thefocusingspace

     Put simply, Focusing is felt-sensing. As such, it is a process that we all know. Well...at least... we can know it, if we become curious about how it happens that we understand situations in a lived-in kind of intuitive way. We can know it because we already are inwardly supported in our everyday lives by this very dynamic way of knowing our selves as situated in the world. We've got our own life-optimising genius built in! We tend not to reflect on how this happens, though.

    With a little training, we can become more attuned to our inner processes, and then we might come upon this fundamental way we are, 'inside,' when we carry forward the situations in our lives - from the most simple to the more complex life-changing situations. When felt-sensing as a trainable process is spoken of, it is called Fosusing. It was named thus by the U.S. philosopher Eugene T. Gendlin, who in his writings has so clearly articulated the importance of the felt sense in our lives. A lot of his work can be read at the Focusing Institute's website.

     Why is it called Focusing? Well, this has to do with how this way of giving attention to our inner life brings something hitherto unclear into focus. The act of focusing a camera manually is an analogy. I'll have more to say about how we can bring the fuzzy, unclear sense of 'something in there' into focus elsewhere on this site.

     Focusing has especially been taken up in the psychotherapeutic community, because it empowers the client. In fact, Gendlin speaks of the felt sense as the 'client's client.' However, it isn't just for use in psychotherapy. As I said above, it underpins much of our daily life. And it is invaluable in many other fields of human endeavour - in business, politics, social and humanitarian services, artistic endeavours, and many more. The Focusing Instutute's website has a drop-down menu that lists fields where people are applying Focusing. Here are some: Afghanisthan, a better world, psychotherapy, expressive art therapies, trauma, addictions, body work, research, children, spirituality, medicine, creative process, science and business.  

    Just the most ordinary things in our daily lives can involve this activity. For instance, I have to cook a meal for my friends and I have to write this article for the website. I start the article. I'm enjoying writing, but I'm keeping an eye on the clock - because I still have to prepare the meal. As I go, I get 'a feel' for how the article is going vis-a-vis my need to start the meal and where I can neatly finish writing for today. As I do this, I don't work only from the 'logic' of time. I get a feel for how 'time' is living in me, in the situation that I'm in, and I let that 'feel' guide me. I let it tell me whether I can complete this section of the article before I need to go to the kitchen. 

    That's a simple, domestic thing. On the other hand, the 'situation' might be something as difficult and important as leaving a relationship, or leaving a job, and so on. A felt sense is a place where some life process is stopped and where it needs our gentle, attentive support to carry it forward. 

   Here's another example, from psychotherapist and Buddhist writer John Welwood:

For example, a man feels empty after a brief converstation with his father on the telephone, without exactly knowing why. Although his surface mind, which operates through linear, focal attention, is still in the dark about what just happened, his body-mind senses and seems to know tacitly the deeper implications of this exchange. He feels this as a hollowness in his solar plexus. By inquiring into the complex tangle of felt meaning he experiences after getting off the phone, he could begin to unfold various aspects of it – such as guilt, resignation about not being heard, helplessness, and the longing for a more genuine relationship. Some of these are immediate responses to what just transpired, while others go back to a whole relationship of thirty years. Yet all were implicit in his initial empty feeling. (1)

"On one level Focusing is a bodily felt way of knowing and assessing a situation or a problem, one that is ruled not by the intellect or reason but by intuition or gut feeling. This visceral (gut) feeling is almost unconscious; it knows something, but that something may be unclear to the conscious mind, like a vague or uneasy feeling in the body. That is, until you focus on it. Then everything starts to become clear." (2)

"Focusing is a mode of inward bodily attention that is not yet known to most people.... General descriptions do not convey focusing. It differs from the usual attention we pay to feelings because it begins with the body and occurs in the zone between the conscious and the unconscious. Most people don't know that a bodily sense of any topic can be invited to come in that zone, and that one can enter into such a sense, " says Gendlin.

   A bodily-felt sense, and the felt-sense-attending process that follows it, named Focusing by Gendlin, indicate a distinct level of human process.   Such process arises out of the interactional nature of humankind.     When we put an organism into a system, the system enters the organism in many ways.  So, it isn't just that my body interacts with its environment (recalling Alan Watt's comment, that the outline of my body is the in-line of the environment), but, actually, the environment is in me, just as I am in the environment. One form of this entering in, is in my bodily-felt sense of a situation. When I close the door to my room, and I have unwittingly left the bar radiator on, I have the environment in me at that moment,  in the form of a felt sense, which in this case tells me something like, "Things are not okay..."   Knowing this, I can take a step toward changing the situation.

   Gendlin did a great amount of research into the existence and value of the felt sense, a level of human process that is often ignored because it is subtle. To quote from an interview with Ann Weiser Cornell:

Focusing is a skill of awareness that involves sensing inwardly, sensing a certain kind of inner experience that everyone has but that we haven't learned is important. It is turning attention to something called a "felt sense" -- a kind of body awareness that is subtle and (at first) unclear. For example, an uneasy feeling in the stomach or a fluttery feeling in the solar plexus or a slight tightness in the chest. These sensations are subtle enough that you can easily ignore them -- and in fact many of us do.