What our whole self knows (focusing)

I've been reading about, and to some extent utilizing, a psychological technique called "focusing" for quite a few years. Tomorrow I will take an online workshop in focusing and so it's very much on my mind.

Focusing has many uses. It can be used to make a decision, to answer a question, to understand how one feels about a given person or problem. It first came to prominence more than thirty years ago through the book Focusing by Eugene Gendlin, the discoverer and primary proponent of this method of gaining knowledge of our inmost selves.

It's likely I'll write more about focusing during the coming week. For the moment, I'd like just to record these key observations in this space, where they will be easy for me to re-locate.

Once your body is allowed to be itself, uncramped, it has the wisdom to deal with your problems. . . . Your body always tends in the direction of feeling better. Your body is a complex, life-maintaining system.

Gendlin explains that a bad feeling is just a symptom, much as pain or a fever is --

The bad feeling is the body knowing and pushing toward what good would be.

Here is my single most favorite quotation:

Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness.

He continues:

The very existence of bad feelings within you is evidence that your body knows what is wrong and what is right. It must know what it would be like to feel perfect, or it could not evoke a sense of wrong.

And finally:

Your body, with its sense of rightness, knows what would feel right. The feelings of "bad" or "wrong" inside you are, in effect, your body's measurement of the distance between "perfect" and the way it actually feels. It knows the direction.

Focusing is a way of gaining access to this knowledge - the knowledge of what the bad feeling is and where it comes from, and the knowledge of how to make it better.