SECOND EDITION NEW, REVISED INSTRUCTIONS

SECOND EDITION NEW, REVISED INSTRUCTIONS

EUGENE T. GENDLIN, Ph.D.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

A BERNARD GEIS ASSOCIATES BOOK

A BANTAM NEW AGE BOOK

 

I very much appreciate Max Gunther's invaluable editorial help with this book.

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

FOCUSING

A Bantam New Age Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Everest House edition published December 1978

A Selection of Macmillan Book Clubs [Behavioral Science)

April 1979

Excerpted in Lifestyle, November 1980

Bantam revised edition / May 1981

Bantam New Age and the accompanying figure design as well as the state­ment "the search for meaning, growth, and change" are trademarks of Ban­tam Books.

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1978, 1981 by Eugene T. Gendlin, Ph.D.

Cover art copyright © 1981 by Bantam Books.

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ISBN 0-553-27833-9 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

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FOCUSING: A Tool For Changing Times.......................................................... 4

part one. UNLOCKING THE WISDOM OF YOUR BODY........................................ 6

One. The Inner Act.............................................................................................................. 7

Two. Change...................................................................................................................... 10

Three. What the Body Knows............................................................................................ 20

part two. FOCUSING............................................................................................... 24

Four. The Focusing Manual............................................................................................... 25

Five. The Six Focusing Movements and What They Mean............................................... 29

Six. What Focusing Is Not.................................................................................................. 36

Seven. Clearing a Space for Yourself................................................................................ 39

Eight. If You Can’t Find a Felt Sence................................................................................ 45

Nine. If You Can’t Make Anything Shift........................................................................... 54

Part three. People helping each other................................................ 58

Ten. Finding Richness in Others........................................................................................ 59

Eleven. The Listening Manual........................................................................................... 62

Part four. Focusing and Society................................................................ 74

Twelwe. New Relationships................................................................................................ 75

Thirteen. Experience Beyond Roles................................................................................... 79

APPENDIX....................................................................................................................... 82

a. Philosophical Note.......................................................................................................... 83

b. Research Summary and References.............................................................................. 84

d. Focusing: Short Form.................................................................................................... 86

PART ONE: UNLOCKING THE WISDOM OF YOUR BODY

One. The Inner Act.

At the University of Chicago and elsewhere in the past fifteen years, a group of colleagues and I have been studying some questions that most psychotherapists don't like to ask out loud. Why doesn't therapy succeed more often? Why does it so often fail to make a real difference in people's lives? In the rarer cases when it does succeed, what is it that those patients and thera­pists do? What is it that the majority fails to do?

Seeking answers, we studied many forms of therapy from classical approaches to recent ones. We analyzed literally thousands of therapist-patient sessions recorded on tape. Our series of studies has led to several findings, some very different from what we and most other pro­fessional therapists expected.

First, we found that the successful patient -- the one who shows real and tangible change on psychological tests and in life -- can be picked out fairly easily from recorded therapy sessions. What these rare patients do in their therapy hours is different from the others. The difference is so easy to spot that, once we had defined it, we were able to explain it to inexperienced young undergraduates, and they too were able to sort out the successful patients from the others.

What is this crucial difference? We found that it is not the therapist's technique -- differences in methods of therapy seem to mean surprisingly little. Nor does the difference lie in what the patients talk about. The dif­ference is in how they talk. And that is only an outward sign of the real difference: what the successful patients do inside themselves.

The purpose of this book is to tell you what they do and how you can do it. For this uncommon skill, this internal act, not only is useful in a psychotherapist's office, it is a way of approaching any problem or situa­tion.

We have taught this skill to large numbers of people not in therapy in subsequent years. Now that it seems anyone can learn it, I also want this book to be readable by anyone. The book is addressed to professionals, but not only to them. Therefore I am writing it simply and not in the technical manner of my philosophical and scientific publications.

The skill we have observed and defined is not only for problems. Among those who know it, it becomes an internal source that is consulted many times every day. I am using it right now, in the process of writing this book.

The skill I am about to teach you is called focusing.

It will enable you to find and change where your life is stuck, cramped, hemmed in, slowed down. And it will enable you to change—to live from a deeper place than just your thoughts and feelings.

One fact that disturbed us the most in those research studies was that patients who did the crucial thing inside themselves could be picked out in the first two therapy sessions. We found we could predict success or failure right from the start just by analyzing the early inter­views. According to a careful statistical analysis, there was less than a thousand-to-one chance of getting the same finding accidentally.

Today we know how to teach focusing. So this finding does not mean that some people cannot learn it. But at the time this was a shocking discovery. Here we had therapists and patients embarking on a year or more of hard effort. Much human need, hope, devotion, and money would be involved, and we already knew they would fail.

The finding means that psychotherapy as usually practiced doesn't show patients how to do psychotherapy. In other words, patients did not improve with practice. If they did not somehow know right from the start how to approach themselves inside in that special way, they did not achieve major changes, no matter what they or their therapists did or how ear­nestly or for how long.

This finding was contrary to my predictions, and to what had been my own firm subjective conviction. I thought I had experienced the gradual opening and in­creasing ability of patients to come into touch with their feelings. I had been certain that patients learn to do psychotherapy in themselves over the course of treat­ment, and do it more effectively in the second half. I had had many experiences of beginning with patients who seemed inept at sensing themselves inwardly, and, by my own skills as a therapist, and with the patients' efforts, I had brought many such patients to a success­ful resolution of their problems.

One reason why research is so important is precisely that it can surprise you and tell you that your subjective convictions are wrong. If research always found what we expected, there wouldn't be much point in doing research.

With hindsight I realize I was thinking only of the successful patients and not of the many patients with whom I failed. Now we know how to teach these people the crucial skill as well.

The research shows plainly, and repeatedly, that suc­cessful patients do indeed improve in this key skill, but the research also shows that they had it to some extent right at the beginning. The others, those who failed, did not have it at all and never achieved it through psychotherapy alone. At that time we did not know how to teach it.

Most therapists don't know what this crucial internal approach is, let alone how to help patients learn it. So I was led to wonder: can it be taught?

My first feeling, stemming from my training as a psychotherapist, was to say no, it can't be taught. I was trained to believe that only a very naive therapist would try to tell the patient in words how therapy works. Someone who hasn't experienced it wouldn't understand the words. Psychotherapy was supposed to be an art, a mystery, not a science. Some groups claim to have developed exact scientific techniques, but this is only a propaganda claim. The omniscient and totally self-assured psychotherapist exists only in the movies. Of course, each school of therapists has its own ideas and techniques, but they all know that they stumble around confusedly when their techniques don't work, which is more often than not. Therefore no serious psychotherapist would claim to be able to put into words exactly what makes therapy work, how to make changes happen inside a person. Only therapy itself was supposed to teach how.

But the research had shown that therapy does not teach how to those who don't already know how. The research had also shown very specifically what the crucial inner act is. Was it naive, now, to think it might be teachable?

Despite my doubts, I set out to see if I could make that all-important inner act teachable. With many peo­ple's help, I gradually devised specific directions for doing what those rare successful patients had somehow known how to do. We tried those directions out on large numbers of people and revised them and tried them again many times over a period of years. Those instructions have now become very specific and very teachable. Research conducted in several places has shown that people can be taught effectively in these ways to perform that internal act (see appendix).

Since this crucial internal act can be taught, and is not taught by therapy, people need not be therapy patients to learn it. What follows from this fact is a kind of revolution. No longer need this change process be in the charge of therapists. People can do it for themselves and with each other.

Of course they are not "therapists" or "doctors" or "authorities" with each other, but the authority aspect of the medical doctor never has really fitted the human process of personal change at all. Human problems are by their very nature such that we are each inherently in charge of ourselves. No authority can resolve our problems or tell us how to live. Therefore I and others have been teaching more and more people to help themselves and each other.

This book will' let you experience and recognize when actual change is happening in you, and when it's not. There is a distinct physical sensation of change, which you recognize once you have experienced it. We call it a body shift. When people have this even once, they no longer helplessly wonder for years whether they are changing or not. Now they can be their own judges of that. Often, when focusing is taught to a new group, some people experience a bodily shift, a step toward resolution of a problem they have discussed with a therapist for many years without change. They are shocked. Could a few minutes of this let me experience more change than I've had in my expensive psycho­therapy?

People still think of the therapist as an authority. Even if patients feel no change, they think "the doctor" must know what's happening. If "the doctor" thinks they should keep coming, they accept it as necessary. They think something "must be happening." As some­one wrote me recently: "When I confronted my thera­pist about there being no change, he thought it was all right if I have a paid friend for the rest of my life. I never went back... but after four years!"

When the revolution in self-help fully takes place and people generally learn and do these helpful pro­cesses with each other, will professional psychotherapy be unnecessary? I think expert help will always be wanted. But it will have to be better than what ordinary people can do when trained in specific skills. People will know how to recognize, unmistakably, whether they are being helped or not.

One must try out a number of therapists (a few sessions at a time, not years!) in order to find real help. You can do this after you learn the unmistakable bodily experience of a bit of change going on.

My approach to therapy and some of my colleagues' approaches too have been radically changed by the knowledge that the crucial inner act is teachable. When people come to me for help, I no longer let them talk and talk. And of course I don't -- and never did -- just analyze their feelings intellectually. Nor do I let them scream the same phrases and work in circles on the same things over and over again as happens in some of the newer therapies. Many people can get in touch with feelings -- but then what? They have "gut feelings" all right, but the feelings don't change.

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.

Another major discovery is that the process of ac­tually changing feels good. Effective working on one's problems is not self-torture. The change process we have discovered is natural to the body, and it feels that way in the body. The crucial move goes beneath the usual painful places to a bodily sensing that is at first unclear. The experience of something emerging from there feels like a relief and a coming alive.

From this new vantage point, the traditional methods of working on oneself are seen to have been mostly pain-centered. People get into and repeat over and over their painful emotions, without knowing how to use the body's own life-centered and inherently posi­tive direction and force. That way people stay as they are and hurt themselves over and over. One of the chief new principles is that the change process feels good. It feels like inhaling fresh air after having been in a stuffy room for a long time. The moment it doesn't, you stop and back up just a little bit.

This crucial skill is not easy to explain. Many people can do it only after some practice. On the other hand, it is very much easier than struggling for years with the old troubles, perhaps ending with a better self-understanding but with no change, perhaps getting in touch with feelings but being unable to make them move, shift, resolve themselves.

As hard as it was for me at first to accept the research finding that therapy doesn't do the job, research findings can never hurt you. They move you forward. If the therapy as it now exists doesn't do the job, then we must change therapy.

The happiest change of all is that we can build the change process into society generally and not only in doctor-patient therapy that costs so much and some­times gives so little. Now that the inner act is teachable, we can teach it not just to therapy patients but to anyone. We have found that it can be taught in a school system, in church groups, in community centers, in many other settings. Any person can use this internal process. People can also be shown very specific ways to help each other with it.

Before I start to explain this inner act, I want to make an earnest request of you. Put aside for a while what you know about psychotherapy or inward pro­cesses. What I am about to show you is not the familiar "getting in touch with feelings". Nor is it the content-free quiet of meditation. Whether you are a psycho­therapist, patient, or intelligent layperson, this inner act is probably quite unfamiliar to you. The internal equip­ment needed to perform the act is in every human being, but in most people it is unused. A few seem to use it intuitively now and then, but the chances are you have never deliberately done it and have never been aware the possibility exists. Only recently is it being discussed in the professional literature.

