May 13 2008 #162

The Purpose of Focusing

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I’ve often received this question: "What is Focusing really for? I know there are many benefits, but what is the ultimate purpose of Focusing?"

As I sit here at the lovely Chateau Bromont, as hundreds of fellow Focusing devotees arrive in Quebec for the 20th International Focusing Conference, it’s a pleasure to reflect on the ultimate purpose of Focusing.

Because it’s true, there are many benefits. I see that calm, clear-eyed glow on people’s faces, after Focusing. (And even more after a week of a Focusing retreat!) We get free from what had been burdening us. We feel lighter, we have a wider perspective, we can see old problems in new ways.

Focusing lets me get clear on what had been puzzling me. It lets me understand my own reactions, and also accept them. I’m much less critical of myself and others. I become interested and curious instead of impatient and judgmental.

And when I do Focusing, people around me change, as well. It seems mysterious, but it’s true. When I get a felt sense, and it shifts, it’s not just the felt sense of me alone, but me-in-interaction, me in the situations of my life. When that opens up and shifts, we all shift. As I approach my family and my colleagues with a fresh way of being, they can’t help but be different as well.

The Implicit Zone

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All of those results are fabulous — and there are many more. But what is the essence of Focusing, why it works, why we do it, why it brings change. It’s a big question, but today I feel like taking it on–even though I’m not quite sure what I’m about to write!

Focusing works because we have an implicit zone. (Thanks to Barbara McGavin for that striking phrase.) We have knowing that is coming into awareness. We don’t yet know it well enough to put into words–yet we know there is something there.

As far as I know, Gene Gendlin, my mentor, the author of Focusing, was the first person to point so clearly to this dimension of consciousness. Many people think that thoughts and words come out of nothing, or out of a sort of dictionary of all possible words being combined right now into sentences. But if you really sense what happens, you know that can’t be true.

Think of a time when you wanted to say something and the words didn’t come easily. Maybe someone asked you what you really meant by some statement. You needed to pause and ask yourself, "What do I mean by that?" At that point you have a sense of it, so far wordless. Then words form. The words form from that wordless sense, that implicit zone.

Words don’t come from nothing, they come from that "u-u-u-u-uh," that sense of what needs to be said, that is there before the words are. That is an example of how the implicit zone operates.

So I would dare to say that the purpose of Focusing is to be there at the edge, where the implicit is ready to form. There we are becoming. We aren’t stuck in old concepts, cut off from the present moment. We’re living our fullness, what we already are becoming what we are next.

It sounds rather sublime and abstract so let me give you a mundane example. I was redecorating my bedroom, choosing a color for the walls. I have my favorite colors: violet, light gray, green. But when I sensed inside, I kept getting: "pumpkin orange." My thought was, I don’t even like orange! But inside it was still: "pumpkin orange." So I bought the color, we painted the walls — and I love it. Two years later, my room still makes me blissfully happy.

The purpose of Focusing: to enable us be the all we are becoming, the whole of that.