Do you wonder how Focusing compares to meditation? Read on…
Penny writes:
I’ve heard something about Focusing and I’m wondering: how is Focusing different from meditation practice or other similar mind exploration techniques?
Dear Penny:
So many people have been helped by meditation! Let’s describe meditation as a kind of open, spacious awareness where feelings and thoughts can arise and pass away without you becoming attached to them.
In Focusing, you still have an open, spacious awareness. You don’t become identified with what you feel. That much is the same.
The difference is that in Focusing, you remain in relationship with what you feel, and with the parts of you having stressful thoughts, so that there can be a completion, a resolution, a release. A next step can come.
Without that next step, feelings and thoughts tend to repeat, come back over and over always the same. And they don’t have to!
Without a resolution and a next step, stressful feelings like regret and anxiety tend to repeat. Difficult thoughts like “You’re not enough” also tend to repeat — unless we can move into a healing relationship with those feelings and thoughts — the healing relationship that they have always needed.
If you are receiving benefits from meditation, yet there are times when you get stuck in repetitive feelings or thoughts, it’s great to bring in Focusing in combination with what you are already doing.
You’ll pause and acknowledge what you’re feeling, and then settle down with “something in you” to listen to what is under that feeling.
When it feels heard, it can relax and release!
I know, I know, it’s not quite that simple. But that’s the essence of it. When something in you is knocking on your door, and asking for your attention, you give it… and from that, everything can change.
