“When you are Focusing, who is the leader?”
A Reader writes:
I would like to ask you: when you are Focusing and you are speaking of all the parts of you, who is the leader? How do you decide what to do?
Dear Reader:
The leader is you!
The leader is not a part of you, but you as a whole person.
But the word “leader” isn’t quite right…because you won’t ever be telling your parts what to do.
In relation to your parts — your scared parts, your angry parts, your tired and sad parts — you are the listener. You are in the role of sensing and inviting how they feel.
Listening and sensing how they feel is not the same as doing what they want. You are the one who will decide what to do.
Dear Reader, you ask, How do you decide what to do? So I get the impression that you have parts of you that are pulling you in different directions, “Do this!” “No, do that!” It’s exhausting, isn’t it?
I have learned that when my parts are talking to me about what they want me to DO, I haven’t really heard them.
I need to gently invite them to let me know two further and deeper things:
(1) “What might you be not wanting to happen if I don’t do what you are asking?” and
(2) “What might you be wanting for me to be able to FEEL if I do what you ask?”
I ask, I wait, and the answer comes slowly from the body. I can feel myself dropping down into a deeper contact with these anxious and yearning parts of me. They start to feel that I am really there with them, caring and interested.
I feel a shift in my body state, a release, a relaxing. A deep sigh.
What felt like a war, now does not. I feel I am even more fully myself. And what I actually DO comes from my own purposes and intentions, and my own inner sense of rightness.
