“Maybe I should just be asking a question and pondering until an answer surfaces.”
Ivica writes:
I think I am maybe overcomplicating my Focusing sessions by mystifying it, looking for magical presence, treating the whole thing with too much unnecessary timidness and thinking answers are some kind of a magical grace from God which appear without me having anything to do with it.
Then a couple of days ago I was trying to recall a name of my primary school teacher and I was getting some vague senses of what her name could have been but they didn’t seem right as I simply kept “pondering” what her name was and then suddenly her name popped into my awareness and I got a sense of relief knowing that I got the right answer.
And it dawned at me that this is probably what I should have been doing in my Focusing sessions all along when searching for my life answers; simply ask the question and ponder over it with curiosity until some answer surfaces to my awareness.
So, is this the core of Focusing? Holding questions with curiosity until something pops up? And if so, is there any fundamental difference between Focusing and simple search of your memory database?
Dear Ivica,
When I first learned Gendlin’s 6-step Focusing, back in 1972, it often felt like answers were expected to come from “nowhere,” as you say. I was frustrated and felt inadequate, not knowing how the “magic” was supposed to work.
But when I observed successful Focusers, I saw they were doing something quite specific. They were not just asking questions and then waiting until something popped up. They had a kind of “inner relationship” and as that inner relationship was cultivated, the answers that emerged came FROM the process in an understandable and meaningful way.
That was why Barbara McGavin and I created the method that we have been teaching over the last 25 years…Inner Relationship Focusing.
In IRF, you start with the issue or topic you want to explore. Then you bring awareness to your body and invite a FELT SENSE of that issue. A felt sense is a fresh, immediate, here-and-now experience that is usually hard to describe but is definitely here.
The rest of the process comes from your relationship with the felt sense…as you describe it, say hello to it, sit with it, and sense how it feels from its own point of view.
The felt sense is what makes Focusing different from anything else
Felt senses are not the same as emotions or thoughts. They are more like “gut feelings,” like the inner sense that something in the room is out of place or missing.
You had a felt sense of your teacher’s name! That’s why you could FEEL when the right name popped up.
Learning Focusing, we learn to get felt senses deliberately and cultivate the relationship with them so that they reveal their wisdom, often along the lines of what has been wrong and what, instead, would be right. This is actually quite different from pondering, thinking, or remembering.
In fact, Eugene Gendlin says that the felt sense is more reliable than reason. So when you learn to cultivate your felt senses, your body will be wiser than your thinking mind!
