FINDING THE RIGHT DISTANCE FROM YOUR PROBLEMS

You don't want to fall into your problems, sink in them, become them. Conversely, you don't want to run away from them, ignore them, or repress them. Those approaches are usually not fruitful.

There is a third way, a much more useful one. It is the inner act of distancing yourself from what is trou­bling you but still keeping it before you. You don't go into the problems. You stand back just a little way -- far enough so that the problems no longer feel over­whelming, but close enough so that you can still feel them.

Stand a few feet back from your problems. You can walk up and touch them if you like, sense them there, as though with your fingertips. And you can pull back whenever they begin to get too threatening.

You do this with each of your problems in the first movement, one by one. You distance yourself from whatever is troubling you on that particular day, what­ever is hurting you, nagging at you. You still see all those problems before you, of course. They are all still very much there. But you have stepped into a little sheltered space where, for a time, they cannot hurt you.

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.

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