Rex Ambler has done more than anyone I know to popularize focusing among Friends. While he doesn't purport to be teaching people focusing, I think that there are some things about focusing that work better than what he teaches in his light groups. Let me say upfront though that I only know Ambler's work from his books.
(1.) In the light groups, you come up with one image and stop - focusing is about getting in the zone where images as well as felt senses arise and then going through multiple steps. Where you end up is often quite different than where you started. You normally wouldn't stop with the first image that came up. (2.) You need to know about the “critic’ or else you will get stuck and probably give up on the practice. Ambler doesn't teach this. (3.) This process is best best done with the attention of one other person. That ongoing presence and attention allows the focuser to go deeper. (4.) The results of this process don't need to be interpreted by the “head”. With Ambler, it seems as if he is still reverting to an intellectual way of operating. The point in all this is to learn to operate at the felt sense level, beneath the intellect. (5.) Ambler puts an emphasis on images. The problem with images is if they are not connected with a felt sense, they can be easily manipulated. There is always a temptation in this process to try to create your own preordained outcome. This is much harder to do at the felt sense level.
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So we have a focusing group at Carlisle and people are into it. That said, my original intention was for the group to be a springboard for regular focusing partnerships. That hasn't happened and here's what I think are a couple of the reasons:
(1.) Hard to be transparent with people you know (2.) People worry that they will hurt someone’s feelings if they single out someone to focus with them outside of the group setting. Thus, it is a deterrent to ongoing regular focusing partnerships. (1.) Explore your relationship to how you feel. This assumes that you can feel more than one thing and have more than one focus, if not concurrently, then quickly in succession. Some questions you might want to ask yourself:
(a.) Am I okay to be with this feeling? If not, you might want to shift your focus to the “not okay” feeling. (b.) How do you feel about the feeling/affect? (c.) Try acknowledging the feeling - “I’m acknowledging that I feel x about y.” (d.) Say hello to it - Ann Weiser calls these last two distancing strategies when a feeling is “too much” in some way. (e.) Rephrase the feeling in a way that allows you to disidentify with it - “I’m sensing something in me that feels x”. I’m bigger than the feeling. (f.) You might want to take some time to find space by mentally distancing yourself from the situation, as in what Gendlin calls clearing a space. Or by taking some time to relax. Or by taking an inventory/clearing a space if a lot of things come all at once. (g.) You might want to take some time to just let go into it, especially if it is new. Just take some time to actually feel what you are feeling. (2.) Match the word or image to the felt sense. Gendlin calls this resonating. See if they match just right or if it’s close and maybe there’s a better word/image. If the word seems too general, for example, anger, you might ask yourself what kind of anger do you feel? Or if the word has a special sense for you, you might ask yourself, “What do I mean by anger?” (3.) Just sit with it for awhile. You have a situation, you have an affect/felt sense, you have a description or word/image match. Just sit with it for awhile and see what pops up. When something does, see how that affects you. Does it reinforce the original felt sense, intensify it, relaxes it, changes it or add to it in some way? Or give it a completely different focus? Or maybe the feeling changes on its own in one of the aforementioned patterns? Or as you think about the situation some more, the feeling may change in some way? (4.) Match the felt sense against the situation. You might ask yourself, “What is it about this situation that makes me feel x?” Or “what is the crux”? Or “What is the worst of this?” Or “What is the best of all this?” (5.) Ask forward looking questions. What would feel better? What needs to happen for this to feel better? What might this become? How would feel if this were all resolved? And then ask yourself - “And I can feel that way now?” and see if anything pops up that says “No.” And then how does that affect the felt sense? (6.) If the felt sense is some variation on fear, worry or anxiety, or if anger which often has an underlying basis in fear, you might take a two pronged approach - start with what you don’t want and when it feels right, explore what you do want. So for example, what don’t you want to have happen, experience or feel? What don’t you want have happen, experience, or feel if that happens or you experience or feel that (this is an iterative process)? As stuff comes up, how does that affect the felt sense? When you have exhaused the iterations, then try the oppositie - what do I want to have happen, experience or feel? What do I want to have happen, experience or feel if that happens or I feel or experience that? Again take some time to see how it affects the felt sense. (7.) Try the opposite. For example, instead of What’s the worst of all this, try “What’s the best of all this?” Or if you have a felt sense, what would the opposite be and then ask yourself what is it about all this that doesn’t allow me to feel x? Or what is it about all this that does make me feel the opposite as both feelings could be “true”. (8.) In all this, what you are after is a change in how you feel. Sometimes, it is helpful to just insist on not changing, protecting and acknowledging this current feeling and not pressuring it to change in some way. This has to do with the relationship - caring, non-violent, accepting, curious How can a companion help someone focusing?
