Learn the Power of Focusing

The Focusing Process

The Focusing process involves brining your awareness into your body. Noticing any sensations that may be there. When we experience an emotion, or are considering an issue, concern, experience or belief, there are likely to be particular sensations or places in the body where these resonate. Rather than ignoring the body responses or trying to understand them in a rational way, Focusing involves just noticing the body experience and allowing any words, images, memories, or internal voices/thoughts to come into awareness.

This process allows the body to reveal its wisdom is, and has been developed as a therapeutic strategy by Eugene Gendlin in his renowned book, ‘Focusing’. This process invites you to focus on a sensation he refers to as “the felt sense." Eugene Gendlin was the first person to name and point to a felt sense, even though this is a normal human experience. A felt sense, to put it simply, is a body sensation that has meaning. Focusing attends to the "wisdom of the body"; the felt sense "knows" what it needs to become next, as surely as a baby knows it needs warmth and comfort and food. We never have to tell the felt sense what to become; we never have to make it change. We just need to provide the conditions which allow it to shift.