Focusing and the Quaker Inner Light both entail “Aha” experiences, moments of sudden insight. You see that in the way early Friends described their experience. They referred to immediate revelation as the basis of their religion. Penington talked about receiving the well and waiting for its springing.
Focusing has its felt shft. But the felt sense and the handle are also discoveries that are like Aha experiences. Many people don’t realize that the handle is an Aha too. From “Third Movement: Finding a Handle” in Gendlin’s Focusing: “Avoid forcing words into the felt sense. Let it come to you with its own essence.” “Let words or pictures come from the feeling.” “You want the crux of all that, the special quality that comes up from it.” “This is what you are looking for: something that comes along with a body shift.” Gendlin doesn’t use Aha language, at least not that I know of. But he does insist that the handle come from the felt sense and that it come with a felt shift. Why does it matter that it is an ‘Aha”? The reason that it matters is that if you knew you were looking for an ‘Aha’ you would conduct yourself differently. John Kounios and Mark Breeman in their book The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain, p.213, say that “. . . broad diffuse attention facilitates creative insight.” So if you were looking for an Aha, you would want to purposely get into a state of diffuse attention. How does focusing facilitate that? By purposely not thinking anything in particular but feeling all that goes with a particular situation. You see this especially in the instructions for a similar process called twilight imaging, developed by Ira Progoff, which also nurtures an 'Aha' experience: "We do not at this point “think” of our life, but we “feel” it. We feel its movement in a general and flexible way. We specifically do not think about it, for if we did, we would only have the same thoughts on the subject that we have always had. We know from our experience that the self-analytic, self-judgmental thinking process tends to move in circular grooves, turning in upon itself and repeating itself. We wish instead to open the way for something new to enter our experience. We therefore do not do what we have been accustomed to doing. We do not think our lives, but we sit in silence and we feel the inner movement of our recent experiences without judgment. We do not direct our thinking, but we let awarenesses present themselves to us regarding this present period of our lives." Iro Progoff in At a Journal Workshop
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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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