DO YOU WANT TO GO ANOTHER ROUND OF FOCUSING?

Sense if your body wants to stop focusing or to con­tinue. Does it say, "Wait! I just got here, let me be here for a day or so. This feels new"? Or does it say, "Let's not stop here, this isn't a new place yet. I don't want to be left here"? Imagine going on and sense its reaction, then imagine stopping and sense its reaction.

If you stop, then first take a minute to be sure you can get back the step you just got on your problem. Usually it isn't enough to remember the outcome. One remembers it later, but it may then lack the directly experienced realness it has now. It helps to recall what came just before the last shift. For example, suppose you had a "handle" image of a ball of wool tightly bound, and from asking what made that, your good shift came and moved your problem one step toward solution. You would remember not only that step itself but also what immediately preceded the shift. That helps, later on, when you recall the step, to get it back with full bodily realness. From the preceding image it will come back fully again. It helps to find this before stopping.

To go another round of focusing, you might freshly sense the whole problem, and ask your body, "Is it solved?" The discomfort of what is still unresolved will then come definitely in your body, if you await it there. You would stay with this whole felt sense and go through the movements 2-6 as before.

Or you might go on from your last shift, from what came with it, by getting under that. "What now is the whole sense of that?"

As understanding and gentle and accepting as you were for that quiet minute, now you also want further change. By being gentle and understanding, by ap­preciating this feeling, you prepared the ground for that further change. To move into further change, you begin again with the second movement: get the felt sense that is under or beyond whatever body-message you just re­ceived.

Suppose, for example, that in the last round what emerged was that you feel "helpless," and you had a shift around, "Oh, that's what I've been feeling, and I'm so jumpy all the time from feeling that it will come to a crunch, and I'm really helpless!"

Now, to go another round, you ask yourself: "What is that whole felt sense, all that about helplessness?"

Ask—and don't answer. Let the feeling deepen itself. "Helpless" is still the right word, but it is now the word only for the tip of the iceberg. You can begin to feel its bulk beneath the word. All that -- quite a lot -- is in­volved in the whole bulk.

Again, the third movement: you try to sense the quality of this new, wider felt sense.

Whenever words come, you check them against the felt sense. If they make no difference there, you let them go by, and you return to the felt sense.

A felt shift feels like a release. That is how you recog­nize it. It may come at any time during any of the focus­ing movements. If that happens, welcome it. Also, some of the movements may happen simultaneously. These instructions deal not with a mechanical process but with a human one.

There may be many such cycles or steps before a given problem feels resolved. You feel a body shift with each step.

It often isn't possible to deal fully with a given prob­lem in one focusing session. A dozen steps may be neces­sary, perhaps even a hundred, before the problem feels resolved. The process may take many months. You con­tinue with each session until, simply, you feel you have had enough for the day. You reach a point where you say, "Well, I haven't beaten this problem yet, but I'm at a stopping place that feels pretty good. I need a day to let my body live with this much changed, and perhaps also to go out into the world and see what happens." Steps of focusing and steps of outward action often alternate. Each aids the other.

Don't get discouraged if focusing doesn't give you dramatic results the first time you try it. Like any other skill, it requires practice. Also, as we have seen, it re­quires you to overcome certain deeply ingrained habits of mind and body, certain too-familiar ways of talking to yourself and at yourself. To deal with such difficulties may take time.

My colleagues and I have taught focusing to many people over the past several years, and we have care­fully noted the difficulties people regularly run into when exploring this unfamiliar internal territory. We know what to do about these difficulties. If you find that the experience of inner change eludes you at first -- and the odds are, statistically, that you will—be assured that you aren't the first person to have encountered your particular problem. Whatever that problem is, we will probably be able to help with it before the book ends.

The remaining chapters of Part Two are designed for this purpose. They are troubleshooting chapters. They review the most common problems that interfere with people's focusing -- they suggest ways to get unstuck.

The six movements:

Clearing a space

The felt sense

Finding a handle

Resonating

Asking

Receiving

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