FOCUSING: A Tool For Changing Times

Focusing, the technique described in the pages of this book, is uniquely suited to our turbulent times when so many old forms are crumbling and old roles are vanishing. Most of us are having to invent, discover and create the next steps of our lives without a light, a map, or a relevant tradition. We are trying to keep apace of rapidly changing technology, trying to under­stand ourselves and our relationships, seeking ways to be well, looking for meaning in our work and a new center of gravity within ourselves.

In a classic series of essays, the anthropologist An­thony C. W. Wallace described the phenomenon of cultural "awakenings." Such movements are triggered by stress, he observed. The "maze ways" of the culture, the customary sequences of behavior, are blocked. Peo­ple cannot move into the roles they anticipated; their lives do not unfold in the ways they had been led to expect.

Under the duress of disintegrating social forms, a few creative individuals -- Wallace called them New Lights -- propose a way out: new pathways through the cultural maze. At first there is a "nativist" backlash, in which traditionalists urge a reversion to the old ways, but eventually, out of historic necessity, the New Lights prevail. Their ideas are adopted, and the society moves into a new era.

Clearly our culture is in the early stages of the tran­sition Wallace described. Every aspect of our society, every institution, is challenged. The political structure, the medical and educational establishments, the econ­omy, the family, religion, the workplace -- all are un­dergoing change. We have no collective maps.

"Many people today are struggling with a baffling fact," Eugene Gendlin writes. "The old patterns that are supposed to make life work -- and once did -- no longer serve. Being a parent today, for example, doesn't work if we try to do it as our parents did, yet no other form is established for us to follow. We have to make it up as we go along...."

The old patterns were once useful, he acknowledges. Except for a few nonconformists, most people histori­cally fitted themselves to their roles. "Only a small number of educated and thinking people created roles and patterns."

But today a large mass of people are educated and literate, with expanded needs to be creative. They feel confined by stock roles and emotions. They have feel­ings "far more complex than accepted roles either de­mand or offer."

Because of the radical changes we are undergoing as a culture, we have new, "unclear" feelings, emotions and sensations for which there is no common pattern. We are trying to create new forms appropriate to a new time. And we have an exciting, unprecedented op­portunity. "If we accept ourselves and each other as form-makers, we will no longer need to force forms on ourselves or each other."

Eugene Gendlin and his co-explorers of the focusing process are New Lights in this awakening, offering not only cultural alternatives but a tool for understanding our unclear feelings and inventing new patterns for liv­ing. Focusing is a key to personal momentum and un­folding, a dynamic process that can guide us through the tricky maze ways of a new world.

Like any powerful, new idea, focusing is not readily described in old terms. It moves us into unfamiliar territory, the realm of creative potential that we have usu­ally considered the province of artists and inventors.

Our brains and bodies know far more than is nor­mally available to us. We are conscious of only a frag­ment of what we deeply know. The central nervous system perceives and processes a great body of infor­mation that is stored outside the range of everyday awareness. Some of this information is best handled on an unconscious basis. But conflict, pain, and unresolved problems can become the source of chronic uneasiness, blocked growth, and even illness.

The complex body-mind can provide new steps. Our deepest bodily knowledge can be welcomed and then lived further. Focusing, whose steps are described with care and clarity taps and articulates new subliminal knowing. It befriends and listens to "the body," a term Gendlin uses comprehensively to mean the total brain-mind environment as we sense it. (The shifts elicited by focusing, felt in the body, involve deeper brain struc­tures as well.)

Focusing is at once richly complex and surprisingly simple. It is mental and kinesthetic, mysterious in its capacity to summon buried wisdom, holistic in its re­spect for the "felt sense" of a problem. An effective method in itself, it is also valuable in conjunction with a variety of psychotherapies, with biofeedback, with meditation, to unblock the creative process and define problems. In short, focusing works for any form of "stuckness."

I first heard of focusing at a clinical conference in Chicago in 1977. Norman Don, a psychologist, re­ported on recent research in which he had wired up experienced focusers, then observed their brainwave patterns as they attempted to elicit a felt shift -- Gendlin's term for the bodily change and sense of release that accompanies the sudden new understanding of a previously unclear feeling.

