The ability to 'listen to the body' is very useful in gaining insight into a whole variety of personal puzzles and predicaments. This ability has been dubbed focusing by the American psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. Back in the 1960s, Gendlin and colleagues at the University of Chicago were involved in large-scale research project designed to discover why it was that some people undergoing psychotherapy made good progress while others did not, no matter who the therapist was or what she did. After analysing thousands of hours of tape-recorded sessions, Gendlin uncovered the magic ingredient, which could be picked up even in the first one or two sessions, and which would predict whether the client would make progress or not. It was not anything to do with the school or the technique of the therapist, nor, apparently, with the content of what was talked about. It was the clients' spontaneous tendency to relate to their experience in a certain way. If they did, they would make progress; if they did not, they wouldn't.[2]

The successful clients were those who spontaneously tended to stop talking from time to time; to cease deliberately thinking, analysing, explaining and theorising, and to sit silently while, it seemed, they paid attention to an internal process that could not yet be clearly articulated. They were listening to something inside themselves they did not yet have words for. They acted as if they were waiting for something rather nebulous to take form, and groping for the right way of expressing it. Often this period of silent receptivity would last for around thirty seconds; sometimes much longer. And when they did speak, struggling to give voice to what it was they had dimly sensed, they spoke as though their dawning understanding was new, fresh and tentative - quite different from the tired old recitation of grievance or guilt which frequently preceded it

Gendlin called this hazy shadow which they were attending to, and allowing slowly to come to fruition, a felt sense, and it was quite different both from a string of thoughts and from the experience of a particular emotion or feeling. It seemed to be the inner ground out of which thoughts, images and feelings would emerge if they were given time and unpremeditated attention. It appeared that many people lacked the ability, and perhaps the patience, to allow things to unfold in this way. Instead they would, in their haste for an answer, pre-empt this process of evolution, creating a depiction of the problem which told them nothing new, and which gave them no sense of progress or relief.

Gendlin discovered that the felt sense will form not in the head, but in the centre of the body, somewhere between the throat and the stomach. The awareness is physical and when it has been allowed to form, has been heard, and accurately captured in a phrase or an image, there is a corresponding physical sense of release and relaxation. It is as if some inarticulate part of the person, like a distressed child, feels understood, and has responded with a sigh of relief. ‘Yes. That's exactly how it is. You understand. Thank you.’ When this 'felt shift' happens, then the previous feeling of blockage eases, and by going back again patiently to the felt sense, people find that it is ready to tell them something further; to unfold a little more.

In focusing one takes an issue to consider, asks oneself ‘What is this whole thing about?’, and then shuts up. Over the course of half a minute or so, by holding awareness in the body, a physical sense of ‘the whole thing’ begins to form in a way that, at first, is unsegmented, and therefore inarticulable. The normal [deliberation]-mode-dominated tendency to leap to conclusions, to construct a clear and plausible narrative as quickly as possible, is reversed. Answers from d-mode [deliberation-mode], which tend to come quickly and with a veneer of ‘this-is-obviously-the-way-it-is’ certainty, are ignored,[3] You know you are doing ‘focusing’ right, according to Gendlin, when you are not sure if you are doing it right - because you cannot yet say what is there. ‘The body is wiser than all our concepts’, he says, ‘for it totals them all and much more. It totals all the circumstances we sense. We get this totalling if we let a felt sense form in inward space.’

   Because this ‘way of knowing’ had not previously been identified as one of the main active ingredients in successful therapy, many therapists were unaware of the need to cultivate the client's ability, in this regard. Yet, Gendlin discovered, once it was recognised it could be 'taught' quite directly. Anybody, with practice, could learn how to do it, and could benefit from it, not just in dealing with the kinds of problem that took people into therapy in the first place, but in a whole variety of situations in everyday life. To begin with, focusing feels strange, because it really is a different way of knowing from the one with which people are most familiar. As with a medical student learning to read X-rays, it takes time to 'see' what is there, and to stabilise these unfamiliar, shadowy objects of attention. But the tentative, exploratory ‘feel’ of focusing soon becomes unmistakeable. In one session in which I took part, the focuser said: ‘I feel kind of scared, but I don't know what of. Inside it's like an animal that's totally alert, ears pricked ... It's like something's coming, and some part of me has picked it up and is getting ready for it., but "I" don't know what it is yet.” It is this sense of the imminence of meaning not yet revealed that characterises focusing. The fruit of the felt sense is often an image or an evocative phrase, rather than a fully fledged story - such as the image quoted above of a startled animal, sensing danger, or the unknown, but not yet able to identify it. The first form that the emerging meaning takes is often poetic or symbolic, rather than literal and transparent.

Focusing is not, of course, a new discovery (though turning it into a technology certainly fits with the Promethean spirit of the age). It is very akin, for example, to the Japanese concept of kufu, which D. T. Suzuki in Zen and Japanese Culture describes as:

not just thinking with the head, but the state when the whole body is involved in and applied to the solving of a problem... It is the intellect that raises a question, but it is not the intellect that answers it ... The Japanese often talk about ‘asking the abdomen’, or ‘thinking with the abdomen’, or ‘seeing or hearing with the abdomen’. The abdomen, which include the whole system of viscera, symbolises the totality of one’s personality ... Psychologically speaking, [kufu] is to bring out what is stored in the unconscious, and let it work itself out quite independently of any kind of interfering consciousness... One may say, this is literally groping in the dark, there is nothing definite indicated, we are entirely lost in the maze.[4]

It may also have been Gendlin's ‘felt sense’ which was referred to as thymos by the classical Greeks. Located in the phrenes, again the central part of the body - lungs, diaphragm, abdomen - thymos is that part of a person which ‘advises him on his course of action, it puts words into his mouth ... He can converse with it, or with his "heart" or his "belly", almost as man to man ... For Homeric man the thymos tends not to be felt as part of the self.. it commonly appears as an independent inner voice.”[5] It appears that, in other cultures and other times, ‘thinking with the abdomen’ was a routine and familiar way of knowing. It is only in our contemporary European d-mode culture, dominated by the idea that thinking is the quick, conscious, controlled, cerebral manipulation of information that the ability to think with the body has to be isolated, repackaged and taught as a novel kind of skill.

 Guy Claxton's footnotes for his text between pp. 169-172 of (the numbering is not that of the original, but rather refers to the above text on this site):