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.

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