The brain's alpha and theta rhythm activity shifted just before the focusers signaled a felt shift. The patterns of subsequent electroencephalographic activity suggested "reorganization at a higher level of integra­tion." I reported on Don's experiments in Brain/Mind Bulletin, in May 1977.

In April 1978 I saw the first half-dozen chapters of the Focusing manuscript. Curious to know more about the method and its physiology, I put my work aside and began to read.

I was first impressed by the easy, conversational tone of the book, the effort to convey the concept of focus­ing on a simple level. Then I became increasingly ex­cited by the possibilities of the method. Following the instructions in the manuscript, I made my first tentative effort to focus -- and hit paydirt! The process triggered an overwhelming personal insight, a sudden fusion of intellectual and "gut" knowing. This shift released a tension of which I had been only dimly aware. I felt oddly light and free, exhilarated, as if an old burden had been taken away. The felt shift marked the end of a year-long siege of migraine headaches.

I have since taught the rudiments of focusing to sev­eral people, including my children, in situations of un­expected stress. Although focusing is best pursued as a deliberate strategy over a period of time, it is also valuable as a kind of psychological first-aid, as useful to a distressed, "stuck" person as a tourniquet to an accident victim. And I have given Focusing to countless friends who feel blocked and are open to new tools.

Modern psychology maintains that we can sometimes solve our problems by tapping into materials below the surface of consciousness. New questions and answers seem to lie out of reach. Using and capturing uncon­scious knowledge has been a chancy, erratic business.

Focusing grew out of the observation by Gendlin and his co-workers that many people were not being helped by traditional therapy. Those greatly improved were distinctive in their ability to tap an internal process ignored by most clients. Gendlin determined to under­stand this process so it could be taught and used by anyone.

Focusing moves inward, drawing on information from the deeper, wiser self ("the body"). If the right steps come, usually within half a minute or so, the felt shift or bodily release occurs.

Interestingly, based on what we now know of how the brain's two cerebral hemispheres specialize in their mode of knowing, it appears that the phenomenon of the felt shift may actually reflect whole-brain knowing. That is, the brain's analytical left hemisphere, dominant for language, names that which heretofore was in­articulate and diffuse, known only to the holistic, mute right brain. New information seems to be mediated primarily by the right hemisphere, which is also more richly connected to the evolutionarily older limbic brain.

The emergence of a step forward on a problem, and the simultaneous physical sense of relief, suggest a sud­den knowing in both hemispheres.

The felt shift is essentially identical to the freeing in­sight of the creative process. The spontaneously cre­ative person has learned to pay attention to at first vague impressions that open into new meaning. Focus­ing improves scores on many measures of creativity. Gendlin has pointed out that most approaches to teach­ing creativity focus on the negative: how to let go of old beliefs. But there are few strategies for approaching the new. Focusing is such a method. It helps to make the implicit explicit. It draws fuzzy, preverbal knowl­edge into definition and expression.

Focusing is also optimistic. It sees the individual in terms of process, not pathology. Focusing can foster major shifts. With these more profound changes, Gendlin said in an interview, a body shift sometimes occurs without the usual accompanying words, phrases or images. "A whole constellation is changing. The ideas are so new we don't yet have a way to talk about them."

Usually, he said, we react in accustomed ways, "re­packing our experiences in the same old concepts, when what we need is to let something wider in." If the focuser stays with the bodily sense of the shifting con­stellation, eventually new language and new metaphors, appropriate to the fresh understanding, will emerge.

Focusing is no conventional repackaging of self-help wisdom. It is at once a manual and a philosophy. It talks about the body's wisdom, the steps of the focusing technique, how to discover the richness in others by learning to listen. It looks at the potential for a new kind of relationship and a new kind of society, trans­cending outmoded roles and patterns. "A new society is forming," Gendlin tells us, "one in which the indi­viduals are much more developed and aware than has been true throughout history.... A society of pattern­makers is coming."

This book is about that society and about how we can ease its emergence by helping ourselves and each other.

Marilyn Ferguson Los Angeles November 1980

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