Learn Focusing

More about Focusing

Focusing Proficiency
Focusing Fact Sheet
Focusing, by Eugene Gendlin
Introduction to UK edition of Focusing
Three Key Aspects of Focusing
Six Steps
Introductory Focusing Evenings
Nine-Month Focusing Program
Phone Sessions
Workshops
Books, Video, and Audio
Recommended books
Find a Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapist
How to Become a Trainer
Bibliographies
Primary bibliography of Eugene T. Gendlin
compiled by Frans Depestele
Bibliografa psicoterapia experiencial
compiled by Carlos Alemany

(ES)

International
Bibliography
on
Experiential
Psychotherapy and Focusing: 1960-2000 (ES)
compiled by Carlos Alemany

Client-Centered/Experiential
Bibliography
compiled by Germain Lietaer

Psychotherapy

Focusing Proficiency
Focusing is a skill that requires development over time, and acquires some of its
shape and color according to the life and goals of the practitioner. In the course of
the 9-month program, participants can expect to gain a fluency with the practice,
allowing them to apply Focusing and its principles to an ever-broadening array of
contexts. Below is a general description of Focusing stages of proficiency. The nine
month program is not a certification program. Click here to find out about how to
become a Certified Focusing Professional.
STAGE 1 Proficiencies
Focuser can sense the body, be with it, from inside.
Focuser can get a "felt sense," a physical sensation that contains meaning and
pertains to a particular situation, for example, an issue with ones work, a creative
project or a relationship.
Focuser can recognize how a felt sense differs from feelings and emotions.
Focuser can recognize when words or images have come directly from the felt
sense.
Focuser is able to notice what would feel right to say from the felt sense of a
particular situation.
Focuser knows when a decision regarding the situation "sits right" and when it does
not.
Focuser can name or describe the crux of a situation in a way that "fits" the felt
sense.
Focuser is able to recognize a distinct bodily knowing even when she/he has no
words yet to describe it.
STAGE 2 Proficiencies
Focuser is able to access a felt sense easily and comfortably.
Focuser can stay with and return to a felt sense, so that it is a stable referent even as
it may open and shift.

Focuser recognizes and is comfortable with the experience of not wanting to attend
to a particular situation or bodily knowing.
Focuser knows how to stay near something difficult, neither leaving it nor going
further into it.
Focuser is able to find a "right distance" from difficult or complex issues.
Focuser is able to have self-empathy, friendly attitudes toward oneself and the
bodily knowledge that arises, even when it involves suffering or seemingly
"negative" things.
Focuser can easily get a felt sense of what is in the way when friendly attitudes
seem impossible.
Focuser is able to identify the several "situations" being carried by her/his body just
now, and to "place" them one at a time, gently, at some distance from the body.
Each placing brings a release of tension in the body.
Focuser is able to connect intellectual understanding with bodily knowing, and to
carry on a dialogue between the two.
STAGE 3 Proficiencies
Focuser is able to attend to a felt sense and allow many aspects of it to emerge.
Focuser often finds whole new fields or "subtexts" emerging from a felt sense.
Focuser can let the subtexts inform a resulting decision on an issue.
Focuser can choose to wait for subtext changes before taking action on a particular
situation.
Focuser recognizes new possibilities within a situation, which were not apparent
from the original "given facts." New facts can be formulated.
Focuser can discover new questions arising from the felt sense of a situation,
leading to a new gathering of information.
Focuser is able to make better decisions based on greater bodily knowledge.
Focuser finds an expanded bodily-sensed realm in which one can move between
different "places," clusters, and attitudes.
Focuser can choose to live from the intricacy which is now always accessible.

Focuser experiences a sense of reliable safety inside.