Some people learn this inner way fairly fast, while others need some weeks or months of patient inner listening and tinkering.

Two. Change.

The process I am going to teach you in this book, the inner act, is a perfectly natural one. But as our language contains no words to describe it, I have had to invent the needed words.

I call the process focusing. It is a process in which you make contact with a special kind of internal bodily awareness. I call this awareness a felt sense.

A felt sense is usually not just there, it must form. You have to know how to let it form by attending inside your body. When it comes, it is at first unclear, fuzzy. By certain steps it can come into focus and also change. A felt sense is the body's sense of a particular problem or situation.

A felt sense is not an emotion. We recognize emo­tions. We know when we are angry, or sad, or glad. A felt sense is something you do not at first recognize -- it is vague and murky. It feels meaningful, but not known. It is a body-sense of meaning. When you learn how to focus, you will discover that the body finding its own way provides its own answers to many of your problems.

The process brings change.

A therapist is not necessary in focusing. By yourself, or with a friend who knows how and when to keep quiet, you can achieve focusing results.

The most important rule for a therapist or friend to observe, in helping someone to focus, is to stay out of the focuser's way. Most therapists like to believe it is they who produce results, rather than a process in the patient. Therapists have much to offer and think this will make all the difference. There is always a strong temptation to analyze what the patient says, to make guesses about the nature of the problem, to lecture, to rearrange the person's situation.

But only your body knows your problems and where their cruxes lie. If I were your personal therapist, I would resist the powerful temptation to tell you things, as though I knew more about your problems than you do. But I would not just let you talk either. I would teach you how to focus effectively, and I would keep you company as you did so. There are also some other things I would do, which I will tell you about later.

Now let me give you some examples of some people's focusing experiences.

Later I will carefully explain each of the six move­ ments of which focusing consists. When these are successful, there is a physical change in the body, a felt shift. Then the problem seems different. In the follow­ing examples I am not yet teaching the focusing move­ments. I am only illustrating what the changes are like that come with each body shift.

Notice that the nature of the problem changes as each shift comes. Without tapping the deeper bodily level, which is at first always unclear, one would stay stuck with the thoughts and feelings of what the prob­lem appears to be at the beginning.

THE MAN WHO COULDN'T WORE

"I'm having a lot of trouble finishing this book I'm writing," said George. "It's because I have to do it. If I didn't have to, I could. But this way, I sit there and I'm sort of stuck—disconnected like. I can't seem to turn on my mind. All I do is sit there and stare out of the window. I can't do the actual writing. If I do have an idea, I sit there and sort of tell myself, 'Well, George, it's great that you have an idea here,' and then I feel like going and reading a mystery novel."

I said, "That body sense of 'stuck,' 'disconnected' -- what is its quality? Focus on it."

He was silent for about a minute, sitting, eyes closed. He started to say something and then stopped: "It's a feeling of—no." Evidently he had a feeling and was trying to let words come from it. Words were coming, but when he checked them with the feeling, they weren't exactly the right words. They made nothing shift.

Suddenly, he had it: "Contempt!" He repeated the word, trying it again and liking it. "It's like this boob isn't the real world, it's just in my head."

George is a college professor. He has a reputation for working harder with students than most professors do.

He went on: "This feeling of contempt -- well, it's like everything I do sitting at my desk is crap. It's in my head, in my private space, instead of out in the world. That's what makes it crap. Head work isn't out in the world where things happen. It's all inside, like it isn't really happening at all. It isn't real or important. What's important is what I do in the world. That's real-teaching classes, seeing students, taking care of my family. Ah, I've had this for years, off and on. Head work is nothing."

I repeated the gist of what he had said. "So there's in-your-head and that's contemptible," I said, "and there's in-the-world and that's real, that's taking care of things."

"Yes. No. Well -- uh -- "

This is what focusing is like. The nature of the prob­lem changes with each shift. You make contact with a feeling and you say, "Yes that's it!" Then you feel something below it or behind it or alongside it and you say, "Well, no, that isn't it after all." The problem, when you finish, is not the same as you thought when you began. The felt sense of the problem changes.

George sat quietly for a while, focusing. Then he said, "There's something else here. It's crazy, paradoxical. This being in the world, taking care of things, it isn't the important part of me at all. Taking care of things, teaching, earning my salary -- that isn't the main thing for me. I always arrange it so I can get it out of the way, get back to writing my book. It doesn't make sense, does it? Writing is contemptible because it's all in my head, but it's still the main thing, the thing I most want to do."

"What is the whole unclear body-sense when you say, 'this thing I most want to do'?"

"It feels like I have to do this writing. It dominates my life. It would be awful if I didn't do it, even though I have this contempt feeling about it."

I said, "All right, go back to it and say, 'Okay, right, it would be awful not to do this writing.' Then ask what that whole sense of 'awful' is."

George often goes past a feeling without letting a whole felt sense form. That is where I usually help. He knows it is important to accept every feeling that comes, not argue with it, not challenge it with peremptory demands that it explain itself. You don't talk back to the feeling like an angry parent demanding that the feeling justify itself. You don't say, "What do you mean, such-and-such would be awful? That's nonsense! Just why would it be awful?" Instead you approach the feeling in an accepting way.

George accepts his feelings, but this is not enough. Just getting in touch with one's feelings often brings no change, just the same feeling over and over. One must let a larger, wider, unclear felt sense form.

George had said "it would be awful." We didn't yet know what there was in and with this "awful." To find out, and to let it shift, the whole vague body sense of all that goes with "awful" had to form for him.

George focused on the felt sense and its quality. Then he said, "It would be awful not to write because -- if I didn't do my book I'd be a failure, a parasite -- well, no, not exactly that" He paused to let the right word come, and finally it did: "A playboy." "A playboy. Now ask what that is." "Ah..." George sat silent for a long time. "Yeah," he said at last, "yeah, this is a very evil path this leads me down. Wow. It feels -- it feels like it's immoral not to do this serious work, writing." George breathed a huge sigh. "It's sexual," he said. "That's what it feels like. Not to have to work at writing: that's sexual. Like masturbating all the time, or -- wait, no, it's more like being a kid watching adults making love. Yeah, that's what it would be like. It would be like having the grown­ups tell me I could just sit there and watch."

"And that would be all right?"

"Sure! That would be fine!" George's felt sense of the situation seemed to have given him permission to stop writing. But then that permission was withdrawn. "Wait a minute," he said. "I don't know if that would be fine after all. It would -- well, ah, it feels both good and bad."

"Sort it out. See if you can get a felt sense of what would be bad about it."

"Well," he said after a while, "there's a feeling of blankness. Like, if I stopped writing I'd be facing a big blank. I'd have nothing to do but read mystery stories. I mean, if I didn't feel compelled to do this writing, I could do whatever I wanted -- but I wouldn't find any­thing to do."

George had a "handle" word. If actually released from work, he'd get a "big blank." Because such an empty space is frightening, people who find one inside themselves often run back into work and other time-filling activities that they don't enjoy. Like Fred, the man with the knot in his stomach, they may drive them­selves so hard to avoid the blank that they make them­selves physically ill.

Focusing allows you to approach any such blank with equanimity, like anything else. For a blank is also a feel­ing. Instead of backing away from it in fear, you walk right up to it, and find out what is there.

I encouraged George to do just that. "Be with the body sense of that blank. What is its quality?" I asked.

George sat quietly, feeling around the emptiness. Then he said, "It feels like there are things I want to do, but -- I'm not allowed to see them. Like when I was a kid, my father had certain books on the top shelf of a bookcase, and I wasn't allowed to look at them."

He paused again. I didn't push him. He asked into this sense of "not allowed." After a while he drew a deep breath and let it out noisily, and I knew something else had shifted inside. "Yeah," he said, "Yeah, of course. I'm an adult now, right? I can look at anything I want to look at. Sure, I -- wait a minute.... Things are coming to me. Sure. One thing I'd do if I didn't have to work on this book -- I'd jog. I've been wanting to go jogging but whenever I feel like it, I have to go and sit at my desk instead. Yeah, and -- " He paused briefly while something else came up. "And I'd write a book about birth control! I've been wanting to do that for a long time. There's a point about birth control that no­body has ever brought out before, a really crucial point. I'd love to write that book! This book I’m stuck on now, it isn't anything I'm really excited about. But I can fin­ish it too, I bet, if I let myself write what I want. This birth-control book -- ah, that would be great!" He paused for a long time. Then:

"Wow, yes, now this finishing this book is OK too. Yes, it feels all right. The point wasn't to finish the book, it was not to have to finish it. Under that have-to-but-can't feeling was all my good energy, all locked up. That's what I figured, all right, but I couldn't shift it. My whole life was under there, seems like. Letting myself have forbidden urges, yes, I see. To be free to stop, that's like being free to follow urges, and that's like being free to do what I want, which is to write. But free to write from out of my direct urge and en­ergy. Well, I knew that all the time, but now I've got it."

George was analyzing now -- in effect creating an in­tellectual rationalization to explain what his body had already solved. The analysis wasn't necessary. But in­tellectuals like to figure things out, and, done in retro­spect, that's all right. What was important was that his body took its own steps first. Before these steps, his analysis wasn't effective.

Three. What the Body Knows.

The stories in the previous chapter illustrate the two main discoveries on which this book is based:

First, that there is a kind of bodily awareness that profoundly influences our lives and that can help us reach personal goals. So little attention has been paid to this mode of awareness that there are no ready-made words to describe it, and I have had to coin my own term: felt sense.

And second, that a felt sense will shift if you ap­proach it in the right way. It will change even as you are making contact with it. When your felt sense of a situation changes, you change -- and, therefore, so does your life.

Let's study these two propositions in more detail.

First, I want to be sure you understand what a felt sense is.

A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. Physical. A bodily awareness of a situation or per­son or event. An internal aura that encompasses every­thing you feel and know about the given subject at a given time -- encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail. Think of it as a taste, if you like, or a great musical chord that makes you feel a powerful impact, a big round unclear feeling.

A felt sense doesn't come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a sin­gle (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling.

Since a felt sense doesn't communicate itself in words, it isn't easy to describe in words. It is an unfamiliar, deep-down level of awareness that psychotherapists (along with almost everybody else) have usually not found.

Let me illustrate. Think of two people who play a major role in your life. Any two people. I'll call them John and Helen in this discussion, but substitute the names of your own people.

Let your mind slide back and forth between these two people. Notice the inner aura that seems to come into existence when you let your attention dwell on John, the sense of "all about John." Notice the entirely differ­ent aura of Helen.

The inner aura as you think of each person isn't made up of discrete bits of data that you consciously add to­gether in your mind. In thinking of Helen, you don't laboriously list all her physical and personal traits one by one. You don't think, "Oh yes, Helen: she's 5'6" tall, has blond hair and brown eyes and a small mole next to her ear, talks in a high voice, gets upset easily, wants to be a playwright, likes Chinese food, needs to lose weight...." Nor do you list each detail of your relationship with her.

There are undoubtedly millions of such bits of data that describe Helen as you know her, but these millions of bits aren't delivered to you one by one, as thoughts. Instead, they are given to you all at once, as bodily felt. ! The sense of "all about Helen" -- including every one of those thousands of bits of data that you have seen, felt, lived, and stored over the years -- comes to you all at once, as a single great aura sensed in your body.

