Focusing and Yoga
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Shyam writes: My question is – In what way are Focusing and Yoga interrelated? How can/does one help the other? I do a few Yoga moves for a few minutes in the morning – and get my body to feel its physical edges. I find that this helps me get a good start to accessing how my body is feeling or its felt sense. I usually have a great Focusing session following that.
Dear Shyam, Sounds like you’ve got a great start on the answer to your own question. By starting with Yoga, you’re awakening your body awareness, and making it easier to feel how your body is feeling. Your own experience of having great Focusing sessions after doing Yoga is eloquent testimony. I would keep that up if I were you!
You could also use Focusing during Yoga if you sense something in you resisting or tightening up around a certain posture. Rather than pushing past the "resistance," you could slow down and gently sense the part of you that doesn’t want to do that, or go there. There might be something important that it has to tell you, that it doesn’t want.
Doing Focusing has taught me how powerful it is to bring a simple, non-judging, non-doing awareness into my body. I’ve learned that bringing that kind of awareness to body sensation, for example when I’ve injured myself, allows a natural healing process that amazes me with its ease and facility.
Before I learned Focusing, I was such a thinker! Part of me thought my body was boring boring boring! So it was also hard for me to do Yoga in the way my teachers recommended. I wanted to think about my day when I was in the posture, go over my mental To-Do List, instead of sinking into the richness of my body feeling. Focusing changed all that. (I also fall asleep more easily!)
Shyam goes on to say: "Based on my reading as well as my experience and understanding – I am of the opinion that the practice called "Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy" (www.pyrt.com) is nothing but Yoga combined with Focusing. Do you have any thoughts or comments on that?"
I’m sure that PRYT is an excellent practice, though I have no experience of it myself. But in the website you pointed me to, I found nothing to give me the impression that Focusing was being used.
Remember, just because a method uses body awareness, doesn’t mean it is using Focusing.
It isn’t body sensing that makes something "Focusing," but rather the use of a "felt sense." The felt sense is a very special kind of awareness that has a quality of capturing or holding the whole of some life situation. It arises freshly when invited, and has a quality of being hard to describe, and having "more to it" than we can put into symbols.
It’s rare that other methods, however body-based, are actually using Focusing, since they would need an awareness of this felt sense dimension.