Fact Sheet
What is Focusing?
Focusing is a mode of inward bodily attention that most people dont know about
yet. It is more than being in touch with your feelings and different from body work.
Focusing occurs exactly at the interface of body-mind. It consists of specific steps
for getting a body sense of how you are in a particular life situation. The body
sense is unclear and vague at first, but if you pay attention it will open up into
words or images and you experience a felt shift in your body.
In the process of Focusing, one experiences a physical change in the way that the
issue is being lived in the body. We learn to live in a deeper place than just thoughts
or feelings. The whole issue looks different and new solutions arise.
What Are the Benefits of Focusing?
Focusing helps to change where our lives are stuck. The felt shift that occurs during
Focusing is good for the body, and is correlated with better immune functioning.
More than 100 research studies have shown that Focusing is teachable and effective
in many settings. Focusing decreases depression and anxiety and improves the
relation to the body.
Who Can Learn Focusing? What is A Focusing Partnership?
Focusing can be taught to anyone! Most people learn best in Focusing Partnerships.
First, one is guided through the process. Second, some didactic understanding of
the process is given. Because Focusing is not a set of ideas, but an experiential
process, it is best discussed after experiencing it. Third, people practice with each
other, using listening skills Focusing guiding instructions and Focusing
partnerships. Click here for more information, or to register and then find a partner.
How Can I Learn More About Focusing?
The Focusing Institute has an international network of certified Focusing teachers
who are trained in intensive two-year experiential programs. Click here to locate a
Focusing teacher or partner near you.
The Focusing Institute recommends the following books in our Bookstore:

Focusing, Bantam Books, 1981 (available in 12 languages).

Focusing Oriented Psychotherapy, Guilford Press, 1996.

The Power of Focusing, New Harbinger Publications, 1996.

Excerpts from the introduction by Marilyn Ferguson:

Focusing, the technique described in the pages of this book, is uniquely suited to
our turbulent times when so many old forms are crumbling and old roles are
vanishing. Most of us are having to invent, discover and create the next steps of our
lives without a light, a map, or a relevant tradition. We are trying to keep apace of
rapidly changing technology, trying to understand ourselves and our relationships,
seeking new ways to be well, looking for meaning in our work and a new center of
gravity within ourselves. ... Focusing is a key to personal momentum and unfolding,
a dynamic process that can guide us through the tricky mazeways of a new world.
Like any powerful, new idea, focusing is not readily described in old terms. It
moves us into unfamiliar territory, the realm of creative potential that we have
usually considered the province of artists and inventors.
Our brains and bodies know far more than is normally available to us. We are
conscious of only a fragment of what we deeply know.... The complex body-mind
can provide new steps. Our deepest bodily knowledge can be welcomed and then
lived further. Focusing, whose steps are described with care and clarity, taps and
articulates new subliminal knowing. It befriends and listens to "the body", a term
[that is used] comprehensively to mean the total brain-mind environment as we
sense it.
Focusing is at once richly complex and surprisingly simple. It is mental and
kinesthetic, mysterious in its capacity to summon buried wisdom, holistic in its
respect for the "felt sense" of a problem. An effective method in itself, it is also
valuable in conjunction with a variety of psychotherapies, with biofeedback, with
meditation, to unblock the creative process and define problems.
In short, focusing works for any form of "stuckness". ...
Focusing grew out of the observation by Gendlin and his co-workers that many
people were not being helped by traditional therapy. Those greatly improved were
distinctive in their ability to tap an internal process ignored by most clients. [He]
determined to understand this process so it could be taught and used by anyone.
Focusing moves inward, drawing on information from the deeper, wiser self ("the
body"). If the right steps come, usually within half a minute or so, the felt shift or
bodily release occurs. ... The felt shift is essentially identical to the freeing insight
of the creative process. The spontaneously creative person had learned to pay
attention to at first vague impressions that open into new meaning. Focusing
improves scores on many measures of creativity... most approaches to teaching
creativity focus on the negative: how to let go of old beliefs. But there are few
strategies for approaching the new. Focusing is such a method. It helps to make the

