FOCUSING IS NOT AN ANALYTIC PROCESS

It is fairly easy, even fun sometimes, to attempt a rational analysis of one's personal problems. Such an analysis can be elaborate or simple, very serious or a parlor game. Intellectuals can't help analyzing at least some of the time.

"The reason I'm alone must be because I pick the wrong men. I must be attracted to a type that eventually rejects me. It must be because I am looking for someone like my father."

Whether or not the basic assumptions behind this person's analysis are broadly correct, the analysis doesn't do her much good. Nothing inside her has changed. She is still stuck.

As a matter of fact, the very terms in which a self-analysis is conducted tend to emphasize that "stuck" quality. When you tell yourself, "That's the way I am," you imply that there is no possibility of change. Analysis is, in this sense, almost always pessimistic.

Focusing, by contrast, is optimistic. It is based on the very positive expectation of change. It doesn't envision a human being as a fixed structure whose shape can be analyzed once and for all. It envisions a person as a process, capable of continual change and forward move­ment. The "problems" inside you are only those parts of the process that have been stopped, and the aim of focusing is to unstop them and get the process moving again. When you are focusing correctly, you not only expect change; you create it in the very act of focusing.

Instead of trying to analyze a problem, you begin by getting in touch with the felt sense of it, all of it, the whole problem at once. It is a special kind of receptivity in which the felt sense can physically shift.

You can never conceptualize all the myriad details in "all that about the fight we had last night." But, having felt the problem whole, you can next get in touch with the crux, and then with what lies beneath that, and so on. You focus step by step, until the problem feels resolved.

Resolving a problem is very different from merely understanding it. In focusing, one doesn't merely talk about a problem. One experiences a physical shift in how it feels.

When focusing produces a real problem-solving step, the body shift signals that some inside stuckness has changed. With each step, the problem feels slightly dif­ferent from and better than the way it felt before. The felt sense of it has changed -- which is another way of saying you have changed. When you next meet the prob­lem in a life situation, your reaction will be different.

A successful focusing step usually gives a much better, truer understanding of what has been wrong. Along with the physical felt shift, something comes in words or felt understanding, which explains the trouble much more clearly, and usually in new terms. Quite often, the whole difficulty is rooted in something dif­ferent from any of the considerations you were looking at. And if you take that body-wisdom and then further focus on it, again something comes along with the next body shift. This may again surprise you and may not follow logically from what you got at the first step.

But sometimes one or more steps of this process of change can bypass your analytic mind completely. A change can happen without your understanding fully why or how it has happened. If you focus on that troublesome felt sense of "all about John," for example, you may find that the words that come along with the body shift add very little to your conscious understand­ing of your "John" problem. But understanding is a by-product.

Or what comes may seem beside the point. "So, all right," you might think, "now I know a new reason why I'm uncomfortable around John. Now I know there's something about my job tangled up in this, something about John thinking I don't try hard enough. But what good does it do me to know that? Next time I meet him, the problem will still be there, won't it?"

No. It won't, not if that came with a focusing body shift. The shift in focusing changed your felt sense of John in hundreds or maybe thousands of subtle ways that are beyond your power, or anybody's power, to perceive rationally. The changes have taken place in your body, not in your rational mind. Your conscious mind knows little about them. All you might ever know is that, next time you meet John, you will feel different­ly and act differently. (At times, one can later figure out some of it -- if one wishes.)

The process is admittedly mysterious -- not only to people who experience it for the first time but also to those of us who have studied it for years. We humans still know very little about our mind-and-body pro­cesses.

I can say with much more certainty what happens than why. I have seen it take place in many others and felt it take place in myself. Now let's make it happen in you.

Focus for the next ten minutes if you haven't done so already. Notice any difficulties you run into. The next chapters can help you with them.

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