When I first encountered focusing, I couldn't help but wonder, "Where did this come from?" It was so strange, so different from the way that people normally operate. But once I was familiar with Focusing, I was surprised to find that other people seemed to know about this way of “knowing”. This is how I became a Quaker. I came across some Quaker writings somewhere that sounded a lot like focusing. And once I did start to attend Quaker meeting, it was clear to me, and perhaps only to me for a long time, that something like focusing had been central to Quaker practice. Here are two quotes, one from Gendlin’s Focusing and one from a 17th century Friend named Isaac Penington. They use different language but they seem to be saying the same thing:
“O dear lambs! Mind the quickenings of life, and the savor and sense which the Lord begets in the heart, and let the outward knowledge (even of what ye have had experience) go, but as the Lord quickens it: and mind not the noises of thoughts and reasonings about things, which the soul’s enemy will be striving to fill you with, and batter you by; but sink down from these, and wait to feel that which lies beneath them; in the free nature, life, virtue, power, and motions whereof alone is your soul’s salvation. . .” Works, 1863 ed., v. 2, p. 422. This sounds a lot like Gendlin in Focusing: “In this second movement [getting a felt sense] you will probably encounter a lot of static from your mind: self-lectures, analytic theories, cliches, much squawking and jabbering. Somehow you must get down past all that noise to the felt sense underneath.” p. 53. What’s interesting about Friends is that at some point, they lost their ability to transmit this way of “knowing.” Except among conservative Friends, this was not an explicit part of Friends when I became a Quaker almost 30 years ago. You can see this way of “knowing” being lost in the following quotation from Hannah Whitall Smith, who was as mainstream a Philadelphia Quaker as you could find. The quote reinforces the impression that this way of “knowing” at one time was central to Friends: “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. This is why I think it is important to move Quakerism into a conversation with Focusing. Gendlin and the Focusing community have built a solid foundation and accumulated a lot of wisdom around this counter-cultural way of “knowing.” Quakers can use that wisdom to recover this essential part of who we are and also transmit this wisdom to the next generation of Friends.
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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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