implicit explicit. It draws fuzzy, preverbal knowledge into definition and

expression...
Focusing can foster major shifts. With these more profound changes ... a body shift
sometimes occurs without the usual accompanying words, phrases or images. "A
whole constellation is changing. The ideas are so new we dont yet have a way to
talk about them."
Usually, he said, we react in accustomed ways, "repacking our experiences in the
same old concepts, when what we need is to let something wider in." If the focuser
stays with the bodily sense of the shifting constellation, eventually new language
and new metaphors, appropriate to the fresh understanding, will emerge.
Focusing is no conventional repackaging of self-help wisdom. It is at once a manual
and a philosophy. It talks about the bodys wisdom, the steps of the focusing
technique, how to discover the richness in others by learning to listen. It looks at the
potential for a new kind of relationship and a new kind of society, transcending
outmoded roles and patterns. "A new society is forming ... one in which the
individuals are much more developed and aware than has been true throughout
history ... A society of pattern-makers is coming."
This book is about that society and about how we can ease its emergence by helping
ourselves and each other.
Three Key Aspects of Focusing
by Ann Weiser Cornell
This article is excerpted from the audiotape called Introduction to Focusing, by
Ann Weiser Cornell, available for $7.95 ($2.25 postage US & Canada, $4.25
postage all other) from Focusing Resources, 2625 Alcatraz Avenue, #202,
Berkeley
CA
94705-2702.
Phone: 510-654-4819 Fax: 510-654-1856. Email: awcornell@aol.com.
There are three key qualities or aspects which set Focusing apart from any other
method of inner awareness and personal growth. The first is something called the
"felt sense." The second is a special quality of engaged accepting inner attention.
And the third is a radical philosophy of what facilitates change. Let's take these one
by one.
The Focusing process involves coming into the body, and finding there a special
kind of body sensation called a "felt sense." Eugene Gendlin was the first person to
name and point to a felt sense, even though human beings have been having felt
senses as long as they've been human. A felt sense, to put it simply, is a body
sensation that has meaning. You've certainly been aware of a felt sense at some time
in your life, and possibly you feel them often.

Imagine being on the phone with someone you love who is far away, and you really
miss that person, and you just found out in this phone call that you're not going to
be seeing them soon. You get off the phone, and you feel a heaviness in your chest,
perhaps around the heart area. Or let's say you're sitting in a room full of people and
each person is going to take a turn to speak, and as the turn comes closer and closer
to you, you feel a tightness in your stomach, like a spring winding tighter and
tighter. Or let's say you're taking a walk on a beautiful fresh morning, just after a
rain, and you come over a hill, and there in the air in front of you is a perfect
rainbow, both sides touching the ground, and as you stand there and gaze at it you
feel your chest welling up with an expansive, flowing, warm feeling. These are all
felt senses.
If you're operating purely with emotions, then fear is fear. It's just fear, no more. But
if you're operating on the felt sense level, you can sense that this fear, the one you're
feeling right now, is different from the fear you felt yesterday. Maybe yesterday's
fear was like a cold rock in the stomach, and today's fear is like a pulling back,
withdrawing. As you stay with today's fear, you start to sense something like a shy
creature pulled back into a cave. You get the feeling that if you sit with it long
enough, you might even find out the real reason that it is so scared. A felt sense is
often subtle and as you pay attention to it you discover that it is intricate. It has
more to it. We have a vocabulary of emotions that we feel over and over again, but
every felt sense is different. You can however start with an emotion, and then feel
the felt sense of it, as you are feeling it in your body right now.
Felt sensing is not something that other methods teach. There is no one else, outside
of Focusing, who is talking about this dimension of experience which is not
emotion and not thought, which is subtle yet concretely felt, absolutely physically
real. Felt sensing is one of the things that makes it Focusing.
The second key aspect of Focusing is a special quality of engaged accepting inner
attention.
In the Focusing process, after you are aware of the felt sense, you then bring to it a
special quality of attention. One way I like to say this is, you sit down to get to
know it better. I like to call this quality "interested curiosity." By bringing this
interested curiosity into a relationship with the felt sense, you are open to sensing
that which is there but not yet in words. This process of sensing takes time-it is not
instant. So ideally there is a willingness to take that time, to wait, at the edge of notyet-knowing what this is, patient, accepting, curious, and open. Slowly, you sense
more. This can be a bit like coming into a darkened room and sitting, and as your
eyes get used the the lower light, you sense more there than you had before. You
could also have come into that room and then rushed away again, not caring to
sense anything there. It is the caring to, the interest, the wanting to get to know it,
that brings the further knowing.
There is not a trying to change anything. There is no doing something to anything.
In this sense, this process is very accepting. We accept that this felt sense is here,

