Focusing: To Connect with Oneself through Meditation

We often experience the feeling that we are unable to progress and grow in some areas of life and that we are stuck in certain problems and situations and cannot find a way out. Eugene T. Gendlin in his book "Focusing" offers us a way of working on ourselves to overcome the problem. He believes that in the traditional methods often used in psychotherapy and counseling people repeat their painful emotions over and over without knowing how to use their body's own life-centred and inherently positive direction and force.

Gendlin offers a new way of working on ourselves where the change process feels good. He says, "It feels live inhaling fresh air after having been in a stuffy room for a long time".

This process in which one makes contact with a special kind of internal bodily awareness. He calls this awareness a "felt sense". According to him, our body knows what our problems feel like and where their cruxes lie.

A felt sense for Gendlin is not a metal experience but a physical one. It is a an internal aura that encompasses everything one feels and knows about a given subject at a given time. A felt sense does not come in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single bodily feeling. This felt sense, does not come in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single bodily feeling. This felt sense, he believes will shift if one approaches it in the right way. It will change even as one makes contact with it. When one's felt sense of a situation changes, we change and therefore so does life. With the physical shift, knowledge that was hitherto in the subconscious becomes available to our conscious minds, and this pinpointing makes the whole body.

Gendlin believes that focusing is a flow process rather than a step by step process. But to make it easy to understand and practice, he advises that we follow six steps.

The first movement consists in paying attention inwardly in one's own body and sensing one's main concern, but standing back from it as though making space for oneself in a jumbled storage room. The second movement consists i selecting a personal problem one is experiencing at the moment but at the same time standing back from it and not going inside it. One then gets a sense of what the problem feels like. The third movement consists in getting a handle on this unclear felt sense. The fourth movement consists in resonating and going back and forth between the felt sense and the word, phrase or image. The fifth movement consists in asking what it is about this felt sense, till a shift or release occurs. The sixth movement focuses on receiving whatever comes with a sift in an open and friendly way.

The philosophy behind this concept and method envisions a person not as fixed structure, but as a process, capable of continual change and forward movement, The "problems" inside one are only those parts of the process that have stopped, and the aim of focusing is to unstop them and get the process moving again.

This method is not merely useful for one's personal growth and forward movement but also helps in human interaction. As Gendlin says people live without expressing their inner richness. Much of what people do is canned routines or roles. For many people their inner selves become silent and disappear because they either do not open up their inward experiences to themselves or share them with others. Thus stuck relationships can revive and grow, once one experiences what human beings are in their inner reality and when one wants the reality of oneself as one really is seen, taken in and sensed by other persons.

Thus the method and tool of focusing can be an important spiritual tool of experiencing our real inward selves and communicating this to others. This is because every human being's experience at any moment have a specific unique shape. This cannot be expressed in a common label, but has to be met, found, attended to and allowed to show itself.

In searching for our own unique life and destiny and the realization of our own unique dream, while at the same time fostering and nurturing the unique dream and destiny of others, focusing can be an important way of unraveling reality changing is. One needs to be spiritual in life.

Happiness Through Head and Heart

Thoughts dodge you. Questions storm you. And you are lost in the jigsaw puzzle of queries and more queries. The question that troubles most rational human beings is, "Why am I born? My humble answer to that is the one given by Buddha, The Enlightened one to his disciple: When the house is on fire, first extinguish it with water. Don't just stand there in front of the burning house and reason out the cause of it. The cause would be known only when the fire is put out. Similarly, now that you are born and are living on this planet Earth, you must live in the manner which is most positive. For that you have to work hard.

Treat life not as an imposition but as a gift from God - to be loved and to be cherished. Move on the pathway of live with faith and courage. and the confidence that he is with you. Accept life with all its trials and tribulations. Acceptance of whatever is, will solve half of your problems.

Know that whatever your life is today, is your own making. It is combined result of your karma, in the previous birth and the exercise of your free will before you were born in this life. You yourself have shaped your life for your own good. So my mantra is: Accept your life with all its trials and suffering.

What do you seek is your day-to-day living ? Happiness. How many have experience happiness? How many can define happiness Yet everyone seeks happiness. That's ultimate goal. Few know where to seek happiness. Most of you seek happiness out-side of yourselves. You run after money, power, wealth, authority, status, name and fame. You are running after the shadows of happiness. True happiness comes from within, from the purification of mind and the ultimate intuition of heart.

Yes, there arises a question. Should you listen to the voice of the head or the voice of the heart?
My answer is simple. Listen to the voice of the heart through the head. Emotions lead us astray. We need head as much as we need heart. Develop both to an extent where both converge to a point of light, and your goal of happiness is achieved.

People are awed by the miracles of science as much as they are fascinated by the powers of spirituality. There is no competition between the two. Science is the discovery of one area and spirituality is the discovery of another area; in the final analysis there is no difference, both are discoveries, both are an experience of an 'awareness'. Our rishis had this knowledge of science through intuition. So where is the difference ?

As the New Age dawns, materialism will automatically lag behind spirituality. And people will live the 'Vedanta' in their daily lives. The verdant concept is spiritual. One life flows in all things. Therefore the future civilization will be built on reverence for life. All life is sacred. Therefore in your day-to-day living, show reverence for everything. The earth, the sky, the trees, stones, rivers, animals, flowers. The vedantic concept is spiritual but it is one which is scientific, for scientist tell us that there is life even in a stone and that the molecules in a stone are ever changing. Now the time has come when man must either make friends with nature or perish. This is the Truth.

Religion is life; it is fellowship, the mingling of the individual with the Great Life and it is not shut up in temples, it is moving in the market place. The great God is not somewhere in isolation. He is in procession of life. Greet Him there. You will not find him in the temples of marbles and stones, you will meet him in the sweat and struggles of life, in the tears and tragedies of the poor; wiping the tears of the poor and singing his new gita for the new age. So if you want to be happy make others happy.

Yes, my vision of life is secularistic. Secularistic in the spiritual sense and not the religious sense. The spirit of humanity is One. In this life we have to work for the unity of mankind. The coming civilisation will be built on a nobler thought, and that thought is, "You are Me, I am You". In that oneness, Joy, Peace and Love will grow.

A Small Introduction to Spirituality

Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his or her being, or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop an individual's inner life; such practices often lead to an experience of connectedness with a larger reality: a more comprehensive self; other individuals or the human community; nature or the cosmos; or the divine realm.Spirituality is often experienced as a source of inspiration or orientation in life.It can encompass belief in immaterial realities or experiences of the immanent or transcendent nature of the world.