June 22, 2020
The Felt Sense
As part of my “Year of Living Mindfully” program, the teacher is gradually rolling out different techniques to assist us in our practice. The latest is called “Focusing,” developed by Eugene Gendlin in the United States forty years ago – and now is a global phenomenon. It’s a simple technique, yet one that’s hard to explain as Gene mentions several times in his book entitled “Focusing” (the book is $8, a very easy read).
The idea is to listen to your body in order to learn what really ails you. For example, you might have been telling yourself for a while – weeks, months, years, perhaps even decades – that you are not worthy for some particular reason. It’s a story that you tell yourself over & over again. But if you listen to your body, you might find that real story is different. That your problem is something else. Something that you can take action & rectify. The case studies in the book are fascinating.
Gene was a psychotherapist and he wondered – with a group of colleagues – why therapy worked for a relatively small slice of patients but not with most of them. They performed studies, recording thousands of actual sessions with patients – and found out that there was an identifiable reason why this was so. The difference wasn’t the therapist’s technique – nor what the patients talked about. The differentiator was how the patient talked about their problems. But that was just the outward sign, the actual reason was what the patients were doing inside themselves.
The theory behind focusing is that our body holds all of our abilities, our experiences and our suffering. However, our monkey mind may be blocking us from seeing the true causes of our suffering. Focusing is a practical self-therapy technique that allows you to identify & change the way you handle your problems.
Like I said, Gene’s book is an easy read, essentially a manual about how to focus & identify your “felt sense” (and then use it). There are six steps:
1. Clearing the Space – Essentially sitting quietly and relaxing, observing your problems from afar – ignoring the monkey mind – and letting your top problem bubble up to the top of your list.
2. The Felt Sense – Don’t analyze the problem. Instead ask “what does this problem feel like?” As with the last step, the challenge is to ignore the static, the stories you’ve been telling yourself – and get to the aura of the problem. What you feel in your body.
This takes some practice to achieve. And once you truly feel it, just stay with that feeling. Even if it’s uncomfortable, just stay with it as it moves from fuzzy to clear.
3. Finding a Handle – Now try to discover what’s the quality of that felt sense. Do that by seeing what image, term, combination of words or phrase best describes it. Again, this is not analysis conducted by your conscious mind. This intuitively finding the core, the crux. At this point, the precise nature of your problem might be changing slightly from what you learned earlier as your body guides you to be more precise.
4. Resonating With the Handle & Felt Sense – This step involves a comparison. You’re double-checking that the image/words of the handle matches the felt sense itself. You want that feeling of just right to bubble to the surface. If it doesn’t, you should tweak your handle.
When you get a match, let it sit with you for a full minute. Sixty seconds is longer than you think. But it’s important that you do that for all these stages when you think you’ve got what you’re looking for. Your body will guide you to the truth if you give it a little time.
5. Asking – Typically, a handle that fits well allows you to feel a slight shift in the problem that you initially uncovered. If you know what the shift is, move on to the next stage. But often you won’t and you’ll need to give yourself a minute to ask the felt self – directly – what exactly is the shift. Stick with the unclear felt sense and ask it over & over until you get clarity.
For example, if your handle is “jumpy,” you can ask yourself “what is it about this problem that makes me so jumpy?” Ask yourself these open questions, but don’t let the analytical conscious mind answer. Let the felt sense answer. So you wait to get the answer.
6. Receiving – You need not believe with what the felt sense tells you. Just receive it. You will soon experience that when a shift comes, another will soon come. What your body then says will be quite different. These are the questions that you should ask yourself about this shifted problem (ask both the backwards-looking and forward-looking questions; what has the problem been – and what can I do to fix it):
– What is this, really?
– What is the crux of the problem?
– What is under this?
– What needs to happen for me with this?
– What would it take to feel better?It often isn’t possible to deal fully with a particular problem in one focusing session. There may be a few, there likely will be many. It could take weeks or months. The beauty is that you can always pick up where you left off from one focusing session to the other.