just as it is, right now. We are interested in how it is. We want to know it, just as it
is.
Yet there is something more than just accepting. In this interested curious inner
attention, there is also a confident expectation that this felt sense will change in its
own way, that it will do something that Gene Gendlin calls "making steps." What is
"making steps"?
The inner world is never static. When you bring awareness to it, it unfolds, moves,
becomes its next step.
A woman is Focusing, let's say, on a heavy feeling in her chest which she feels is
connected with a relationship with a friend. The Focuser recently left her job, and
she has just discovered that the friend is applying for the position. She has been
telling herself that this is not important, but the feeling of something wrong has
persisted. Now she sits down to Focus.
She brings awareness into the throat-chest-stomach area of her body and she soon
discovers this heavy feeling which has been around all week. She says hello to it.
She describes it freshly: "heavy... also tight... especially in the stomach and chest."
Then she sits with it to get to know it better. She is interested and curious. Notice
how this interested and curious is the opposite of the telling herself that this is not
important which she had been doing before. She waits, with this engaged accepting
attention.
She can feel that this part of her is angry. "How could she? How could she do that?"
it says about her friend. Ordinarily she would be tempted to tell herself that being
angry is inappropriate, but this is Focusing, so she just says to this place, "I hear
you," and keeps waiting. Interested and curious for the "more" that is there.
In a minute she begins to sense that this part of her is also sad. "Sad" surprises her;
she didn't expect sad. She asks, "Oh, what gets you sad?" In response, she senses
that it is something about being invalidated. She waits, there is more. Oh, something
about not being believed! When she gets that, something about not being believed, a
rush of memories comes, all the times she told her friend how difficult her boss is to
work for. "It's as if she didn't believe me!" is the feeling.
Now our Focuser is feeling relief in her body. This has been a step. The emergence
of sad after the anger was also a step. The Focusing process is a series of steps of
change, in which each one brings fresh insight, and a fresh body relief, an aha! Is
this the end? She could certainly stop here. But if she wanted to continue, she would
go back to the "something about not being believed" feeling and again bring to it
interested curiosity. It might be that there's something special for her about not
being believed, something linked to her own history, which again brings relief when
it is heard and understood.

Focusing brings insight and relief, but that's not all it brings. It also brings new
behavior. In the case of this woman, we can easily imagine that her way of being
with her friend will now be more open, more appropriately trusting. It may also be
that other areas of her life were bound up with this "not being believed" feeling, and
they too will shift after this process. This new behavior happens naturally, easily,
without having to be done by will power or effort. And this brings us to the third
special quality of Focusing.
The third key quality or aspect which sets Focusing apart from any other method of
inner awareness and personal growth is a radical philosophy of what facilitates
change.
How do we change? How do we not change? If you are like many of the people
who are drawn to Focusing, you probably feel stuck or blocked in one or more areas
of your life. There is something about you, or your circumstances, or your feelings
and reactions to things, that you would like to change. That is very natural. But let
us now contrast two ways of approaching this wish to change.
One way assumes that to have something change, you must make it change. You
must do something to it. We can call this the Doing/Fixing way.
The other way, which we can call the Being/Allowing way, assumes that change and
flow is the natural course of things, and when something seems not to change, what
it needs is attention and awareness, with an attitude of allowing it to be as it is, yet
open to its next steps.
Our everyday lives are deeply permeated with the Doing/Fixing assumption. When
you tell a friend about a problem, how often is their response to give you advice on
fixing the problem? Many of our modern therapy methods carry this assumption as
well. Cognitive therapy, for example, asks you to change your self-talk.
Hypnotherapy often brings in new images and beliefs to replace the old. So the
Being/Allowing philosophy, embodied in Focusing, is a radical philosophy. It turns
around our usual expectations and ways of viewing the world. It's as if I were to say
to you that this chair you are sitting on would like to become an elephant, and if you
will just give it interested attention it will begin to transform. What a wild idea! Yet
that is how wild it sounds, to some deeply ingrained part of ourselves, when we are
told that a fear that we have might transform into something which is not at all fear,
if it is given interested attention.
When people who are involved in Focusing talk about the "wisdom of the body"
this is what they mean: that the felt sense "knows" what it needs to become next, as
surely as a baby knows it needs warmth and comfort and food. As surely as a radish
seed knows it will grow into a radish. We never have to tell the felt sense what to
become; we never have to make it change. We just need to provide the conditions
which allow it to change, like a good gardener providing light and soil and water,
but not telling the radish to become a cucumber.

