“What if I have trouble feeling in my body?”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Reader writes: “First, I love your weekly Focusing tips newsletter and enjoy reading it. I don’t know whether anyone has asked this question yet but I was wondering, what if you have trouble feeling inside your body? I have this trouble. I tried Focusing once with my therapist. All I did was sit there with my eyes closed and try and feel inside my body and I ended up mostly hyperventilating a lot and talking. I do have some very difficult issues and I tend to dissociate a bit. So I’m not sure if learning Focusing would help me or not.
“In your latest newsletter you said about your own early experience: ‘At first I could feel nothing. I certainly couldn’t do Focusing alone. Then when I started to be able to have feelings, they were all very shameful feelings.’ Are you talking about feelings as in ‘shame’ with some kind of body sensation attached to it? I get the shameful feelings all right and I can figure out why usually and the ego state causing it, but I’m not sure about anything else. Eventually I would like to learn how to do Focusing, but this lack of body feelings or sensations, I guess, is something that has prevented me from exploring Focusing further because if I don’t feel some kind of bodily sensation along with a feeling, it doesn’t seem like it would be Focusing. Right?”
Dear Reader,
What I find so striking about your question is that you have feelings, and you know you have them, but you say you don’t feel them in your body.
Dear reader, however and wherever you experience those feelings, like shame — that IS your body!
I am shaking my head with the irony of it… that the word “body” has become so narrow and confined that we can no longer use it to communicate about this wonderful field of knowing that we have.
I remember trying to learn Focusing, trying to find these “body feelings” they were talking about, feeling blank, coming up with “nothing” — while at the same time I was feeling anxious about not being able to do it right, and yearning for the cute guy across the room to want to trade Focusing with me. Those feelings didn’t count for some reason… probably because I couldn’t imagine that this odd esoteric “felt sense” could actually be referring to my ordinary life!
When I became a Focusing teacher myself many years later, I vowed to find a way to make Focusing easier for other people than it had been for me. And in many ways I think I have succeeded in that… but I am still banging up against this tough nut, this concept of “body” and what people think we mean by that.
Dear Reader, you were even hyperventilating and you say you felt nothing in your body! I’ll bet you did feel something when your breathing was so rapid. But you thought that couldn’t be what we were talking about.
My advice to you, as to all learners of Focusing: make life simple for yourself and accept ANYTHING as the starting place for Focusing. Your heart is beating rapidly? OK, we’ll start there. You are worried whether you will do this right? OK, we’ll start there. Anything is something.
A story of ‘nothing’
I remember a man who told me, after a Focusing exercise, that he had felt nothing. I was curious because I had been watching his face during the exercise, and he hadn’t looked like he was feeling nothing. So I asked him to say more.
“Well, first I felt a tightness in my chest, but I thought that was just the way I’m sitting… so I looked for something else.
“Then I felt a heaviness in my stomach, but I thought that was just from the lunch I ate… so I looked for something else.
“Then I felt a warmth all through my body, but I thought that we were supposed to be looking for problems… so I looked for something else.
“And then I got nothing!”
I learned so much from this experience. I learned that when we say “No” to what we are offered, our inner being gives up and stops offering. So instead, let’s say “Yes.” Let’s accept whatever experience we are having. I assure you it is “in the body” — because all our experiences are either in the body or can lead us there.
