Focusing and Meditation Share a Long Path
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Debbie writes: “Could you describe how Focusing is different from mindfulness type meditation or any other similar meditation practice? What distinguishes Focusing from meditation?”
Dear Debbie: I like to say that Focusing and meditation walk together quite a long way down a path… and then finally they are different. Let me say how I see that.
There are many types of meditation. As far as I know, all of them share a quality of relaxed acceptance toward what arises in our experience. This is exactly true about Focusing also.
Most types of meditation invite us to empty the mind by staying with an object of awareness, like a mantra, or a count of breathing. The type of meditation that is most like Focusing is mindfulness, or Vipassana, meditation. In this type of meditation, the object of awareness is the arising of body sensation.
So that seems really similar to Focusing! We are quietly and non-judgingly aware of body sensation. How it is NOT like Focusing?
The big difference (and this is the big difference between Focusing and any other method)(except of course those methods which have consciously adopted this from Focusing) is the felt sense.
You see, a felt sense is not just any body sensation. A felt sense is a wholistic, freshly arising sense that comes when we invite a sense of a whole situation. Felt senses need to be invited. They come when we pause, and bring awareness inside ourselves in a particular way.
Might the sensations that the meditator feels be felt senses? Yes, they might… but the meditator doesn’t care whether they are or not.
Whereas the focuser does care. The focuser is inviting a felt sense of the whole issue and then attending with interested curiosity to the not-yet-in-words quality of it. This is rather different from the meditator’s simple attending.
Both are valuable, of course! And I know of people who do both Focusing and meditation, sometimes in a single session. They just aren’t the same.