An Introduction to Focusing: Six Steps

[These Six Steps are also available in Nederlands, Deutsch, Espaol, Dansk,
Hebrew (PDF), Italiano, Portugues, Suomi and Japanese.]
Introduction
Most people find it easier to learn focusing through individual instruction than
through simply reading about it. The actual process of focusing, experienced from
the inside, is fluid and open, allowing great room for individual differences and
ways of working. Yet to introduce the concepts and flavor of the technique, some
structure can be useful. We offer one approach here: six steps. Although these steps
may provide a window into focusing, it is important to remember that they are not
THE six steps. Focusing has no rigid, fixed agenda for the inner world; many
focusing sessions bear little resemblance to the mechanical process that we define
here. Still, every Focusing Trainer is deeply familiar with these six steps, and uses
them as needed throughout a focusing session. And many people have had success
getting in touch with the heart of the process just by following these simple
instructions.
There are other ways of describing the focusing process. Indeed, every Focusing
Trainer has his or her own way of approaching it. Click here to see short forms of
steps that other Focusing Teachers have developed.
So, with the caveat that what follows is a simple scaffolding for you to use as long
as it's useful and then to move beyond, we offer to you six steps, a taste of the
process.

What follows is a lightly edited excerpt from The Focusing Manual, chapter
four of Focusing.
The inner act of focusing can be broken down into six main sub-acts or movements.
As you gain more practice, you wont need to think of these as six separate parts of
the process. To think of them as separate movements makes the process seem more
mechanical than it is or will be, for you, later. I have subdivided the process in this
way because Ive learned from years of experimenting that this is one of the
effective ways to teach focusing to people who have never tried it before.
Think of this as only the basics. As you progress and learn more about focusing you
will add to these basic instructions, clarify them, approach them from other angles.
Eventually perhaps not the first time you go through it you will have the
experience of something shifting inside.

So here are the focusing instructions in brief form, manual style. If you want to try
them out, do so easily, gently. If you find difficulty in one step or another, don't
push too hard, just move on to the next one. You can always come back.
Clearing a space
What I will ask you to do will be silent, just to yourself. Take a moment just to relax
. . . All right now, inside you, I would like you to pay attention inwardly, in your
body, perhaps in your stomach or chest. Now see what comes there when you ask,
"How is my life going? What is the main thing for me right now?" Sense within
your body. Let the answers come slowly from this sensing. When some concern
comes, DO NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back, say "Yes, thats there. I can feel that,
there." Let there be a little space between you and that. Then ask what else you feel.
Wait again, and sense. Usually there are several things.
Felt Sense
From among what came, select one personal problem to focus on. DO NOT GO
INSIDE IT. Stand back from it. Of course, there are many parts to that one thing
you are thinking about too many to think of each one alone. But you can feel all of
these things together. Pay attention there where you usually feel things, and in there
you can get a sense of what all of the problem feels like. Let yourself feel the
unclear sense of all of that.
Handle
What is the quality of this unclear felt sense? Let a word, a phrase, or an image
come up from the felt sense itself. It might be a quality-word, like tight, sticky,
scary, stuck, heavy, jumpy or a phrase, or an image. Stay with the quality of the felt
sense till something fits it just right.
Resonating
Go back and forth between the felt sense and the word (phrase, or image). Check
how they resonate with each other. See if there is a little bodily signal that lets you
know there is a fit. To do it, you have to have the felt sense there again, as well as
the word. Let the felt sense change, if it does, and also the word or picture, until
they feel just right in capturing the quality of the felt sense.
Asking
Now ask: what is it, about this whole problem, that makes this quality (which you
have just named or pictured)? Make sure the quality is sensed again, freshly, vividly
(not just remembered from before). When it is here again, tap it, touch it, be with it,
asking, "What makes the whole problem so ______?" Or you ask, "What is in this
sense?"

