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 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.
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.
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