LOOKING UP THE ANSWER. THE BACK OF THE BOOK

If you cannot get a body shift, there is a different method, which lets your body experience what it would be like if the problem were resolved. Ask your body, "What would it feel like, in my body, if this difficulty somehow got completely resolved?" If you wait a few seconds you will feel the shift in your body.

It helps also, when you do this, to let your body shift outwardly, if it wants to. Perhaps your body will want to sit up with your head high, or perhaps it win want to relax and exhale, or move in some other way of its own accord.

By going through this process, you let your body give you a taste of what it will be like to feel right. When you reach that good feeling, keep it. See what you learn from it. After a while, tell yourself, "I can feel this way all the time." Then wait. If something new inside comes to you and says, "No. Sorry. You can't feel this way all the time," ask that "something" what it is.

This is much like prematurely looking up the answer to a math problem in the back of the book. You know what the answer looks like but not how to do the steps. But knowledge of the answer helps you to work backward. It lets you ask what is in the way, what you must change to get this answer. Working from the answer backward gives you steps you couldn't find from the problem.

Thus it is with this way of focusing. You let your body feel its answer. Not only does this feel good at the time you are doing it, but it lets you ask: "OK, what's in the way of feeling this way?"

That "what's in the way" can be a new opening. But to use it, you must pretend to yourself for a mo­ment (knowing better, of course) that the problem really is all solved and you will remain in this good frame of mind-body.

Some people, when they ask what's in the way, go right back to where they were, the way they left the problem. Don't do that. Stay and pretend it's all solved until a new "what says no?" comes. You can do that by holding onto the good feeling, just as you would hold onto an answer from the back of the book while trying to make steps from it backwards.

Note an example from the later stages of someone's focusing:

"I sit with this bad feeling a while but it doesn't change. I know what it is, but that doesn't matter. What matters is I can't get it to shift. So I did this. 'What would your body feel like if it were all solved?' And I got 'Wow! I'd be free!' And my body sort of sat forward and my blood circulated more and I felt like moving my shoulders, like I was marching out into the world. It was a neat feeling! Then I said, 'OK, can I stay this way?' And it came and said 'No.' And I said, 'OK, why not?' and right away I got this special kind of being scared.

It felt really good to focus on that special kind of scared, instead of the stuck bad feeling from before.

"That special scared, it turned out to be very odd. I wasn't scared of anything that's usual. I was scared of living, like I'd break something if I just came out, like living in a china store, sort of, that's the way I've been...."

CHECKING

Make it a "place" you can leave and come back to. A painful place may not shift immediately. You may have to check in with its felt edge, a number of times during the rest of the day, and perhaps for several days. Do it briefly and gently: "Can I still feel that whole thing?... Ah, there it is. Anything new? ... Ah, still the same. OK." This takes only a minute. Eventually you will find a step or shift there.

DON'T SAY. "IT MUST BE ..."

I want to warn you once more against analyzing, inferring, "figuring out." This can prevent anything from shifting. We all think we know much about our problems. We push our bodies around a great deal, try to force ourselves in this direction and that, guided by a Sunday school list of admired traits or by various social groups' lists of what are accepted as worthy goals. We don't listen to our bodies enough, and this failing can crop up even in the midst of focusing.

You might form a global felt sense of a problem, then grope for its crux and find it and feel good for a second or two. But then the old analyzing habit can take over. "Oh, sure, I know what this is about," you hear yourself say. "It must be ..."

Whenever you hear phrases like "it must be," turn them off. You are only doing what most people do throughout their lives: trying to tell yourself what is wrong. Remember the importance of an "asking" rather than a "telling" internal attitude. Tell yourself nothing. Ask, wait, and let your body reply.

Your effectiveness in focusing, and the rewards it gives you, will improve with practice. In time, you won't need to think consciously about any of these trouble­shooting rules. Nor, as I've said, will you need to think of the focusing process as a six-step exercise. It will be­come an easy and natural act, like walking.

And it will become a part of your everyday life, if you let it. You will find yourself using it not only in times of stress but as a help in solving all life's prob­lems. Learn to trust your body's guidance.

 

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