The sense of "all about John" comes to you in the same way. It is a huge file of data: what John looks like, how he speaks, how you and he first met, what you need from him, what he said yesterday, and what you said in return. The amount of information is staggering -- yet somehow, when you think of John, all the relevant facts and feelings come to you at once.

Where are all those thousands of items of information stored? Not in your mind, but in your body. The body is a biological computer[1], generating these enormous collections of data and delivering them to you instanta­neously when you call them up or when they are called up by some external event. Your thinking isn't capable of holding all those items of knowledge, nor of deliver­ing them with such speed. It would take all the remain­ing years of your life to list all the details you know about Helen and your relationships to her. Your body, however, delivers "all about Helen" in one great, rich, complex experience of recognition, one whole felt sense.

To illustrate the point further, think of your own re­actions when you talk with Helen, and then when you talk with John. You change inside -- correct? You can sense the difference within you. If you are talking pri­vately with Helen and then John unexpectedly walks into the room, you can feel yourself becoming different. Your felt sense of John is now here too, as well as your felt sense of Helen.

These changes inside you are not brought on by thinking. You don't think, "Oh yes, this is Helen: with her I've got to behave in such-and-such a way." Little thinking is involved. Ask yourself, "Why am I this way with Helen and that way with John?" The answers are not in your mind. Only your body knows.

Notice that a felt sense is not an emotion. It has emo­tional components in it, along with factual components. But it is bigger than any single emotion, more complex -- and much less easy to describe in words.

For example, your felt sense of Helen probably in­cludes a large number of emotions that you have felt at various times when with her. Perhaps some such emo­tion is dominant in your relationship at this very hour. The dominant emotion right now, let's say, is anger. You and she quarreled bitterly last night, and now the first word that comes to mind when you think of her is "anger." Yet that emotion is not the felt sense—is not "all about Helen."

An emotion is often sharp and clearly felt, and often comes with a handy label by which you can describe it: "anger," "fear," "love," and so on. A felt sense, being larger and more complicated, is almost always unclear -- at least until you focus on it -- and almost never comes with a convenient label.

To illustrate, let's suppose there is some difficulty in your relationship to John. Asked to describe this dif­ficulty, you might say: "I'm tense when I'm with him. When I'm with Helen, I feel as if my 'natural' self is safe and free, but when I'm with John, I am uncom­fortable, tense."

This tension arises somewhere in "all about John." People who don't know about focusing are likely to be aware only of the tension, over and over. They never consult their felt sense of "all about John," or perhaps a little less broadly, "all about this odd feeling I get with John." The word "tense" might be the best one-word description of the feeling, but "tense" is only the tip of the iceberg. "Tense" might be the dominant emotion at a given moment, but below it and behind it lies some­thing huge and vague.

You can feel that huge, vague something with your body, but you can't touch it with your mind -- your mind protests, "I don't want to be struck dumb every time I'm with John! I want to be relaxed, bright, natural. Why can't I be? Why?" But there are no answers in your mind. If your mind knew the answers or had control of the situation, presumably you could surmount the dif­ficulty through rational processes and an effort of will. You could think your way to a resolution of the problem. But this is patently impossible. No matter how your mind protests, no matter how hard you think, the same tension makes itself felt inside you whenever you are with John. This tension is generated by your body, reacting to John's presence. The reaction bypasses your thinking mind almost entirely. But when you let the felt sense form, then you can work with more than you can understand. If you attend to the felt sense through cer­tain steps I will show you, it will shift.

That is precisely what this book is about. It is neces­sary to approach our felt senses by an entirely different route -- that special through-the-body route that I call focusing. By approaching them that way, we can let a felt sense form and change.

Much of what has passed for emotional guidance and psychotherapy in our past has been futile. Counselors tried to make us analyze our feelings rationally, or "face" them over and over.

Let's look again at that hypothetical difficulty in your relationships with John, and let's look at some of the most common ways of approaching such a problem. (All the common approaches are, unfortunately, futile.)

Belittling the problem. You try to convince yourself that the problem doesn't exist or is too trivial to worry about. "It doesn't matter," you tell yourself. "It's noth­ing. I shouldn't let such silly little things bother me."

Does this change anything? No. The next time you meet John, the "trivial" problem is exactly as big as it always was.

Analyzing. "It must be that John reminds me of my father," you conclude solemnly. "I was always intimi­dated by my father. He was so sure of himself. So is John. Sure, sure, that must be it"

The analysis may or may not be correct. But it does nothing to change the feeling. You can analyze furious­ly the whole time you are with John, but if that feeling is there in your gut with its inexplicable discomforts and tensions, the relationship will not be eased any more than it was last time.

"Facing down" the feeling. "I'll just grit my teeth, stand up to it, and walk through it, "you tell yourself hopefully. "I'll ignore it. I won't let it get me!"

But it doesn't help, does it? If something gets you, it will go on getting you until some fundamental change takes place.

Lecturing yourself. "Now see here," you tell yourself sternly, "it's time you pulled yourself together and stopped all this nonsense. You're supposed to be an adult, right? So act like one! There's no reason in the world why John should make you feel uncomfort­able"

No. That doesn't work either.

Drowning in the feeling You sink into the emotion, hoping that this time just feeling it again will change it. "Yeah, that was a bad time when he started talking about my sex life. I just sat there like a dummy. I am stupid. Wow, that is awful! I feel like a squashed bug...." Whenever you sink into this unchanged feel­ing, it makes you feel as bad as last time.

These approaches cannot work because they don't touch and change the place out of which the discomfort arises. It exists in the body. It is physical. If you want to change it, you must introduce a process of change that is also physical. That process is focusing.

Part Two of this book devotes itself to the job of teaching you how to focus. I won't start teaching it here. For now, I just want to finish describing the char­acteristics of a felt sense.

The most exciting characteristic of all is the fact that a felt sense, when you focus on it well, has the power to change.

You can actually feel this change happening in your body. It is a well-defined physical sensation of some­thing moving or shifting. It is invariably a pleasant sensation: a feeling of something coming unstuck or uncramped.

I can best describe it to you by starting with a familiar human experience: the odd feeling of knowing you have forgotten something but not knowing what it is. Undoubtedly it has happened to you more than once. You are about to take a plane trip, let's say, to visit family or friends. You board the airplane with a small, insistent thought nagging you: you have forgotten some­thing. The plane takes off. You stare out the window, going through various things in your mind, seeking that elusive little piece of knowledge. What did I forget? What was it?

You are troubled by the felt sense of some unresolved situation, something left undone, something left be­hind. Notice that you don't have factual data. You have an inner aura, an internal taste. Your body knows but you don't.

Maybe you try to argue it away, try to squash it in­tellectually or rise above it -- the method of belittling it. You tell yourself: no, I won't let this bother me and spoil my trip.

Of course, that doesn't work. The feeling is still there.

You sigh and rummage in your mind again. You find a possibility. "Helen's party! I forgot to tell Helen I can't come to her party!"

This idea doesn't satisfy the feeling. It is perfectly true that you forgot to tell Helen you would miss her party, but your body knows it isn't this that has been nagging you all morning. You still don't know what you forgot, and you still feel that wordless discomfort. Your body knows you have forgotten something else, and it knows what that something is. That is how you can tell it isn't Helen's party.

At some moments the felt sense of what it is gets so vague that it almost disappears, but at other moments it comes in so strongly that you feel you almost know. Then suddenly, from this felt sense, it bursts to the surface. The snapshots! I forgot to pack the pictures I was going to show Charlie!

You have hit it, and the act of hitting it gives you a sense of sudden physical relief. Somewhere in your body, something releases, some tight thing lets go. You feel it all through you: Whew!

It feels good. You may feel bad about the pictures but the step feels good. This is one of the key character­istics of a shift in a felt sense: it always has that easing and sometimes very beautiful sensation of bodily re­lease. It feels like exhaling after holding your breath. You can feel the tension draining out of your body.

There are no words in the language to describe the felt sense and its physical shifts. Therefore, I must give a name to that feeling of coming unstuck inside. I call it the body shift.

Not everybody feels the shift taking place specifically in the belly. It may seem to happen all over the body, or it might feel like a loosening in the chest, or it might be a relaxation of a tight throat. I call it body shift main­ly to suggest that it doesn't happen in the mind. It is always, in some way, a physical sensation. You often can see it and hear it when it happens in somebody else. There may be a long audible sigh of relief, a sudden loosening of some tight facial grimace, a quick, com­fortable relaxing in the posture.

That is what it is like to get a shift in a felt sense. The example I've used -- forgetting something on a trip» -- is trivial, of course. But undoubtedly there are problems in your life that you don't consider trivial. Stuck places inside you that spoil parts of your life, ways in which you feel trapped and helpless. In all these cases, exactly as with those forgotten snapshots, your body knows much that you don't know, much that you cannot possibly figure out.

Nobody can figure out, intellectually, all the details of a personal problem. No therapist can. You can't -- neither for someone else nor for yourself. The details are in your body. The way to find them is through focus­ing.

When you do, as we've seen, a physically felt shift occurs. Why does it occur? Where does that odd feel­ing of release come from?

It comes from two sources:

First, the once-hidden knowledge is now available to your conscious mind. You may be able to use it in some rational plan of action for resolving the problem. This can certainly lead to a feeling of relief: "Yes, of course! That's where the hang-up is.... That's the di­rection I need to go!"

The second source of that "uncramping" feeling is more important. Even if you can't make immediate or direct use of the once-hidden knowledge, the body shift makes your whole body different.

Consider those snapshots again. The once-obscured fact -- “I forgot the snapshots” -- was not the kind of fact that could be put to immediate use in a rational plan of action. The fact came to you aboard an airplane. There was nothing you could do with it. Despite this, your felt sense of your trip was now changed. You were changed.

And so it is with more important personal problems.

You can feel the change happening inside you.

Part two. FOCUSING.

 

Four. The Focusing Manual

The time has come for you to learn focusing.

The inner act of focusing can be broken down into six main sub-acts or movements. As you gain more prac­tice, you won't need to think of these as six separate parts of the process. To think of them as separate move­ments makes the process seem more mechanical than it is -- or will be, for you, later. I have subdivided the process in this way because I've learned from years of experimenting that this is an effective way to teach focusing to people who have never tried it before.

Think of this chapter as only the basic manual. As the book progresses we will add to these basic instruc­tions, clarify them, approach them from other angles. Eventually -- perhaps not the first time you go through it -- you will have the experience of something shifting inside.

I'll start by giving you the focusing instructions in brief form, manual style. In the next chapter we will go through the six movements in a more detailed way, stopping to explain and elaborate.

FOCUSING MANUAL

1. Clearing a space. What I will ask you to do will be silent, just to yourself. Take a moment just to relax       All right—now, inside you, I would like you to pay attention inwardly, in your body, perhaps in your stomach or chest. Now see what comes there when you ask, "How is my life going? What is the main thing for me right now?" Sense within your body. Let the answers come slowly from this sensing. When some concern comes, DO NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back, say "Yes, that's there. I can feel that, there." Let there be a little space between you and that. Then ask what else you feel. Wait again, and sense. Usually there are several things.

2. Felt sense. From among what came, select one personal problem to focus on. DO NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back from it.

