The Buddhist magazine Tricyle recently posted an interesting article by David Rome called Focusing and Meditating, which explores the Focusing technique (developed by Eugene Gendlin in a psychotherapeutic context) and how it relates to the contemplative practice of Buddhist meditation. Rome describes Focusing as
bringing gentle, mindful awareness to a subtle level of bodily experiencing known as the “felt sense.” Felt senses, which lie somewhere between physical sensations and emotional feelings, represent a distinct kind of experience.
A long-time meditator, Rome describes how Focusing can be a complimentary contemplative practice. Whereas meditation cultivates an awareness and acceptance of experience “as it is” in any given moment, Focusing involves directly engaging specific issues and problems in life and discovering uniquely appropriate solutions. Although I myself have practiced both meditation and Focusing, I haven’t thought much about how the two methods relate to one another, and I found Rome’s perspective on this to be fascinating. For those interested in more about Focusing, below are some notes of my own:
Eugene Gendlin developed the Focusing technique at the University of Chicago, where he and his colleagues conducted research in which they found that the single most important factor in psychotherapy affecting positive outcome was the client’s ability to contact and work with his or her bodily-felt sense. It was not enough, argued Gendlin, to have a rational understanding of one’s psychological issues. Many clients with exquisite theoretical and conceptual psychological understandings often continue to remain stuck in the same stultifying patterns. According to this line of research, the key to healing lies in developing one’s awareness of the bodily-felt dimensions of experience.
Gendlin was a colleague of Carl Rogers, one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology. Rogers had long suggested that an attentiveness toward bodily-felt dimensions of experiencing was a key element of successful psychotherapy. What Gendlin did was develop this suggestion into a concrete methodology that has since been successfully taught to many people, both in and outside of a therapy setting. Gendlin’s perspective is founded on the notion that, in all situations and at any given time, there is an ongoing psychophysiological flow of experiencing that can be attended to in such a way as to concretely transform the way we live a particular situation. Not simply sensations of the “body”, this felt-sense is holistic, in that it implicitly contains one’s sense of the “whole thing” of a particular situation, including what one has learned conceptually. As Gendlin puts it (in his book Focusing):
The felt-sense is in the body, yet it has meanings. It has all the meanings one is already living with because one lives in situations with one’s body. A felt-sense is body and mind before they are split apart.
In other words, the felt-sense is of the integrated bodymind. It is experienced as both sensual and meaningful. To get a flavor of the felt-sense, let’s look at the familiar “tip of the tongue” experience. You know the name of that movie starring your favorite actor, but you just can’t access that knowledge at the moment. There’s absolutely no doubt that the knowledge is within you somewhere — it’s right on the tip of your tongue. Although you can’t name the movie, you can sense what the name is in an unclear way. This hazy place that feels meaningful yet not fully known is a felt-sense. It is sensed in the body as a vital, sensual flow of experiencing that contains meanings in an implicit way. When the implicit meaning is revealed, there is an unmistakable shift in the way we relate to the given concern, a shift that is experienced as a feeling or inner bodily movement that releases the sought after knowledge. This can also be described as an “a-ha” experience.
This felt-shift or sense of a-ha is also an experience on the level of the integrated bodymind — not just a sensation in our “bodies” nor merely an idea or concept popping up in our “minds”. Other familiar examples of the shifting felt-sense include having someone else successfully complete a sentence for us while we struggle to find the right word, and the “I know I forgot something but I just can’t figure out what it is” scenario. In each of these situations, meaningful knowledge is arrived at only when there is the right “fit” between a particular concept and one’s bodily-felt experience of the situation. If you are experiencing the felt-sense that you forgot to bring something (which turns out to be your camera) to the airport, then only a conceptual scheme having to do with your camera comes with the release of the felt-shift. Even if, while rifling through your memory, you realize that you also forgot your tooth-brush, you can “just tell” that your sense of concern had to do with something else, since the tooth-brush revelation brought no shift in the felt-sense. These familiar examples of the felt-sense are illustrative, in a very basic way, of the level of inquiry that characterizes Gendlin’s technique of experiential Focusing.
Focusing can be looked at as a process of being with one’s felt experience as it unfolds in relation to an issue, problem, or a situation. Most situations, of course, are not nearly as clear-cut as the above, everyday scenarios. When something is on the tip of our tongues, we already know a lot about the particular type of knowledge we’re looking for — perhaps a movie title or someone’s name. When the concern, issue, or situation is more complex, the associated felt-sense is experienced as much more unclear, fuzzy, and unrecognizable. However, while the felt-sense is always initially experienced as unclear and unknown, it is also always distinct, in that it feels ripe with potential meanings in relation to a particular situation or concern. I can choose to focus on any aspect of my experiencing — my mother, my job, this blog post, my physical health — that is potentially meaningful for me, and each associated felt-sense will feel uniquely unclear initially.
In the context of personal transformation, where one’s intent is to change the way one lives in relation to some aspect of experience, the first step of the focusing process is to bring attention to the bodily-felt experience of a particular concern, identifying the felt-sense as the somewhat hazy, hard to discern global sense that surrounds it. As one stays focused on this unclear sense, one can become more and more clear about what it is they’re feeling, allowing various shades of meaning to emerge by the skillful use of open ended questions. (David Rome summarizes some specific steps to Focusing HERE.)
In Focusing, intellectual analysis of feelings and immediate mental answers to questions are identified and gently turned away in favor of responses which are experienced as emerging from the felt-sense itself. For instance, I can ask myself “is there anything keeping me from being happy and full of life right now?”, and then immediately try to mentally answer the question with things that I rationally already identify as problem areas of my life. I might say to myself, “I hate my boss, I’m not getting enough sex, and I’m fighting a cold”. This question-answer session, however, is not Focusing. This manner of questioning is, in a way, rhetorical — the response consisting of things I already know. Nothing new is discovered, there is no felt-shift to indicate a movement or change on the level of bodymind. In Focusing, one asks a question of themselves and then attends to the unclear yet distinct bodily-felt sense that feels meaningful in relation to that question. One asks and then waits for a response to bubble up from the felt-sense, focusing on it until some aspect of it becomes clear. To my question as to what might be blocking full-living, images having to do with my mother might unexpectedly come up. As I say the words “it may have something to do with Mom”, a unmistakable shift in the felt sense — the sense of a-ha — would indicate that I might benefit from focusing further on whatever issues might be related to my mother. Further open-ended questions, such as “What is it about my Mom that feels unresolved?”, or “Exactly what am I am feeling, right now, in relation to Mom?”, might allow the feeling of stuckness or blockedness to loosen its grip on me and rest at a place of greater resolution.
The bodily felt shift in response to an open ended question is the concrete experience of bodymind connection that is the hallmark of experientially-oriented approaches to psychotherapy. Thoughts and concepts are continually checked against the felt sense in the process of Focusing, giving the focuser access to a wider store of wisdom than the thinking mind alone.