Let me start out by saying that most of what I know about focusing can be found in Gendlin’s book Focusing and Ann Weiser’s The Radical Acceptance of Everything. This is my shorthand for what they say based on my own experience. I would highly recommend both books to anyone who seriously wants to learn focusing. That said, here’s my compressed notes for the people that I work with: (1.) Stay out of their way - First it’s important to have the mindset that you are not responsible for the other person’s focusing. Ideally, you stay out of their way as in a meeting for worship, if the meeting is too busy, Friends don’t have a chance to hear themselves think. And the fallback as a companion is to stay silent, just like meeting for worship. And trust the process, just like meeting for worship. And remember that the focuser is always in charge. And avoid eye contact. You want them looking inward, just like meeting for worship. If the person is experienced, they will mostly guide themselves. (2.) A different kind of listening - While you want to be empathetic, kind, patient and in general a caring supportive presence, there is a different kind of listening in this process. What you are listening for here is primarily how the person is in their process and in their relationship to their experience. It’s why you don’t need to know the content. And when you do practice a variation of active listening, saying back the words that seem to carry the life, the point isn’t for you to understand, it’s for the focuser to hear themselves. Again the focus is on the focuser’s process, what’s going on inside the focuser.. (3.) With newbies, you will want to explicitly guide them through the process. You want to give them the kind of instructions you use for yourself as a guide for how to guide them. You just want to remind them that they are in charge, to feel free to guide your guiding by asking for what they want or don’t want, and to feel free to ignore your suggestions (guiding should always be done with the attitude of a suggestion). And mirror the focusing attitude, which is essentially non-violence. Welcome what comes. Don’t try to fix or make it go away. Trust the process. (4.) Help with difficulties - generally people may need help when something comes up that is difficult for them. If as a companion, you sense this, there are a number of suggestions you might offer:
I did a short presentation on focusing Saturday at the Warrington Quarterly retreat. I hope that people got something out of it. It was helpful to me in that I think I will have a sharper focus the next time I do something like this for Friends. The next time I would start out by stating that it was normative at one time to describe how we participate in the operation of the inward light in terms of feeling and sensing. I would then use quotes from Melvin Keiser, Richard Ashby and Hannah Whitall Smith to make the point. I would then state that how we participate in the operation of the inward light is strange, counter to the way that we normally operate. I would then use quotes from Jesse Kersey, Joseph Phipps and Howard Brinton. I would then say that Focusing is one way to learn and practice the kind of activities that facilitate the inward light. I would then point out that other Friends like Ambler and Gwynn are also turning to Focusing to teach Friends about the Inward Light. And Friends are already familiar from meeting for worship with some of the same requirements that make Focusing work - turning inward, silence, time.
Here are the quotes I would use: First, that it was normative to describe our esperience of the inward light in terms of sensing and feeling. Here is the quote from Keiser who was head of the Quaker studies program at Guilford:: Only now as major efforts are being made to get beyond the modern mindset does Friends’ experiential basis of knowing look important, and perhaps even useful. What is this different direction? While Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, grounds true knowing in reason, Penington grounds it in feeling and sense. For modernity, “feeling” is merely subjective emotions, and “sense” means physical sensations, stimuli received from the outer world through the receptors of our five senses. In recent Anglo-American modern philosophy “sense” is used along with “reference” to mean “meaning” – what sense does it make – along with how does it relate to the empirical world. For Penington, however, sensing is an intuitive, non-rational, feel for something. And feeling is a way of relating to something that affects us, moves us emotionally. “Feeling” and “sensing” are, therefore, synonymous. Both are ways of relating to a reality that involve an emotional awareness. They are a conscious awareness that does not use ideas, although we can get an idea about what we are feeling or sensing. But the idea is not the feeling, though it be filled with the feeling. Idea is erected upon sense and feeling as their clarification through intellectual content. Different from modern philosophers, then, Penington affirms that we know realities through conscious awareness that is not conceptual. Feeling and sensing make it clear that knowing is experiential and not merely having an idea. This would be nonsense to many modern thinkers but it is startling in its relevance today as some philosophers (existential, phenomenological, feminist, postcritical) turn to experience as their starting point and way of knowing. R. Melvin Keiser, Knowing the Mystery of Life Within, p. 179. And then Ashby from a 17th century book meant to show the unity of Friends: The testimonies and declarations which are given forth in obedience to the Lord's requirings, are to bring everyone of you to a sense and feeling of the inward testimony of truth in your own bosoms, to the feeling of the work and operation of the Lord's Spirit upon your hearts, to give to everyone a clear sight and understanding of those things that tend to their souls profit, and to their spiritual advantage and divine growth in grace. Richard Ashby, sermon 1693, from The