Of course, there are many parts to that one thing you are thinking about—too many to think of each one alone. But you can feel all of these things together. Pay attention there where you usually feel things, and in there you can get a sense of what all of the problem feels like. Let yourself feel the unclear sense of all of that.

3. Handle. What is the quality of this unclear felt sense? Let a word, a phrase, or an image come up from the felt sense itself. It might be a quality-word, like tight, sticky, scary, stuck, heavy, jumpy, or a phrase, or an image. Stay with the quality of the felt sense till something fits it just right.

4. Resonating. Go back and forth between the felt sense and the word (phrase, or image). Check how they resonate with each other. See if there is a little bodily signal that lets you know there is a fit. To do it, you have to have the felt sense there again, as well as the word.

Let the felt sense change, if it does, and also the word or picture, until they feel just right in capturing the quality of the felt sense.

5. Asking. Now ask: What is it, about this whole problem, that makes this quality (which you have just named or pictured)?

Make sure the quality is sensed again, freshly, vivid­ly (not just remembered from before). When it is here again, tap it, touch it, be with it, asking, "What makes the whole problem so ____?" Or you ask, "What is in this sense?"

If you get a quick answer without a shift in the felt sense, just let that kind of answer go by. Return your attention to your body and freshly find the felt sense again. Then ask it again.

Be with the felt sense till something comes along with a shift, a slight "give" or release.

6. Receiving. Receive whatever comes with a shift in a friendly way. Stay with it a while, even if it is only a slight release. Whatever comes, this is only one shift; there will be others. You will probably con­tinue after a little while, but stay here for a few mo­ments.

IF DURING THESE INSTRUCTIONS SOME­WHERE YOU HAVE SPENT A LITTLE WHILE SENSING AND TOUCHING AN UNCLEAR HOLISTIC BODY SENSE OF THIS PROBLEM, THEN YOU HAVE FOCUSED. It doesn't matter whether the body-shift came or not. It comes on its own. We don't control that.

THE STORY OF A "TRIVIAL PROBLEM"

Let's see the focusing movements in operation.

The woman who reported this experience is in her late twenties. I will call her Peggy. She and her hus­band -- call him John -- live in a suburb. He works for a bank, where he has a real chance to become an execu­tive. Peggy works part time as a teacher at the junior high school. The part-time status is necessary because she has to care for a five-year-old son.

One evening, John came home jubilant. The bank president had told him quite plainly that the bank had some expansion plans and that he, John, was consid­ered a key element in those plans. In his excitement while telling Peggy of this, John knocked a dish off the kitchen table and broke it. It was her best china. Peggy flew into a sudden rage, ran upstairs in tears, and re­fused to cook dinner.

She was surprised and upset by her own outburst. Stormy scenes were not usual for her.

She sat alone in the bedroom and tried to patch her­self up inside, using all those familiar approaches that we all use and that seldom work. At first she tried to dismiss the problem as "trivial," as though hoping she could belittle it out of existence. "So he broke an ex­pensive dish," she told herself angrily. "Am I so dumb that I can be upset by that? The damned dish isn't all that important in my life. It's replaceable anyway...."

That didn't work. The upset feeling refused to let itself be thought to extinction. Peggy next tried figuring it out. "Well, I've been under a lot of strain the past few days," she told herself. "I let the school work pile up on me, had to stay up late grading all those papers. Haven't had enough sleep.... Sure, that must be it. No wonder I'm edgy."

No results. What Peggy told herself might have been true, but nothing changed inside. The angry, irritated feeling stayed right where it was.

Finally she decided to try focusing. She had practiced it for several years and was very good at it -- was, in a sense, "fluent" in it as one might be fluent in a familiar language. She didn't work her way through the six focusing movements one by one, as a beginner must do, but flowed through them in a single continuous move­ment. In recreating her experience here, however, I will flag the various movements so that you can see how she got from place to place.

Preparation. She began by getting as comfortable as possible, removing all unnecessary physical irritations that might have masked what her body wanted to tell her. She washed her face because it felt hot and itchy after crying. She took off her shoes, propped a pillow against the headboard of the bed, and leaned back against it.

First Movement: Making a space. She stacked all her problems to one side, as though making a space for herself in a jumbled storage room. "Why don't I feel terrific right now? Well, there's that big pile of dog­-eared school papers I still have to finish. And there's that problem about Jeff getting sent home from kinder­garten. And of course there's this lousy new thing about the broken dish".

She pushed all these problems a little distance away from her. She knew she couldn't make them go away. But she also knew, being a practiced focuser, that she could give herself a quiet time away from them.

Second Movement: The felt sense. Now she let her attention go to the problem that, at that moment, seemed to be the worst: the stormy scene involving that broken dish. She deliberately avoided trying to decide anything about it, trying to analyze it, figure it out. She simply groped for the felt sense of it.

She asked, "What does all that feel like?" And then she let the unclear sense come to her in its own way -- large, vague, formless at first, lacking words to describe it, lacking labels or identifying marks of any kind.

She wasn't impatient with this formlessness. She didn't demand that it identify itself. Nor did she try to force identification upon it: "Oh yes, of course, this odd feeling must be ___". She simply let it exist in its own way for an appreciable time, perhaps half a min­ute.

Third Movement: Finding a handle. Now, very gently, she asked what the quality of the felt sense was. She tried to let the felt sense name itself, or to let an image come and fit it.

Again she avoided analysis, avoided self-lectures, avoided assumptions and deductions. She wanted the answer to float up from the feeling itself, not from the confused clutter of material in her mind.

In the third movement a word, phrase, or image -- if it fits exactly -- provides a "handle" on the felt sense. One can then often feel the first shift, the first bit of in­ternal movement (sometimes just a twinge of move­ment) that says this is right.

As often happens, she went through the focusing movements almost simultaneously here. She got a word (third movement), checked it (fourth), and asked the felt sense what it was (fifth).

Using more words than she herself did, I would put it like this. She had asked: "What is the worst of this?" The feeling came back: "Anger at John." A further question: "Over the broken dish?" The wordless reply: "No. The dish has hardly anything to do with it. The anger is over his air of jubilation, the way he radiates confidence about his future."

Thus did the problem change. The inner shift was unmistakable.

She received this fully and sensed it over and over, feeling the change going on in her body. When her body had finished changing, she went on.

A shift like this can come at any time in focusing. You receive it and continue another round of focusing.

Again she got the felt sense, now the changed way the whole problem was in her body at this moment. "His jubilation... what now is the whole sense of that?"

She waited. She did not try to force words onto the felt sense. She sat patiently and let the felt sense speak for itself (a second movement, again).

She tried to sense its quality, the fuzzy discomfort of the whole thing, and to get a "handle" on that quality (third movement again).

A word came: "Jealous."

Fourth Movement: Resonating. She took the word "jealous" and checked it against the felt sense. "Jealous, is that the right word? Is that what this sense is?" The felt sense and the word apparently were a close match, but not a perfect one. It seemed that the felt sense said, "This isn't exactly jealousy. There's jealousy in it some­where, but...."

She tried "sort-of-jealous" and got a tiny movement and the breath that let her know that was right enough, as a handle on the felt sense. She did it again, and... yes.

Fifth Movement: Asking. Now she asked the felt sense itself: "What is this sort-of-jealous? What about the whole problem makes this sort-of-jealous?"

She let the question reach the unclear felt sense, and it stirred slightly. "What is that?" she asked, almost wordlessly.

And then, abruptly, the shift came. "Sort-of-jealous ... uh... it's more liке... a feeling of being left be­ hind."

"Ah!" That "ah!" came with a large, satisfying sense of movement. Peggy's body was telling her that she was unhappy over the fact that her own career was stalled.

Sixth Movement: Receiving. As she tried to stay with the relief of this shift, she had to protect it from voices that soon attacked her. "You shouldn't feel that way." "You're lucky to have the teaching job." And also, "How will you ever get your career moving?" "You know there's nothing you can do about it."

Peggy shoved all those voices over to one side. "That all has to wait," she said. And she came back to sensing the new opening. "Being left behind ... can I still feel that?... Oh yes. There it is again, yes... that's right ... that is how I feel."

GOING ANOTHER ROUND

But this quality -- the feeling of being left behind -- was only the tip of the iceberg. Peggy wanted to see if it could lead to more change and movement.

And so she went back through the cycle of focusing movements again. "What is this left-behind feeling? What's really in it for me? What's the worst of it?"

This focusing session lasted for perhaps twenty min­utes. When it was over, Peggy felt enormously refreshed. The shape of her problem had changed, and so she had changed. She and John then talked calmly about their lives and their futures.

The broken dish was forgotten. That one focusing session had not made Peggy's career-versus-motherhood problem vanish, but it had started a series of beneficial changes inside her. Further sessions told her more about herself and helped her to move from where she was stuck.

PREPARATION

Find a time and a place to sit quietly for a while. If you want a friend to sit with you, that is fine and may actual­ly help. But the friend must be content simply to listen quietly, must not expect you to speak if you don't feel like it, and must offer no analyses or assessments if you do choose to say what's inside you. Total silence is fine, and it is also all right for the friend to use words such as "Yes, I hear... I understand." But at this early stage, the friend must not say anything else.

It is a good idea to sit in some location that is at least slightly unfamiliar. That is, don't try to focus while sit­ting at the desk where you work, nor while sitting in your favorite armchair. Sit in another chair, or on the edge of your bed. Or, if you prefer, go out and walk or lean against a tree.

Try to find a sense of general physical comfort, if not total well-being. (That, with luck, will come later.) If small physical irritations are plaguing you, they will obscure other things your body is trying to tell you. If you are cold, put on a sweater. If your foot itches, take off your shoe and scratch. Settle back and mentally relax.

FIFTH MOVEMENT: ASKING

If a big shift, an opening, and a bodily release have already come during the earlier movements, you go right to the sixth movement, receiving what has come along with the shift.

For example, you might have gotten such a shift and change in the problem already, when you sat quietly with the felt sense, sensing its crux and its quality. Or it might have come along with a handle word or image. It might have come while you resonated the handle with the felt sense.

But more usually a well-fitting handle gives you a little tiny bit of a shift, just enough to know it is quite right. You feel its rightness several times over (resonat­ing), until there has been all the bodily effect that this rightness can make. Now you need a shift, and there has not yet been one -- at least not the kind that changes the problem.

Now comes the fifth movement, asking.

In this movement you ask the felt sense, directly, what it is. Usually this consists of spending some time (a minute or so, which seems very long) staying with the unclear felt sense, or returning to it again and again. The handle helps one do this.

You use the handle to help you to make the felt sense vividly present again and again. It isn't enough to re­member how you just felt it moments ago. It needs to be right here, otherwise you can't ask it. If you lose hold of it, present the handle to yourself and ask, "Is this still here?" After a few seconds it is there again (as before, or slightly changed).

Now you can ask it what it is.

For example, if your handle was "jumpy," say "jumpy" to yourself till the felt sense is vividly back, then ask it: "What is it about this whole problem that makes me so jumpy?"

If you hear a lot of fast answers in your head, just let that go by and then ask again. What comes swiftly is old information from your mind. At first the question to the felt sense may not get down to it, but the second or third time you ask, it will. The felt sense itself will stir, in answer, and from this stirring an answer will emerge.

You can tell the difference between the merely men­tal answers and those from the felt sense. The mental answers come very fast, and they are rapid trains of thought. The mind rushes in and leaves no space for you to contact the felt sense directly. You can let all that go by, and then recontact the felt sense, using the handle again. When the felt sense is back, you ask it.

