“Each time I end Focusing I say I’ll be back to this again but the next time I focus something new and urgent comes up.”
Yen Lu writes:
“Often at the end of a Focusing session, we say that we will come back to ‘this’ again.
“However, each time, something new (and urgent) comes up during the week, and the ‘saved’ item gets pushed back.
“I have a stack of them. Could what is seemingly urgent be edging out the important? Should I return to the stack and choose one, and put what came up urgently now into the stack for another time?”
Dear Yen Lu,
Great question! When I started teaching Focusing, I wrestled with this question a great deal. Often at the end of a Focusing session, the process, though satisfying, also felt unfinished. It felt right to say inside, “I will be back.”
But then, did I ever really go back? Every Focusing session was fresh and new, being with something in the present moment. That felt right, but was I leaving broken promises behind me, saying I would return and then never returning?
I realized I needed to be really clear about what “I will be back” at the end of a Focusing really means. It means, “I will be back to the Focusing process. I will be back here in the body, sensing what needs my attention. And if you [something in me at the end of the session] want my attention again, you can feel free to come again.”
So this way, I am not saying that I will return to a specific felt sense or part or issue, but I am saying that I will be back to the Focusing place, and I am WILLING to be with any of this again.
What We Can Come Back To is an Issue
We cannot come back to a felt sense, because felt senses are always new and fresh. If your felt sense at the end of a session feels like an octopus with its arms around your throat, you will not be able to find the octopus again later, because it was your body’s expression of what something felt like at that moment.
So don’t tell the octopus you will be with it again. Instead, you can tell the life issue that you are willing to be with IT again…Unlike felt senses, life issues can be invited back, and returned to until there is a shift and a resolution.
As for whether you’ll do Focusing on an ongoing important issue, or a newly arising urgent issue, why not both? An urgent issue may come at any time… and we cannot tell it to go away… but we CAN spend ten minutes really acknowledging it and then checking if it is complete for now so we can invite back the important issue.
