Here is the ad hanging on our meeinghouse bulletin board advertising Focusing and our Focusing group. I like it because it succinctly describes what we are about.
Learn Focusing Focusing is an attitude, a set of skills and practices, a philosophy, and a world-wide network. Focusing is the brainchild of the American philosopher Eugene Gendlin. He developed it as a way to help people tap into an inner source of healing and direction that we all can learn to access. At its simplest Focusing is asking another person or yourself how you feel about a particular situation but asking it as if it were a real question, and then taking the time to allow the feeling to emerge and to articulate it in its unique specificity. Many people realize that they have never taken the time to discover how they really feel. This simple act has a number of benefits. First, it feels good when we can articulate how we feel. It feels like a gift. While some of the things that come up in a Focusing session can be daunting, focusing teaches a way to be with even the most frightening issues. Afterwards we often feel as if we have participated in something sacred. Second, once feelings are acknowledged, they often change. So where we were stuck in a response that wasn’t very helpful, we discover a new way to be, a way to be that is not just in our head, but that we feel all the way down to our being. We gain a kind of freedom to be different. Third, we realize that instead of acting from our true feelings, we normally respond from the stock responses and stereotypes that our social environment affords us. To discover our real feelings is an act of liberation from society’s or our own self-imposed constraints. It is what the existentialists mean by authenticity. Focusing is ultimately a political act. We do Focusing with a companion because it is easier to take the time needed to do this work if we have the support of another person. Also, a companion can sometimes help keep us on track when we get sidetracked, especially if we start speaking from our "head" and lose contact with the feeling. To provide that help, the companion does not need to know the content or what the feeling is about. She needs only to be aware of how the focuser is affected by that content. The benefit in that is that the person doing the focusing can maintain their privacy. We have a Focusing group that meets the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays in the evening. The location varies. Since Focusing is so different from the way people normally operate, we generally recommend that people have some training in the process before joining the group. Contact [email protected] or call Andy Hoover at 245-2887 for meeting locations or to set up an initial training. Also, you can visit CarlisleFocusingFriends.weebly.com for information about focusing and our group.
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As someone who has spent a lot of time investigating connections between the Quaker inward light and focusing, I am attuned to other ways that this way of knowing has found cultural expression. Guy Claxton has some remarks on focusing in his book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (p. 172) that mentions some connections he has found:
[Focusing] is very akin to the Japanese concept of kufa which D. T. Suzuki in Zen and Japanese Culture describes as: Not just thinking with the head, but the state when the whole body is involved in and applied to the solving of a problem . . . It is the intellect that raises a question, but it is not the intellect that answers it . . . The Japanese often talk about ‘asking the abdomen’, or ‘thinking with the abdomen’, or ‘seeing or hearing with the abdomen’. The abdomen, which includes the whole system of viscera, symbolizes the totality of one’s personality . . . Psychologically speaking, [kufa] is to bring out what is stored in the unconscious, and let it work itself out quite independently of any kind of interfering consciousness . . . One may say, this is literally groping in the dark, there is nothing definite indicated, we are entirely lost in the maze. It may also have been Gendlin’s felt sense which was referred to as thymos by the classical Greeks. Located in the phrenes, again the central part of the body - lungs, diaphragm, abdomen - thymos is that part of a person which ‘advises him on his course of action, it puts words into his mouth . . .He can converse with it or with his “heart” or his “belly”, almost as man to man . . . For Homeric man the thymos tends not to be felt as part of the self: it commonly appears as an independent inner voice.’ [E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational] It appears that, in other cultures and other times, ‘thinking with the abdomen’ was a routine and familiar way of knowing. In the previous blog, I mention that I had found focusing easier once I realized that Gendlin's "Getting a Handle" is a second kind of felt sensing. The first kind invokes and discovers an inchoate body sense; the second asks what the quality of that first felt sense is. The second step is not description but a waiting for something to emerge, something more distinct than the first kind of felt sense. I have started calling them feeling-1 and feeling-2. In reading an earlier version of Focusing prior to the book, in an article entitled "The Use of Imagery in Experiential Focusing." published in 1970, Gendlin describes this 2-step process:
The usual first step, as above, is for the person to let himself down into the directly felt sense of "all that", the wholistically felt sense of his problem, trouble, or how he feels now. This fresh, global sense, is easily had, it is like the "thud" with which a whole confused trouble can come home to oneself, as one first recalls it. To let oneself down into feeling it all freshly requires that one must stop talking, both out loud and to oneself, and attend to the way it all feels. The second step of imageless focusing is to "let a specific feeling peak up from this global feel of all that." The individual is instructed to ask himself "what's the crux of it?" or "where am I really still hung?", but not to answer himself in words, rather to wait for a specific feeling to form, which is this crux. Often this occurs instantly - the global feel lasting only for a few seconds and then becoming a specific feeling. But sometimes it can be difficult to get a specific feeling to form. |
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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