One of the most important procedures in focusing is this asking of "open questions." You ask a question, but then you deliberately refrain from trying to answer it through any conscious thinking process.

People usually think they know the answers to such questions, or they decide what the answer should be. They ask themselves closed questions—in effect, rhetor­ical questions that they themselves answer immediately. Don't do that to your felt sense. Asking a felt sense is very much like asking another person a question. You ask the question, and then you wait.

There is a distinct difference between forcing words or images into a feeling and letting them flow out of it. When you force them into it, you effectively smother it and prevent it from showing its real nature. You tell it, "Oh, I already know what you are. There's no sense wasting time on you."

The words and images that flow out of a feeling, by contrast, are the kind that make a freshly felt difference. They are the kind that make you say, "Hey! Hey, yeah, that’s what it's all about!" These are the words and pictures that produce a body shift.

The body shift is mysterious in its effects. It always feels good, even when what has come to light may not make the problem look any better from a detached, ra­tional point of view.

If the felt sense does not shift and answer right away, that is all right. Spend a minute or so with it. We do not control when a shift comes. (That is "grace.") What is crucial is the time you spend sensing it (returning again and again to it). If you spent time sensing something unclear that is right there, meaningful, about this prob­lem, and you don't yet know what it is, then you are focusing.

Sometimes it helps to ask one of the following two questions; first try one, then later the other. With each you will need to make sure that the question reaches the felt sense. At first, usually, your mind will answer. Just repeat the question until the felt sense stirs.

1. "What is the worst of this?" (Or, "What is the 'jumpiest' thing about all this?" if your handle word was "jumpy.")

2. "What does the felt sense need?" (Or, "What would it take for this to feel OK?")

If you have contacted the felt sense in the usual ask­ing, and then have also asked these two questions in turn, and spent a minute or so sensing the unclear felt sense each time, it may be good to stop focusing for the moment.

Focusing is not work. It is a friendly time within your body. Approach the problem freshly later, or tomorrow.

SIXTH MOVEMENT: RECEIVING

Whatever comes in focusing, welcome it. Take the at­titude that you are glad your body spoke to you, what­ever it said. This is only one shift; it is not the last word. If you are willing to receive this message in a friendly way, there will be another. If you will go this step of change, which is next now, there will be more change, whatever is next later.

You need not believe, agree with, or do what the felt sense just now says. You need only receive it. You will soon deeply experience that once what comes with a shift is received, another shift will come. What your body then says will be quite different. So permit it to tell you now whatever it must say first.

For example, with a shift you may get something you need to do, that is, a need from deep inside you. But the first form in which it comes might be quite impossible for you. It might seem to require that you leave your spouse and children and job, and besides it might re­quire much money. It is very important to protect this first form, in which your life-direction can be sensed, even though it does not now meet these realistic ques­tions. Your body is changing, your life-direction is ap­pearing, this is only one step. Let the questions wait. You aren't going to go right out to do something wild.

Keep that new sense of what would be a right direction and don't worry now about the form it will eventually take.

Allow even a very little shift to have its full minute or so. "All right, now at least I know where the trouble is," you may find with a momentary relief. Then the critical questions want to wipe it out very quickly. "Yes, but what good is it if I can't get it to change?" "Is this real? Maybe I'm fooling myself." "What if I don't get another shift after this?" Protect the shift that just came from all these negative voices. They may be right, but they have to wait. Don't let them dump a truckload of cement on this new green shoot that just came up.

It is time enough later to find out for sure if this step on the problem is real. Right now give it a space in which to breathe. Let it develop. Sense it. Be with it.

You may want to stop focusing after this, or you may go on. But don't rush on immediately. In a minute per­haps you will.

If you decide to stop, sense that you really can leave this place and return to it later. It is very much like a place, a spot in your inner landscape. Once you know where it is and how to find it, you can leave it and come back tomorrow.

Whatever comes in focusing will never overwhelm you if you can have the attitude we call "receiving." You welcome anything that comes with a body shift, but you stay a little distance from it. You are not in it, but next to it. This space, in which you can be next to it, forms in a few moments, as your body eases. "I can't solve this all in one day," you say to yourself. "I know it's there. I can find it again. I can leave it for a while." You are neither running away nor going into it. You get a breath. You sense that there is space between it and you. You are here, it is there. You have it, you are not it.

Or you can imagine a door between it and you, if you wish one. You have your hand on the doorknob, and you can open it a little whenever you want.

Clearing a space

The felt sense

Finding a handle

Resonating

Asking

Receiving

Six. What Focusing Is Not.

One very common difficulty experienced by new focusers is a confusion over what focusing is supposed to be. Most people absorb a layman's education in psycho­therapy by the time they reach adulthood, and while this may be useful in some respects, it can also lead to faulty preconceptions.

If you start your focusing experience with any such error in your mind, you are very surely going to go off in a wrong direction. So:

CLEARING A CLUTTERED ROOM

We've already looked at this room-clearing approach. It is the one that makes me call this first movement the act of "clearing a space." You push all your problems to one side so that there is a place for you to breathe and sit in temporary comfort. To use a slightly different example, this is like...

PERMISSION TO FEEL GOOD

Some people have told me that this first movement somehow seems like escaping problems. They believe they must feel every bad feeling to the fullest at all times. If they don't, they are being cowardly. They seem to feel guilty about feeling good, even briefly. They feel it is their duty to feel bad incessantly as long as the problem is unsolved.

I tell them not to be concerned about feeling good for a little while. "You aren't escaping anything," I say. "Don't worry. While you feel good, you know that everything will stay just as bad as you know it is."

The mess will still be there and you will still have to clean it up. You aren't escaping it by taking a brief respite from it. As a matter of fact, you have done just the opposite. You have made yourself capable of han­dling it in a more effective and different way.

NOT AS A MONUMENT

Think of the first movement as a brief time when you allow yourself to stop being a monument to your troubles.

Most people harbor a feeling that they must make their bodies express their troubles constantly. We live life with our bodies. Every trouble and bad situation is like a cramp in the body. As long as the body is cramped by trouble, it already has the shape of the trouble and therefore can't cope with that trouble as a fresh, whole body. It copes with the trouble while being the trouble. Therefore focusing begins with giving your body a pause, a break, in which to let it become whole.

Most people let their bodies be cramped into the shape of what's wrong with their lives, being a monu­ment to all the things that are wrong, every moment.

But you can walk up to your poor body, standing there cramped, the monument to everything that's wrong, and say: "It's OK. We won't forget. You can rest a while. Later you can come back and stand as a monument again, but now, go take a break!"

The fear is of avoiding and forgetting. It is as if you had only two choices: either avoid or feel terrible. But there is a third choice: let the body feel whole and solid, don't become the embodiment of your troubles, just have them in front of you. You have not avoided them and yet you are not totally overwhelmed by them.

If you can do that just for a minute, you will be ready to work on the difficulties and painful feelings in a new way.

SETTING DOWN THE BURDEN

To use another analogy, your inner act in the first movement of focusing is like the act of putting down a heavy burden you have been carrying. You have walked for miles with this uncomfortable bag. Now you stop, set it down, and rest for a while. Only by first setting it down can you look at what’s in the bag.

Your body needs the rest. You load it with this bur­den every morning and, if you are like most people, give it no rest until you go to sleep. Perhaps there is a brief time when you awake on some mornings when your body is allowed to feel good. You must have had the experience. Your eyes open. You feel gloriously re­laxed and peaceful.

And then the load lands on you! You remember all the problems that were troubling you yesterday. Each morning we load ourselves with this heavy parapher­nalia and stagger through the day with it. In the first movement of focusing, you unload. Put the heavy pack down on the ground. Take the problems out one by one and line them up and look at them without carrying them.

THE COMFORTING LIST

Still another way to think about the first movement: it is like making a "things-to-do" list.

Undoubtedly you have experienced the tension of having too many things to do and too little time in which to do them. A kind of panic may arise before you go away on vacation, for example, or on a long trip. In the few days before you take off, you find your­self running around in circles.

In that state you are very likely to do that which you dread: forget something important. How can you calm yourself? By sitting down and making a list of what needs to be done.

Making the list doesn't get the jobs done, of course. What it does do is to make you feel better. It alleviates the panic, puts you into a state in which you can ap­proach the central problem in a calm, orderly way.

BODY TRUST

In seeking this first-movement state of tranquility, you will find it helps to trust in your body.

Let your body return to its natural state -- which is perfect. The body can feel completely at ease and natural every moment. Just let it.

Once your body is allowed to be itself, uncramped, it has the wisdom to deal with your problems. You will be dealing with these tense feelings and situations with a relaxed, loose body.

It is true that this little bit of good feeling -- this rest you are giving your body by stacking the troubles in front of you -- is incomplete.

But also expect, soon, when you start to work on this stack, that you will feel much better. Your body always tends in the direction of feeling better. Your body is a complex, self-maintaining system.

Often, we feel so much wrong that we come to accept those bad feelings as the basic state of things. But it is not. The bad feeling is the body knowing and pushing toward what good would be.

Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness.

The very existence of bad feelings within you is evi­dence that your body knows what is wrong and what is right. It must know what it would be like to feel perfect, or it could not evoke a sense of wrong.

Your body, with its sense of rightness, knows what would feel right. The feelings of "bad" or "wrong" inside you are, in effect, your body's measurement of the distance between "perfect" and the way it actually feels. It knows the direction. It knows this just as surely as you know which way to move a crooked picture. If the crookedness is pronounced enough for you to notice it at all, there is absolutely no chance that you will move the picture in the wrong direction and make it still more crooked while mistaking that for straight. The sense of what is wrong carries with it, inseparably, a sense of the direction toward what is right.

The moral and ethical values we think about and try to control may be relative and various, but the values by which our bodies move away from bad feelings are much more objective. Of course, the body also learns more as we develop. It does not sense every possible value already. But it senses vastly much more than we can think. The body is an incredibly fine system within nature and the cosmos. Its holistic sensing of what is prolife and what is not indicates much more than a thought or an emotion can. If we wish to add some­thing, we must sense how that can fit into what the body senses already-—its own values. We may not be able to say what these values are, without contradicting our­selves or making ungrounded assumptions, but the life process in us has its direction and this is not relative.

All the values we try to formulate are relative to the living process in us and should be measured against it.

In focusing you will often find that some words, which come with a strong sense of rightness at a given moment and give you a body shift, are later superseded by what comes at a later step. You cannot -- and should not -- trust any single set of words, any one feeling, any one body-message that comes. But you can definitely trust the whole series of steps by which your body moves to resolve and change a wrong state of being. You can trust that, even if the words and under­standing of a given step are superseded, that step was the right step to come then, at that moment, and will lead to the right next step from there.

When I use the word "body," I mean much more than the physical machine. Not only do you physically live the circumstances around you, but also those you only think of in your mind. Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people -- in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside.

When something goes wrong, the body knows it and immediately sets about the task of repairing itself. The body knows what its own right state feels like and is constantly checking and adjusting its processes to stay as close to that state as possible. It maintains its tem­perature, for instance, in a narrow range near 98Ѕ degrees. People all over the world have precisely the same body temperature, whether they live on the Equator or in the Arctic. Your temperature stays in the same range through summer and winter, in exercise or repose, for your body knows what right is and con­tinually monitors and adjusts and compensates to main­tain the proper balance.