Concurrence and Unanimity of the People Called Quakers published in 1694. And then Hannah Whitall Smith, perhaps the most famous evangelical Friend of the latter part of the 19th centuy, in her autobiography wrote: “The natural result of this teaching was to turn our minds inward, upon our feelings and our emotions, and to make us judge of our relations with God entirely by what we found within ourselves. What God had said in the Bible seemed to us of not nearly so much authority as what He might say to us in our own hearts, and I have no recollection of ever for a moment going to the Scriptures for instruction. The ‘inward voice’ was to be our sole teacher. And for me at that time the inward voice meant only my own feelings and my own emotions. As there is absolutely nothing more unreliable and unmanageable than one’s inward feelings, it is no wonder that I was plunged into a hopeless struggle. In vain I tried to work myself up into what I supposed would be the sort of feelings acceptable to God. No dream of salvation in any other way ever came to me.” From The Unselfishness of God, 1903, p. 152. Smith is referring to time growing up in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting just before the Civil War. While she rejects this path to God, she does suggest that it was normative for Friends to look to their feelings to discern how God was speaking to them. For about the first 150 years of Friends this way of knowing, as articulated by Penington was the norm for Friends. In the early part of the 19th century, what was for Friends a new interest in the Bible challenged the authority of the inner light. More liberal evangelical Friends wanted to base Quaker practice on an educated reading of the Bible. The conservative Friends wanted to preserve the inner light as the primary authority. In the context of the 1827 separations, you find Jesse Kersey from York Meeting trying to bridge the differences between Friends by returning Friends to what was essential: “But there is a rule above all rules, which renders us accountable: and that is the quickening and powerful word of God, by which a consciousness in man is kept alive . . . I consider this consciousness in relation to the mind, as feelings in relation to the body; the mind has feelings, capacities, and sensibility, as well as the body; and in this situation it is the consciousness through which the divine power acts, and it is always felt and perceived. And those who become devoted to its government, are instructed in feeling a sensibility of its presence, and when furnished with this, they mistake not its testimony for that of another.” Jesse Kersey, Sermon at Green Street Meeting, 4/19/1827. Being born again, Quaker style: the soul of man hath not only a faculty of cogitation, by which it ordinarily thinks, unites, divides, compares, or forms ideas, but also a latent power of internal sensation, or of perceiving spiritual objects by an inward and spiritual sense, when presented through a proper medium; which, till the beams of Divine light shine upon it, it must be as totally unacquainted with, as the child in its mother’s womb is with its faculties of sight and hearing. . . . Thus born of the spirit, into this proper medium of Divine knowledge, the soul is made acquainted with that spiritual sense it could neither discover, nor believe pertained to it, whilst in its natural state. This is no new natural faculty added, but its own mental power newly opened and brought into its due place and use. Words are inadequate to the expression of this internal sense felt in the soul under Divine influence. It cannot be ideally conveyed to the understanding of the inexperienced; for it is not an image, but a sensation, impossible to be conceived but by its own impression. Joseph Phipps, The Original and Present State of Man, (This was the most important Quaker theological work of the 18th century, originally published in 1767) This is not much different than my experience in learning focusing. Here was something that was always there but I never knew to look for it because nobody ever pointed it out to me. Howard Brinton was a key figure in the effort to rediscover the original message of Friends. He was looking back to people like Penington. He wanted to base Friends’ spirituality on feeling much like Penington. (Gendlin spent some time at Pendle Hill in 1944 when Brinton was in charge. So it would be no wonder that Gendlin would have seen people at Pendle Hill doing something that seemed similar to what became Focusing.) Here is a quote from Brinton: "In seeking guidance regarding a proposed course of action, we find ourselves using four main tests: authority, reason, results, and intuitive feeling... But it can be shown that ultimately in the field of religion and morality the test of feeling must be trusted. By feeling in this field is meant our intuitive apprehension of the Light of Truth. By feeling we accept some authorities and reject others. By feeling we accept certain premises as a basis for our reasoning and reject others. By feeling we accept certain results as good and reject others as bad. When early Friends placed the Light above Scriptures, Church, Reason, and shortrange experience of results, they assumed a tenable position." Howard Brinton, Friends for 300 Years. Note for our purposes though how both ordinary and strange this way of knowing is. Brinton calls it the “intuitive apprehension of the Light of Truth.” Not very helpful if you want to “get” this. And yet we use it all the time, kind of like someone asking you how are you feeling. |
AuthorI am Andy Hoover. I was first exposed to what would later become focusing as a college freshman in 1972. I can't say that I understood then what it was about. About a decade later, when I came across the Focusing book, I was researching "right-brain" practices as the key to religious experience. Focusing was a perfect fit. I became a Quaker because I came across Quaker writings that sounded a lot like Focusing. Archives
May 2019
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