Focusing Tip #461
A Reader writes:
I’ve been struggling with low mood, being negative and judgmental for many months. I can also experience extreme emotions — often anger which quickly turns to upset. I feel lost in life, like a leaf blowing on the wind. I feel these things are manifesting to help; but it’s at a point where it’s become debilitating and I can’t see a way through. I’m sure my body has wisdom to help, but often feel disconnected from this.
Dear Reader:
What a good time to turn to Focusing! Yes, the Focusing process can help — has helped many — with all those experiences you describe.
The first step could be to pause and feel your grounded support. You’d feel your contact with what you are sitting on, feel your breath. That doesn’t take long, and if you can do it, it will give you a bit of relief already.
But possibly the extreme emotions, if they are here right now, will interfere with even being able to feel your body’s contact on what you are sitting on, and your grounded support.
So if that’s happening, try shifting the language that you use to talk about your present feelings. Practice saying “Something in me feels ________,” instead of “I feel ________,” and notice the difference that makes.
“Something in me feels lost in life, like a leaf blowing on the wind.”
(I love that vivid metaphor! In order to write such a fresh, interesting sentence, I feel you were doing a bit of Focusing already.)
What happens when you say “Something in me” instead of “I”? What usually happens is that you feel bigger than the trouble, even though it is still here (we wouldn’t want to push it away). It becomes something you can be with instead of something that you are.
And you can probably now feel it in your body, as a hard-to-describe, more-than-words, “this here” kind of feeling.
Just this much brings relief…and there is so much more. In the further process, what you think you know will drop away and you will go on a journey of discovery…of yourself, and of your own life energy that has been trapped and bound up in these low moods and feelings of anger and being lost.
I’d love to help you try it!