You don't have to exercise any conscious control over this temperature-maintaining process. You trust your body to carry the process on day by day -- and you also trust it to know when something is going wrong. It always does know. When your temperature slips out of that narrow "right" range, you feel unmistakably less than good.

Medical help only ministers to the body, only helps here and there with what is always the body's own healing process. A doctor knows how to help heal a wound, but the wound heals itself. Similarly, whatever you do, sense then whether it has helped your body's healing take a step or not.

Your body knows the direction of healing and life. If you take the time to listen to it through focusing, it will give you the steps in the right direction.

A VAST SPACE

The first movement (clearing a space) can be done alone, for its own sake. If you do it very slowly, you may come to a state that seems important in its own right. Then you might leave the rest of focusing for another time.

To do the first movement in this way is more elabo­rate. You put your attention in your body, and you propose to your body that you feel totally fine and joyful about how your life is going. Then you sense what comes there, usually some discomfort about some­thing in your life. You see what that is (large or trivial doesn't matter), and you acknowledge it ("Yes, that's there"). Then you place it next to yourself, in a friendly way, as if on the floor.

Now you ask your body, "What would come, in my body, if this problem were somehow all solved?" What­ever your mind answers, you wait until you sense what comes in your body. Then you let that be for a little while.

Now you ask, "Except for this, do I feel totally fine and joyful about how my life is going?" You do the same thing with what next comes. Each time, you wait for the way your body responds to the questions.

After the five or six things that usually come in this way, there is one more: There is usually, for each per­son, a "background feeling" that is always there (for instance, "always gray," "always a little sad," "always running scared," "always trying hard"). What quality is always there, now too, and comes between you and feeling fine? Set it aside as well ("Sometime I'll see what more goes with that... not now"). Again ask, "What would come in my body, if that were also set aside?"

By this means you can sometimes come to an open­ing out, a sense of a vast space.

Under all the packages each of us carries, a different self can be discovered. You are not any of the things you have set aside. You are no content at all!

When you arrive at this wide space, you might want to stay a while and just be there. But to arrive there involved specific questions put to your body, and a wait for some specific response from your body.

THE FRIENDLY HEARING

The first movement is the time when you establish an environment of friendly feeling within yourself. You prepare to give yourself a fair hearing.

"How are you now?" you ask, gently. "What's with you right now? What's the main thing for you right now?"

And then you don't answer in words. No, you wait. Let the answer be the feelings that will come in your body.

People can always think of some long list of things that might, or ought to, trouble them. This is not the list we want. We want only to hear what is now keep­ing your body from feeling sound.

At first you might hit a blank and become impatient, because after all, you think you know. "I'm fine, except for my bad feeling, as usual, about my main relation­ship, and that other worry." But this is answering your question yourself. The body doesn't answer that quickly. It takes about thirty seconds.

Surely you would be willing to accord your body thirty seconds? And yet, oddly, most people never do.

Look at your watch and see how long thirty seconds are. This will make you aware of their surprisingly lengthy span. Take thirty seconds. Try it now.

We've noted before that most people are pretty un­friendly toward themselves most of the time. If you are like most, you have treated yourself less like a friend than like a roommate you don't like. You grumble at yourself, insult yourself, get impatient with yourself when things go wrong. You construct a model of the ideal person you wish you were, and then you condemn yourself because you are imperfect as measured against that ideal. "Oh, I'm just lazy," you insult yourself. "If I really wanted to get somewhere I'd work harder. I set up these good goals for myself and then I back off and flounder and make excuses."

And so the lecture goes. Until you have focused, you haven't sat down and asked in a quiet and friendly way what is really there. "Lazy" is only an external word, an insult. The word "lazy" says only that nothing im­portant could be involved in how you do feel. But your body knows why and how you are as you are, and some of that will turn out to be important if you will give it a friendly hearing.

Society mostly gives you the same unfriendly hearing you probably give yourself. "Shape up," the world says. Results are wanted of course, but sometimes they are wanted so quickly, so tensely that there's not a minute to see what is in the way. Yet one minute can make a vast difference. Other people often don't want to know what is really stopping us or frustrating us. "Just do it right." The inward complexity, which can stop us but can also make us better, more effective, interesting, and creative, is often not welcome. There are those con­demning words -- "lazy," "not motivated," "selfish," "self-pitying," "too sensitive," "too demanding" -- which do not really describe what is in us, but rather, dismiss what is in us. But we must look inside ourselves.

Suppose you are interviewing a rather shy person who hasn't been allowed to say much for some time, perhaps some years. You would not get impatient and yell at the person after five seconds. You would ask questions gently and then wait at least thirty seconds before concluding that the person was a hopeless idiot and also empty and incapable of speech. Nor would you reject the first thing that was said.

This doesn't mean I am demanding that you change yourself completely before you even begin focusing. I am not suggesting that you can be self-accepting and self-loving and all the things you'd like to be and per­haps are not just by reading these pages. Rather, it is an attitude you can take for this special time of focus­ing.

There is also some strong, harsh voice that interrupts loudly when one tries to listen inwardly. Sometimes it is a critical part of oneself. Sometimes, however, it is a perfectly good life energy that is impatient. "I've been in the same spot for years, now I want something to get me out." This is a perfectly justified feeling, but it too must wait. "But I've waited all my life." Sure, but now wait only these few minutes so we can hear from your internal self. Let's ask gently, "What do you feel down in there?"

It is important in the first focusing movement to establish this atmosphere of a friendly hearing. Be pre­pared to accept for a moment whatever feelings you find inside. Don't argue with them.

An unfriendly hearing is one in which certain answers or all answers are rejected before they are even fully heard. It is the kind of hearing an angry teacher gives a disruptive child. It is the kind you have probably given yourself too often:

"Well, what do you have to say for yourself? How do you explain this new mess you've gotten us into?"

"Well, I -- "

"Shut up! I'll tell you what your trouble is"

The first movement of focusing is not like that. In this movement you smile at yourself, hold out your hand to yourself. "Hello, there," you say. "How are you feeling now?" Having asked that question, you carefully avoid answering it. Let the answer come from inside, and accept it for the moment. "Lots of prob­lems." "Oh, lots of problems huh? Well, OK, let's just clear a space among them for a while, so we can sit in peace. Which problem feels the heaviest right now? That one?... Ah, that sex business, is it? What else?"

Keep your cleared space. When you begin to focus, don't be inside any of these things. Stand back, or stand next to, what you focus on. Ask: "How does that feel today, all that about sex?"

And you are into the second movement with every chance of making something shift.

WHEN WORDS GET IN THE WAY

If you have been living with a problem for a good deal of time, you have probably formed words to describe or explain the problem and you are probably stuck on those words. This happens to most people. "I know what my problem about sex is," someone might say. "I'm scared of it. Just scared. I can feel it. What else is there to say?"

Obviously nothing will shift if those words are always in the way. They are pessimistic words, denying the possibility of change. "This is the way I am," the words say. "I was built this way, or my life has made me this way. I'm stuck here."

We've talked before about the trick of letting such words go by, ignoring what we know and sensing fresh­ly to find what your body really feels. Take the feeling you have and let it broaden out into the felt sense of all that.

Another way to get this is to say to yourself, "What does it now feel like to me, to be a person who has this problem?" Immediately, you will feel something wider, which at first isn't clear. Focus on that. Or it may be immediately clear what the feeling quality of it is. It may be anger at having the problem, or urgency to solve it, or a heavy hopeless feeling, or perhaps some sense of being small and tense. To ask what it feels like, now, to be a person with this problem, helps widen the scope, so that the felt sense of the whole problem can come and then give you other specific feelings. Then focus on the main feeling quality of what comes.

Another specific aid: If words keep coming into your head, explanations and ideas and accusations and so on, keep repeating an open-ended question of your own. For example, keep repeating, "What does this whole thing feel like?" That way you control the word-making part of your mind yourself, so it can't run off with you.

But the point isn't to fight words. It is quite all right for words to flow. The point is to feel behind and be­yond them. To do this, it helps to keep repeating an open-ended question.

It is important not to stay stuck with the same old thoughts and feelings, but to widen the scope so that a different process can begin from the body's wider sense of the trouble.

RELAXING YOUR BODY

It may help to stretch and relax all the parts of your body for a few minutes, before you begin focusing. Tense your arms, hands, forearms; let them feel tight, hard, tense. Feel the tension ... slowly relax. Feel the difference. Let them feel loose, soft, relaxed. Do that with your legs, stomach, jaw, all over. Check to see if you are "holding on" anywhere, and let yourself relax.

WHEN NOTHING FEELS BODILY

"Before I could learn to focus," someone said to me, "I had first to discover how the ordinary emotions were really in my body. I used to feel fear and anxiety and excitement, of course, but I used to feel them all around me. Like they were in the air, sort of. It took me some time to realize that they were in my body, like my heart pounding, or a sinking feeling in my gut. I had to learn this first about the ordinary things everybody feels, that they were inside. Only then could I look for a felt sense inside."

If this report fits you, give yourself a week or so in which to catch yourself whenever you feel any ordinary emotion strongly. Notice what your body feels like. You will find that your body feels the emotion inside.

Test yourself now. Can you put your attention inside your stomach? If you can, you sense a distinct feeling there, perhaps warm and fuzzy, perhaps tight and tense. If you cannot get such a sensation in your stomach, then you need to work on this. Put your attention in your left big toe; wiggle it if necessary. Press it down. Now you feel the sensation in it. Now come up to your knee. This time don't move your knee, just see if you can find it from inside. Then move to your groin, and from there move up into your stomach. There you are.

This is quite new to many people, but it does not take long to learn. Most people can put their attention in their stomach or chest, and if you work at it a little, so can you.

IF YOU HAVE FEW FEELINGS

Some people find it difficult to make contact with their feelings. Nearly everybody has this difficulty at least sometimes. A friend might show you a favorite painting, for example. You look at the painting, aware that the friend expects a meaningful comment from you. But the painting arouses no response in you—or, if it does, you can't quite get in touch with those feel­ings. You stare at the painting and finally you have to say, "Well, it's -- uh -- nice."

It may seem to you that you are simply not very complicated inside, that you don't have that complexity of feeling strands that I am describing in this book. But you do have it. You are human. It is there.

We are so accustomed to the simple patterns—if someone cheats us we are mad, if someone ignores us we are hurt—that many people don't look beneath these simple patterns to their own unique complexity. But it is there. When at first I might ask how you feel about being ignored, you might say, "Bad ... how would you feel?" This would indicate that all people would feel "bad" or "hurt" when they are ignored, and indeed that is true. But just how and where it gets me is not the same as just how and where it gets you. This "just how and where" is beneath the simple feeling that is patterned and universal. To make touch with that could take a little time.

You have to say to yourself, "Yes ... that's right... I feel hurt, and that's natural, yes, of course I know why. They ignored me. Sure, that's it, but... let me sense all that which is involved for me in this. It has to do with all-about-that person and all-about-me-with-that person, and all-about-what-it-means-to-me-to-get-ignored-anyway." Soon you will feel that mass of things not yet clearly known. Then you can focus on that felt sense and then on its crux.

