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.
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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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