Are you depressed because it seems as if you just CAN’T do what you need to do? That is pretty depressing! Read on…
“I’m so depressed – I’ll never be good at this – I just can’t do it.”
I am SO in love with the Focusing process! It is a love affair that has been going on for 37 years now, and gets deeper with every year. Nothing thrills me more than being able to be present with someone who is moving forward into fuller life. I am truly the luckiest person in the world that I get to be present for sessions like the one David had this morning.
David has been feeling totally blocked about creating his new website. He started his session by telling me how awful he was feeling, how depressed… and how every time he even thought about getting to work on the website, he started having defeating thoughts, like, “I’ll never be good at this.”
I invited him to bring awareness into his body and to sense how all that was feeling right now.
The first thing that came was, “Wow, it already feels different when I slow down and feel it in my body. I haven’t been doing this.”
Then he said, “It’s a deflated feeling. Something just feels so lost.”
I invited him to keep company with something in him that was feeling deflated, and lost. To let it know he heard it.
David said, “I’m really letting it know that I hear it… that it feels so overwhelmed.”
Then he paused and added, “For some reason ‘overwhelmed’ is not the word.”
There was a longer pause….
“It’s not the tasks that are overwhelming…”
“Oh!” said David. His voice held excitement. “It’s not the tasks that are overwhelming. It’s more like… like figuring out the order to do them. I get an image of a vast jigsaw puzzle. That’s what it’s like.”
Now David is quite energized. His whole demeanor has shifted. Words like “deflated” or “depressed” are the farthest away from him right now. He’s been in contact with this for a total of about fifteen minutes.
In the rest of the session, he has a number of insights about how he can approach his tasks, what kind of help he can get, how this connects with other times and other situations. But never does any sense of being deflated or depressed return. He is now in a new place, not only about his website, but about any series of tasks in his life.
What’s the secret of such a dramatic shift? That place has just been waiting inside him to show him how it really felt! Until he started Focusing, he hadn’t asked! The secret is the contact, the interested curiosity…
Most of the time, let’s face it, we walk around at the mercy of our emotional reactions, thinking we already know what they’re about.
But when you’ve seen this process unfold as often as I have, I can tell you, we don’t have a clue! And all we have to do is pause, get in contact, and ask–and what the body process knows about what it needs comes bubbling up.
I love it!