If you find it hard to get in touch with your more complex feelings, there are several things you can do. It may be just a question of practice. Some people check their own feelings regularly, day by day, hour by hour, but perhaps you have never done this. Try it for the next few days. Identify feelings as they go by. As you interact with others and go through your daily life, stop inwardly once in a while and ask in a friendly way, "How am I now? What am I feeling now?" Don't tell yourself the answer. Wait. See what comes.

It feels good to do this, as long as you receive what you find inside. Don't say bad things to yourself and insult yourself over what you find. Just be pleased that you have found it, that it is clearly felt. Come to know your inside space.

If someone is often with you, it may help you make contact with your feelings if you ask that person to tell you when you clearly display a specific feeling. "You look angry," the person might say. Or, "I can see you're happy now." Other people will often be right in guessing that you have a feeling—though they are not likely to be right in guessing what that feeling really is. When your friend says you have a feeling look, be grateful, but don't take the friend's word as to what the feeling might be. Check inside. Your friend's assessment, "You look angry," may be quite wrong. You may find, instead, that you feel upset, worried, annoyed, impatient, disappointed, apprehensive, or per­haps some odd way that has no name. Go further into sensing what is in it.

If it has no name, that may be the best result of all. When you casually apply one of those well-worn unit-labels to a feeling -- angry, scared, bored -- the tendency is to think you now know everything there is to know about that feeling. You have given it its unit-label, you have identified it, and that's that. But there is always much, much more to know, for there is an infinity of possible ways to feel any labeled feeling such as anger. My "angry" right now sticks up from a different mass of things from another "angry" I will feel in a different situation tomorrow or next week. That is why you need not stop with feelings that seem to come with ready-made labels. Welcome especially those that come with­out names. When a feeling has no name, pause, listen, and let fresh words flow from it: "I feel... like I ought to be able to do something about this, but... I'm walled in, or something."

IF YOU AVOID YOUR FEELINGS

Some people, including psychologists, think that there are scary things inside themselves. This is fallacious.

Nameless horrors and weird states are not lying there "inside" you, like poisonous snakes locked in a cage. Many people talk of themselves this way. "I don't want to open the lid," they say. "I don't want to let all that bad stuff come out."

The truth is that you are not a cage full of snakes. You are not any kind of container in which feelings writhe around with lives of their own. You are a pro­cess, and your feelings are a part of that process.

For example, there is the way I felt with my father when he wouldn't listen to me, a feeling of helpless anger. Isn't that the same feeling I had then, have now, and can have whenever I bring it back to myself? Yes, but I am never just this feeling. I am a whole body. Therefore this feeling that I call "helpless anger" comes along with a thousand other things. Each time this feeling comes back to me it has a different totality with it.

When, in focusing, I ask my body to let me have more of what's in that whole feeling, the very way I approach myself changes the totality. The good-feeling focusing process itself changes much of the surround­ings in which this feeling is now produced. My memory of my boyhood feeling won't change, but the way my whole body produces the feeling will be different. And that is one way to understand why focusing allows the body to change what has long been stuck and unchang­ing in us.

This means that we need not be scared of what is in us -- for there are no things in us. Rather, our feelings are newly produced each moment.

DELIBERATE LETTING-GO

In the spectrum of people's attitudes toward their feelings, there are two opposite extremes that don't often produce useful results. One is the attitude of strict control: trying to make the head dominate the body, insisting that you won't give in to this or be stopped by that. The other extreme is that of never wanting to direct or control feelings, as if anything seems artificial except floating, letting images roam, letting feelings come and go.

Either extreme can prevent you from getting a body shift. Focusing is a deliberate, controlled process up to a certain point, and then there is an equally de­liberate relaxation of control, a letting go, a dropping of the reins.

The very word "focusing" suggests that you are try­ing to make sharp what is at first vague. You grope down into a felt sense and you control the process to prevent yourself from drifting. "I want to know about this feeling, not any others right now," you tell yourself. "What's this feeling about? What's in it, what's under­neath it?" If you do find yourself drifting, rein yourself back in: "Where was I just then? Ah... yes. I was at that stuff about guilt, or whatever it is. What is all that about? ..."

Once you have made contact with a felt sense clearly and strongly, you drop the reins. Don't try to control what comes from it. Let what comes from the felt sense come: words, pictures, physical sensations, as long as it is from this felt sense.

The process might be called "deliberate letting-go."

SOME TRIGGERING QUESTIONS

When you have made contact with a felt sense but can't make it move, the problem may be only that you haven't yet asked yourself the right open-ended ques­tion. Sometimes feelings will respond to a question that is phrased in a certain way, but not to virtually the same question phrased another way. A question that makes things shift inside me one time might have no effect at another time. Thus it may help you to experi­ment with various phrasings until you find one or a few that work for you.

Listed below are the questions that seem to work most often in most people.

"What is this, really?" That is basically what you are trying to get at, but the question as phrased may be too general, too vague. These questions are more specific.

"What is the crux of this?"

"What is the worst of it?" Or "What are the two or three things about it that trouble me the most?"

"What is at the center of it?"

"What is under this? What is doing it?"

"What needs to happen for me with this?"

"What would it take to feel better?"

Notice that there are two basic kinds of questions: the kind that asks what's wrong, and the kind that asks what would be right. Another way to say it: we can ask into what the problem has been, or we can ask about what needs to happen and hasn't yet.

It is very important to ask the forward type of ques­tion sometimes.

For example, suppose you often feel lonely and iso­lated. When you focus, that feeling often comes. It is quite right to focus on what the whole felt sense is that goes with "isolated." You may find in what way you isolate yourself, or what quite different things this is really about. But it will be important at some point also to ask the felt sense: "What would it take not to feel this way?" or some question of that type.

Look for the life-steps forward, and not only at what the trouble has been.

USING IMAGERY

Another way to get a body shift when you are stuck is to let an image form. Many people have vivid imagery and many don't. But anyone can form an everyday image, even with open eyes. Try it: Imagine now the room where you sleep, and where your bed is. How do you get to the door from the bed? You can conjure a visual image of that even as you are reading.

In that same inner space, you can ask for an image of a feeling to form. Wait till it pops in. The image will express a felt sense. You might see a forest, for in­stance, a figure, a storm, a wall, yourself min­ing.

When you have the image, then see how this image makes you feel. Often just having the image will shift something. Whether it does or not, ask yourself, "What does this image now make me feel?" It will probably give you a step.

CHECKING

Make it a "place" you can leave and come back to. A painful place may not shift immediately. You may have to check in with its felt edge, a number of times during the rest of the day, and perhaps for several days. Do it briefly and gently: "Can I still feel that whole thing?... Ah, there it is. Anything new? ... Ah, still the same. OK." This takes only a minute. Eventually you will find a step or shift there.

DON'T SAY. "IT MUST BE ..."

I want to warn you once more against analyzing, inferring, "figuring out." This can prevent anything from shifting. We all think we know much about our problems. We push our bodies around a great deal, try to force ourselves in this direction and that, guided by a Sunday school list of admired traits or by various social groups' lists of what are accepted as worthy goals. We don't listen to our bodies enough, and this failing can crop up even in the midst of focusing.

You might form a global felt sense of a problem, then grope for its crux and find it and feel good for a second or two. But then the old analyzing habit can take over. "Oh, sure, I know what this is about," you hear yourself say. "It must be ..."

Whenever you hear phrases like "it must be," turn them off. You are only doing what most people do throughout their lives: trying to tell yourself what is wrong. Remember the importance of an "asking" rather than a "telling" internal attitude. Tell yourself nothing. Ask, wait, and let your body reply.

Your effectiveness in focusing, and the rewards it gives you, will improve with practice. In time, you won't need to think consciously about any of these trouble­shooting rules. Nor, as I've said, will you need to think of the focusing process as a six-step exercise. It will be­come an easy and natural act, like walking.

And it will become a part of your everyday life, if you let it. You will find yourself using it not only in times of stress but as a help in solving all life's prob­lems. Learn to trust your body's guidance.

 

Twelwe. New Relationships.

People find richness in each other as they open up in focusing and listening.

As a result, relationships grow fuller and more solid. An appreciative climate develops. In each person a striving for rightness is sensed and respected.

Focusing can help free stuck relationships -- even those that have been stuck for a long time. Consider, for in­stance, the case of Ken and Ed, two professors at my university. They had an argument almost twenty years ago. It didn't get resolved. Ever since, they have avoided each other except at official meetings. They are often both involved in decisions that matter to them. They cannot avoid talking to each other. Their relationship is not bitter, only stuck. They don't do anything de­liberately to trouble each other, but nothing helpful ei­ther.

A few years ago I was involved in one of their de­cisions. I sat in Ken's office as he pondered the decision. He knew what he wanted, but he also guessed that Ed would have complicated feelings about it, probably in opposition. Ken needed Ed's support. At least he needed Ed not to oppose actively. Ken decided to ap­proach Ed directly. But how did he do it? Ken decided to approach Ed on the phone to talk about it, even though Ed was in the same building. Nothing much changed, of course.

These two do not know about focusing and listening. They think they know each other, and of course, in a sense they do. They have observed each other for twenty years. Each predicts correctly what the other will do in a given situation. But they don't know that a shift could happen if they focused and listened to each other. They don't sense the richness that lies just beneath the dis­agreeable traits each knows in the other. They don't know there can be movement in such stuck places.

The usual thing to say to them would not be useful. "Why don't the two of you just talk it over?" That would only result in more bad feelings. Each would probably begin by saying what's wrong with the other. If they did, they would only justify their opinions of each other and also justify their general view that peo­ple are what they are and stay that way.

But in a real focusing-listening process both could change. The change needed in each one isn't drastic: only a change in how each feels about the other.

Ken, underneath those traits and habits that bother Ed, is different from what either man suspects without focusing. If that rich human texture could emerge, both would feel differently.

In arguments both people endlessly repeat their po­sitions, over and over. It saves a lot of time if you re­state the other's position: "I don't agree but let me see if I know what you're saying. Your point is "This permits the other person to stop repeating, and to listen to you, or to focus and see what else he feels.

Or let's take an example from a closer relationship. She wants the freedom to have more than one lover. He is jealous and anxious. They have been stuck there for some time.

Their interaction has repeatedly gone something like this: whenever she felt comfortable with him, she would express her love for him but also mention her need to go out with others. He would question her. Go out with whom? When? How often? She would lock herself into silence and resentfulness. Then they would be stuck.

His "knowing" her went this far: he sensed that she then felt withdrawn, but he didn't understand why.

Her "knowing" him was in terms of his possessiveness. She saw him as wanting to own her, limit her life.

At last, after months of this, they focused and lis­tened. One step went this way: he said, "When I ask you those questions and you get mad and won't talk to me, what are your feelings? I can listen now, for a change."

Instead of repeating her usual complaint about his possessiveness, she focused. For a while she stayed si­lent, and so did he. Then she got it: "What makes me so angry, Hank, is that when you ask those things you suddenly turn into an unattractive, unromantic, scared man for me, and I lose my sexual turn-on for you. That's really what happens."

He simply said, "Oh, I didn't know that. I'm glad you found that and told me."

This one focusing step did not solve their whole prob­lem, of course. But even this one step had the effect of moving their relationship on past a stuck point.

Focusing can save time. It might take only a few min­utes a day. You get to where the trouble is and it shifts. How much more efficient that is than to be stuck in an unchanging relationship, spending time and energy on repetitious quarrels that go nowhere.

