Before I get into this week’s topic I want to reassure those of my readers who’ve gotten into a bit of a flurry the last few weeks, wondering if my emphasis on the felt sense being a wholistic sense means that they are not really Focusing.
I am not here to take away what is working for you! If your Focusing process is bringing you gifts of ease, comfort, self-compassion, and change, or any of the above, by all means, do not worry about definitions. You are doing fine.
My only intention is to give hope to the people who still feel stuck in repetitions even though they are feeling how it feels in their body. Which brings us to this week’s topic…
Getting Unstuck
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I’m writing this week’s Weekly Tips from the Garrison Institute in New York, where we are about to start this year’s Focusing Summer School.
The course I am offering here on four mornings this week is called "Getting Unstuck."
I started my brief talk to the whole group this evening with these words: "When I was a little girl, I had big dreams. I wanted to write books, help a lot of people, and save the world."
People laughed… but it felt like a laugh of recognition. We’ve all had big dreams. I think we should have big dreams. I think we can change ourselves and the world we live in… and I think every one of us has inside us a contribution to that new world.
The trouble is, we get stuck.
I’ve realized that showing people how Focusing can help you get unstuck on bringing your dreams into reality is now my way of changing the world.
It certainly has changed MY world!
Dreaming Big and Doing the Next Step
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Tonight another teacher here, Atsmaout Perlstein, told the group how she used Focusing to decide to move back to her native Israel after 30 years in the United States, even though she had "everything I needed here."
She told the group: "If the next step feels right, all the way down in your insides, then you don’t have to worry about the step after that."
That’s been my experience too. Using Focusing, we can find the right next step… and we can also have conversations with the parts of us that say it isn’t right. We may take a next step soon, or it may take awhile. It may be the one we thought it would be, or it may change its form. But in any case, we don’t have to know where it will all lead.
Getting unstuck starts with being kind and gentle to yourself. Some parts of you are worried that you’ll never do it, and perhaps in their anxiety they have turned into inner critics… not realizing that their nagging does the reverse of what they want.
So we start by finding Presence, and saying a respectful Hello to everyone inside: the critical voice, and the rebellious one, and the one that just wants to go to sleep, and the exhausted one… you have your own list. Each one gets a Hello without argument, without trying to make it different.
Then "I" — the Listener — I settle down to listen. At some point soon, I don’t only listen to the arguing voices, back and forth. I also invite a fresh whole sense of each part. (That’s right, every part has a whole!)
I let go of assumptions, and allow what is there to form freshly again. Often, just being in Presence is enough to invite this to happen. Let’s notice how Presence — open accepting curious interested — makes a space in which felt senses are likely.
"Something in me" has been in the way, not wanting to move, and another "something" has been labeling that "stuckness." How interesting! As I bring fresh attention to this, I discover that "stuck" isn’t how it would label itself at all! Instead it’s… and it’s also….
(Your own process will fill in the blanks!)