlin called this bodily way of sensing a problem a “felt sense,” and he developed the method he called “Focusing” so that anyone could learn this profound way of experiencing breakthroughs in whatever has been holding them back.
You can apply this method of contemplation as a profound process for seeing and releasing your emotional pain body, familial conditioning and societal programming.
"Most traditional methods of working on oneself are mostly pain-centered. People get to repeat over and over their painful emotions without knowing how to use the body's own inherently positive direction and force."
~ Eugene Gendlin
Insight Into Your Problems
Eugene Gendlin is best known for Focusing, a psychotherapy technique that can help you access a nonverbal bodily feel for the problems that you are struggling with. Gendlin gave the name "felt sense" to this emerging body-feel. A felt sense is a body sensation that has meaning.
A felt sense is not an emotion or a thought. It is a sense in the body that does not yet have words. The felt sense is the bridge between your subconscious and conscious mind, and it often shows you how to release the familial, societal, cultural, and religious conditioning that has stopped your innate growth processes.
In your journal, write down the following headings and jot down your spontaneous thoughts underneath each heading.
1.) Clearing a Space: Inside Your Body
On any given day, you will likely have half a dozen problems that keep you stuck inside. Ask yourself: "What is bugging me? Why don't I feel wonderful right now? How is my life going? What is the main thing for me right now?"
Problems: Remove the problems out of your body by listing them in your journal. Do not try to list every problem you can think of; only the main problems that you are feeling tense about right now. Alternately, use your imagination to place your problems in front of you. Survey them from a distance.
Background Feeling: There is also a consistent background feeling that you will always carry within your body. Describe this ongoing background feeling. Place your background feeling next to your list of problems. Stay cheerfully detached from them, saying. "Well, except for all these problems, I am fine."
All Fine: You will also have a deep sense of well-being running at all times, often covered up by the static of problems. Sense how you feel when everything is all fine. Invite a word, phrase, or image to come forward to describe this familiar feeling of well-being that peeks out from behind your problems sometimes. Place this feeling of "all fine" next to your problems and your habitual background feeling.
2.) Felt Sensing: Choosing a Problem to Work Through
"A problem is a missing of something needed." ~ Ann Weiser Cornell
Choose one problem by asking which problem feels the worst right now. Ask which one hurts the most and feels the heaviest, the biggest, the sharpest, the most prickly, clammy or sticky.
Don't go inside the problem as you usually would, for this is the place of emotional overwhelm. Stand back from the problem. Ask, "How does this whole problem feel?" But don't answer in words. Feel the problem whole. Feel the overall sense of all that is your most pressing problem.
Ask yourself to be quiet. Listen and feel. The feel of the problem comes to you whole, without details, like listening to a piece of music made up of many notes and having one whole sense of it. Try to feel the whole inner aura of the problem. Try to get down to the single feeling of "all that" about this problem.
This "felt sense" of your whole problem is the holistic, unclear sense of the whole thing. Most people pass this felt sense because it is murky, fuzzy, and vague. You might think, "Oh, that! But that is just an uncomfortable nothing!" This is how your body senses a problem; it is at first quite fuzzy.
"A felt sense is a bodily awareness of a situation or person or event...an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about a given subject at a given time. It encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once. Think of it as a taste, or a great musical chord that makes you feel a powerful impact, a big, round, unclear feeling."
~Eugene Gendlin
3.) Description: Finding Words, Images and Symbols for the Problem
"Every bad feeling is potential energy for the more right way of being."
~ Eugene Gendlin
Find a quality word, phrase, or image for the felt sense. Find a quality like sticky, heavy, jumpy, helpless, tight, burdened, etc. Or find a short phrase such as, "like in a box, have to perform." A combination of words might help you get a “handle” on your felt sense, like "scared-tight" or "jumpy-restless." Or, a drawing might work better. You might sense that your problem exists in a specific part of your body. Perhaps a visual symbol will arise from your felt sense.
Try out different words or descriptions until you feel a bodily shift of rightness, and then discard everything else. You will know which one is right.
4.) Resonating: Checking the Description
This is a double-checking of the words and the bodily felt sense to see if they resonate. Make sure your words, symbol, or image are just right with the feeling. Play with the description to see if it wants to change. Allow the description to change until it captures the quality of your bodily felt sense. Once you get the sense of rightness, your body will shift again.
5.) Asking: The Felt Sense What It Needs
You will know what is missing even before it can be articulated. What is wrong contains within it what would feel right instead. Listen to the word you have decided is right and tune into the unclear felt sense for one minute. Using your word - if it says "jumpy," ask, "What is it about this whole problem that makes me so jumpy?"
If you hear a lot of fast answers from your head, just let them go. What comes swiftly is old information from your habitual mind. The mind rushes in and gives you no time to contact the felt sense directly. Ask yourself the question and wait. This is not meant to be hard work, but it is a friendly time within your body, inquiring.
Words and images will flow out of the feeling and offer a freshly felt difference. Just repeat your open-ended questions until the felt sense stirs. Ask, "What is the worst of this?" "What would it take for this to feel okay?" "What does the felt sense of this problem need?"
You might sense a surprising change you need to make. Allow anything to spontaneously arise. Realizing your problem needs to shift into a feeling of rightness brings clarity and relief.
6.) Receiving
Whatever comes in Focusing, welcome it. Welcome the wisdom your body offers you, whatever it says. This is only one bodily felt shift and is not the last word. You do not need to believe, agree with, or do what the felt sense says. You just need to receive it fully. With each felt shift, your body changes and your life direction will appear step by step.
Be willing to receive just one step. Once you locate this one felt shift, it is very much like a place, a newly loved, fully seen spot in your inner landscape. Once you know where it is and how to find it, you can leave it and return to it later.
The Freshness of the Body's Felt Sense
Negativity has deeper roots that point to core wounds and conditioned fears from the past.
It is strange to consider, but negative emotions that feel triggered today and are unfinished from the past will come up freshly to heal in the present moment.
For this reason, we do not have to revisit the past in static ways. If we pay attention to our body’s “felt sense,” we can heal all facets of our life experiences in fresh and spontaneous ways.
The felt sense is always freshly made, unique living—just what is needed for today's unfolding. Its inward coming is sensed as more truly "me" than the familiar feelings from the past.
Eugene Gendlin explained that the body's sense of a situation (the felt sense) is always new and fresh, expressing how the body has the problem—today. Some content from the past may also come, but the felt sense is always more, the new whole of the now.
This is very often misunderstood. The so-called "here and now"always holds a new experience of the past. Past unprocessed experiences are always implicit in any present. So, we are not repetitively reliving a repressed past. Reliving a past event is the present experience of it, fresh, right now, and has the quality of a present-day interaction.
In this way, Focusing allows you to move past what has kept you stuck in emotional pain, using your body’s inherent ability to heal and move forward into new possibilities that precisely align with who you are today.
If you want to explore the Focusing process further, I have created a YouTube meditation HERE and a Focusing journal on Amazon HERE.
Ad-Free Focusing Meditation: I have also uploaded my Focusing meditation to the Insight Timer app, which you can listen to on your phone ad-free HERE.
FOCUSING MEDITATION
FOCUSING JOURNAL
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