What is Focusing?

The essence
Focusing is a natural and gentle practice of listening to your inner sense of knowing, listening to your body

How is it done?
Very simply, we turn our compassionate attention inward and listen.

Many people love working in a Focusing partnership where someone simply listens to you without advice or interpretation. (The role of listening in Focusing is a rewarding practice in itself that will help you in your everyday lives) My workshops will enable you to practise in a Focusing partnership and alone. Focusing can be practised alone, formally or in informal moments.

Once learnt, it becomes a resource you can use in your everyday life.

Focusing can help you to:

Understand your emotions
Make clearer decisions
Untangle lifelong issues
Trust your inner wisdom or intuition
Deepen therapy or bodywork
Feel more present to yourself and others
Ground your meditation and spiritual practice

How could you use it?
As a practice, Focusing can be practised in its own right or mixed with many other disciplines and practices, such as:

Counselling
Bodywork
Body-based practices like dance, yoga or qi gong
Meditation
Creative artistic practice
Creative thinking and reflection
Communication practices like NVC

Origins
Focusing was developed by Eugene Gendlin and his then colleague, Carl Rogers, when they were investigating how and why therapy works. What they discovered was that the main factor in the patient’s success in therapy was not the therapist or the type of therapy, but the clients own relationship with their inner experience. If, in the session, the client paused in their speech, searched within for the right words, fumbled around for an image, for a sense of rightness to what they said or heard… then the therapy was a success.

From that research Focusing, as it is known now, was developed and taught. Today there are many styles of Focusing and it has dozens of applications in all walks of life.

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What is split off, not felt, remains the same. When it is felt, it changes. Most people don't know this. They think that by not permitting the feeling of their negative ways they make themselves good. On the contrary, that keeps these negatives static, the same from year to year. A few moments of feeling it in your body allows it to change. If there is in you something bad or sick or unsound, let it inwardly be, and breathe. That's the only way it can evolve and change into the form it needs.

– Eugene Gendlin

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Your body is not a machine, rather a wonderfully intricate interaction with everything around you, which is why it "knows" so much just in being.

– Eugene Gendlin

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The idea that any part of us is “sabotaging” or “negative” is just not in my universe. Of course, parts of us may do things that have negative results, and can even cause much pain and devastation. But fighting them sets them up as enemies. Once we see something as an enemy, we’ve lost our chance to discover and receive its messages and gifts.

– Ann Weiser Cornell

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