It seems obvious that close relationships can benefit from regular focusing and listening. But how about work situations? Wouldn't everyone become too close person­ally? Might the atmosphere grow too sticky? Would people talk deeply with each other all the time so no work could get done? Imagine spending fifteen minutes listening to someone every time you go to the purchas­ing department for a simple form!

No, it wouldn't be like that. Rather, it's more like that without focusing and listening!

Most work places are dense with bad feeling and bad relationships. Every time Rhena goes to the purchasing department, she has to take those sick smiles from that woman who last year tried to get her fired. Bill is de­structive and doesn't trust anybody, and Jim plays along with him and tells him every bad thing about all the others. And so on.

Many people work every day in places like that. And even in pleasant places, work would be expedited if peo­ple would listen.

People like to get work done, and done well. They get discouraged because in most places there are too many ways to get stuck.

It will take much time to improve our work situa­tions, our schools, hospitals, churches. Spaces and times for focusing and listening can be made in any institution. But even when focusing and listening are learned by everyone (probably in schools), our work places and institutions will still change slowly.

Our structured institutions today offer little oppor­tunity for personal living and speaking. The real living of people is mostly dulled and silent, inside them, alone. In terms of social institutions, that space is empty.

If you want to meet someone more personally, mod­ern society offers only a few poor choices. You can go to psychotherapy. You can attend a weekend encounter group. If it is successful (about one out of three is), you will come close to some people and they will come close to you. Then it breaks up. If you want more, then a week later a new group of strangers confronts you. You can have the same initial experience over again, but there is no continuing social structure.

What is the answer? I believe it lies in a new kind of social structure called a "Changes" group.

Several such groups have been developed over the years, in various parts of the country, by people who know focusing and listening. Such a group brings peo­ple together in the closeness of focusing-listening. What is important is that it is there—a continuing social structure. It is a place where you can go when you need to focus and need someone to listen to you.

You can very easily start a Changes group yourself. To show you how such groups work, let me describe one of them: Changes in Chicago.

On a typical Sunday evening, there is a big meeting in the church at 57th and University Avenue. Two large rooms are full of people. You look more closely and see that they are in pairs. At many little tables, in corners, and in the hall you see two people sitting. One talks, one listens. After some time they will reverse roles.

К you had walked in earlier you would have seen a large meeting of the whole group. You would have seen listening in action. Someone says something im­portant. Someone else turns to the speaker and says, "I think what you're getting at is...." The speaker pauses, focuses briefly and says, "Well, yes, but more like...."

I am always impressed at Changes when this happens so regularly. Although I have trained people in listening for many, many years, I often forget to listen when I am in a big group. I am always glad when others don't forget. If I interrupt, someone says, "Wait, Gene, I think she's trying to say...."

Once in a while, someone shy will want to say some­thing difficult and will ask an individual in the group to listen. It looks odd. I remember Susan standing up at a meeting and saying, "Um... Joe, will you listen to me so I can get this out?" Joe nods. She says something and Joe says back the crux of it. She continues and so does Joe. In this way she gets her thoughts said and heard, before anyone else in the group can interrupt or argue. Everyone understands what she wanted Joe to do and why.

Another purpose of listening in that community would become clear to you during the break. People mill around and talk in little informal groups, as they do anywhere else. Someone comes up to a man and says, "Hello, Tom. I'm going through a tough time and I need to be listened to. Are you in a shape to do it?" "Sure," Tom says. "Does it need to be right now?" "Well, yes, if that's OK." They walk off to find some quiet corner.

Or Tom might have said, "No, I don't want to listen now. Sorry." The focuser would walk off to find another listener. Or Tom might have suggested a time for some other day. Or he might have said, "Yes, sure, but I need a listener, too. Can we share the time?"

As we've noted before in this book, real listening is rare. When Allan moved to a job in Tucson, he would come back to Chicago every few months, just to be listened to!

Once people experience what is at first vague and murky opening into step after step of one's inner detail and change, then living without this in people becomes lonely and shallow. Without some people who listen, it is hard to hear oneself. One is often frustrated with people who don't know focusing. Every little while one wants to say, "Could you go see more what that is?" but the person doesn't know what that means.

People think they already know what they feel. They may be in excellent touch with their "gut feelings," but then they let it go at that. They don't know that a road of many steps would open if they sensed beyond the obvious feelings, into what is not as yet clear.

So one usually wants to teach focusing to those with whom one wants to be close. Not that one must hear what comes. In silence, too, it is good.

It is lonely also if I am taken as static in what I feel and say, if you won't listen knowing that there can be steps into depth, and shifts. It is boring if you take what I express as my "position," and in response you state yours. Then we are done. We are both flat, like a closed door in a wall.

It is not surprising that Allan came to Chicago to be listened to. Now that these skills are spreading, Changes is no longer such a rare island.

After the mutual listening part of the Changes eve­ning, there is a short break. Then people go to special groups. There are Ustenmg-training groups. There are several focusing groups in which a very gentle climate prevails, and they would be shy to let you in. There are also other activities. Someone might have stood up spontaneously in the big group and said, "I would like to lead a dance movement group tonight. Meet me in this corner." Or it might have been behavior modifica­tion or a group on Jungian dream interpretation.

Focusing makes all other methods more effective by putting them in relation to the body's felt sense. We don't make a "sect" of focusing. It goes well with, and can be added to, anything a person already finds help­ful. Conversely, we are glad for anyone to teach us other skills. People talk about different methods as though they contradict each other, but in the human body what helps doesn't contradict anything else that helps. Focusing lets you sense whether something is helpful for you at a given time.

Self-help skill training is essential for such a network, and focusing and listening involve specific steps in which anyone can be trained.

You would often find more real psychotherapy hap­pening in that community than in formal therapy. It might worry you to see seemingly untrained people doing this. What if Tom is no good at listening, or what if he pushes his views on others? Is this safe?

It is safer than doctors. No one thinks the other per­son is an authority. No one here is likely to put up with being told what to do, imposed upon, or interrupted. The person they have asked to listen is just another person. If Tom's listening doesn't feel good, the focuser will go away.

A psychotherapy patient who is getting little from therapy requires months or years to change therapists. Usually, the patient thinks, "The doctor must know what's going on. There must be good reasons for it." Changes are far safer than psychotherapy. When psycho­therapy is effective, it is irreplaceable, but then the pa­tient can feel some changes going on in the body.

How can you start your own Changes group? Begin by finding one person who will focus and listen with you. If that works out and you both want a Changes group, invite a third person in, and plan gradually to let others in. Encourage each person who likes it to bring others.

What makes any Changes group work is the focusing - listening approach. There is no need for a "policy," and Changes as a whole has none. Of course, there are housekeeping decisions. Someone has to decide when to meet, what to do with small amounts of money, and so on.

In the traditional organizational model -- not at Changes -- such decisions are handled by a small power group others cannot join. Another model is "participa­tory democracy," in which everyone tries to make all decisions. But decisions are boring, people grow im­patient, and meetings get rancorous, even though the decision being made is trivial.

Changes has a third model. There is a small group that makes housekeeping decisions. But everyone knows where and when it meets and is always invited to be part of it: for one time, occasionally, steadily, or never. Most members don't come, but all may.

Each Changes group is organized as its own mem­bers want it. There is a "Changes International," but it only keeps a list of Changes groups and mails out occasional literature. It enforces no "policy."

Focusing and listening are not the only things prac­ticed, or the only viewpoint. But they are shared and learned by all who wish to. There is much therapeutic changing and human closeness.

APPENDIX

 

A. Philosophical Note

Focusing is part of a wider philosophy (Gendlin 1962, 1973). In focusing one pays attention to a "felt sense." This is felt in the body, yet it has meanings. It has all the meanings one is already living with because one lives in situations with one's body. A felt sense is body and mind before they are split apart.

What is the relation between this un-split body-mind and our more usual logical thinking? I have dealt with this question systematically in my philosophical works.

Focusing is not an invitation to drop thinking and just feel. That would leave our feelings unchanged. Focusing begins with that odd and little known "felt sense," and then we think verbally, logically, or with image forms -- but in such a way that the felt sense shifts. When there is a body shift, we sense that our usual kind of thinking has come together with body-mind, and has succeeded in letting body-mind move a step.

What we can trust is not just body-mind, not just thought, not even such a step. We trust the series of steps.

Thinking in the usual way, alone, can be objectively true and powerful. But, when put in touch with what the body already knows and lives, it becomes vastly more powerful.

There is a new method here, not only for personal concerns but also for theory and science. Logical think­ing stays within whatever "conceptual boxes" it starts with. It has only the different, competing interpreta­tions, assumptions, viewpoints -- and one must stay within one of these. When felt sense is the touchstone, one can try out all kinds of different concepts without being locked into any one set. This is what scientists (now rarely) do when they come up with something new after living with a problem for a long time. Rather than using concepts only, one can return to one's un-split felt sense of whatever one is working on.

One can keep whatever each set of concepts or as­sumptions shows, and yet also go free of them and go directly to the felt sense. In that way one can emerge with something else that those concepts could never ar­rive at, and make new concepts.

A new basic model, a new way of understanding experience and nature, is involved. Experience and nature are not like our concepts. Our concepts are each just so, and not otherwise. Truth does not lie in thought alone. It lies in how various thoughts relate to experi­ence, whether they bring something into focus from experience or not.

Experience can never be equated with concepts. But experience is not "undefined" either. It is more organized, more finely faceted by far, than any con­cepts can be. And yet it is always again able to be lived further in a new creation of meaning that takes account of, and also shifts, all the earlier meanings.

How this relation between concepts and experience changes logic and conceptual structure has been pre­sented elsewhere (see references 5 and 10).

This philosophy leads to a new method of human thinking.

 

D. Focusing: Short Form.

Clear a space

How are you? What's between you and feeling fine?

Don't answer; let what comes in your body do the answering.

Don't go into anything.

Greet each concern that comes. Put each aside for a while, next to you.

Except for that, are you fine?

Felt sense

Pick one problem to focus on.

Don't go into the problem. What do you sense in your body when you recall the whole of that

problem?

Sense all of that, the sense of the whole thing, the murky discomfort or the unclear body-sense of it.

Get a handle

What is the quality of the felt sense?

What one word, phrase, or image comes out of this felt sense?

What quality-word would fit it best?

Resonate

Go back and forth between word (or image) and the felt sense. Is that 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, the words (images] being just right for this feeling, let yourself feel that for a minute.

Ask

"What is it, about the whole problem, that makes me so?"

When stuck, ask questions:

What is the worst of this feeling?

What is really so bad about this?

What does it need?

What should happen?

Don't answer; wait for the feeling to stir and give you an answer.

What would it feel like if it was all OK? Let the body answer: What is in the way of that?

Receive

Welcome what came. Be glad it spoke.

It is only one step on this problem, not the last.

Now that you know where it is, you can leave it and come back to it later.

Protect it from critical voices that interrupt.

Does your body want another round of focusing, or is this a good stopping place?

[1] Ward Halstead, my colleague at the University of Chicago, spent a lifetime working on "biological intelligence." He devised many tests to measure bodily ways of discriminating different things: time, rhythms, spatial arrangements, interpersonal impressions, faces. When he read my book on "felt sense" he applied his term "biological computer" to it. The equivalent of hundreds of thousands of cogni­tive operations are done in a split second by the body.

SECOND EDITION NEW, REVISED INSTRUCTIONS

EUGENE T. GENDLIN, Ph.D.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

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