“The body stores memories of the past, and my images are from what I already know.”
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Karen writes: “I have a question. In my experience of Focusing, bodily sensations link to words, images, emotions that explore and expand an issue. However, I think of the body as the unconscious mind, which stores memories of all that has happened previously. The symbols that emerge from the body I find are within the confines of my belief systems and paradigms, for example, ‘a vortex at the solar plexus, something precious, a jewel’, connects to a system I know about in which the solar plexus chakra means ‘jewel’.
“Is it possible to get beyond these limitations of belief systems by just being with the body sensations and not interpreting?”
Dear Karen,
What a wonderful question, that goes to the very heart of what Focusing is, and how it helps us open up to new possibilities.
If I might paraphrase your question in a kind of exaggerated way — If the body doesn’t have anything new, and our symbols aren’t new either, then how can Focusing bring change? Well, it couldn’t… which means there must be something wrong with the assumptions.
Let’s take the body first. Yes, our bodies know everything that ever happened to us. But the metaphor of “storage” will lead us astray, because the body is nothing like a warehouse where memories sit, waiting to be tapped and otherwise unchanged. Rather, our bodies are continually re-creating our memories, and thus re-creating the past. Can the past change? Of course! “I thought it was a betrayal, and now I realize he was only doing his best.”
So as we live, we bring the constantly re-created past with us and we interact with the people and situations around us — and the feeling of that living can be experienced directly, as felt senses.
The process of symbolizing uses what we know and makes something new
So next we come to your interesting point that you might get a symbol for what you are feeling in your body that uses something you are already familiar with, such as a jewel for the solar plexus. If I understand you, this makes you wonder how Focusing can bring real change.
But, like the past, symbols are lived freshly in the body. They are not only how they have always been. Sensing that the solar plexus feels like a jewel is a starting place. Then you would sense what this jewel feels like now, perhaps not like any other jewel. The symbol of a jewel brings with it the richness of what you already know, and also something new in how it feels right now.
So my answer to your question is no. Just being with body sensations isn’t Focusing. (I just heard Gene Gendlin say this today!) In Focusing, you pause and allow felt senses to form, and then find fresh symbols that describe and fit how they feel.
Because we are alive in our bodies, re-creating the past and living forward in our relationships and situations, our sense of how we are (felt sense) is always fresh, and the symbols we find for it become fresh as well.
So don’t stop when you find a symbol that you know. Let that be a starting place, and go forward into sensing freshly. You’ll be able to feel that how it is now is more than what you already had.
And that’s how Focusing brings us new life, new ways of being, new possibilities.