If you get a quick answer without a shift in the felt sense, just let that kind of
answer go by. Return your attention to your body and freshly find the felt sense
again. Then ask it again.
Be with the felt sense till something comes along with a shift, a slight "give" or
release.
Receiving
Receive whatever comes with a shift in a friendly way. Stay with it a while, even if
it is only a slight release. Whatever comes, this is only one shift; there will be
others. You will probably continue after a little while, but stay here for a few
moments.
IF DURING THESE INSTRUCTIONS SOMEWHERE YOU HAVE SPENT A
LITTLE WHILE SENSING AND TOUCHING AN UNCLEAR HOLISTIC BODY
SENSE OF THIS PROBLEM, THEN YOU HAVE FOCUSED. It doesn't matter
whether the body-shift came or not. It comes on its own. We don't control that.

Instructions for Not Following Instructions

Isn't it wrong to publish instructions for inward personal process?
One danger with a set of instructions is that people might use them to close off other
ways. Anything human involves more than one method. Please notice, we don't say
that this method is all you need or might find valuable. Had we said that, we hope
you would have thought us stupid.
Anything you learn here can go well with anything else that you may find helpful. If
there seems to be a contradiction, go easy. Let your own steps find the way to
reconcile the contradiction.
There are other reasons one might not like specifics, such as these steps.
Instructions may seem to diminish mystery and openness, although that is not so.
Also, written instructions cannot avoid misunderstandings. No formula fits every
person. Anyway, one must find one's own path.
These problems occur with all types of knowledge about humans.
Adopt a "split-level" approach to all instructions: On the one hand follow the
instructions exactly, so that you can discover the experiences to which they point.
On the other hand be sensitive to yourself and your own body. Assume that only
sound expansive experiences are worth having. The moment doing it feels wrong in

your body, stop following the instruction, and back up slightly. Stay there with your
attention until you can sense exactly what is going wrong.
These are very exact instructions for how not to follow instructions!
And, of course, they apply to themselves, as well.
In this way you will find your own body's steps, either through the instructions, or
through what is wrong with them.
Focusing is always like that: You don't push on if it doesn't feel right, but you don't
run away either. You go no further, but you back up only a little, so that you stay
until what is in the way becomes clear.
Focusing is quite safe. It may not work but it is not negative. So, if you sense
something that does not feel life-forwarding and sound in your body, sense what
that is until that opens.
But isn't it the height of self-contradiction to give exact steps for how not to follow
instructions? Indeed. One often needs several attitudes at once.
In a society increasingly skilled at human processes, of course we share the
specifics we learn. Shall we teach the specifics of driving a car and not the specifics
of finding and opening the bodily felt sense? But, human processes do give rise to
more different specifics than can be logically consistent. Human nature is not fixed
and not knowable in some single system. That is fortunate. No knowledge can push
you out of the driver's seat of your life. Especially not our knowledge here, which is
to be about finding your own process!
Therefore this knowledge, here, must arrange for itself to be superseded by you, as
you sense for what feels sound, inside you. Instructions for not following
instructions are the essence of focusing one's own inwardly opening steps.
If you stop and sense what's wrong at any point, and if you wait there until that
opens and reveals itself, you can make good use of all sorts of methods and
instructions. You do any method better than its authors can arrange.