Ruth Hirsch

Healing through Focusing

Meaningful Musings

What is Focusing?

September 13, 2000

Published in The Focusing Connection, September 2000, by Ruth Hirsch

Many people, from those who have been introduced to Focusing with a private session and/or introductory class to those who have been certified to train others in Focusing, struggle with how best to describe this process to the uninitiated. A clear, simple description is very important to being able to convey the essence of what this process is to friends and family, as well as to potential students of Focusing.

How could a process that we’ve found to be so beneficial to our lives, which is many ways is so simple,  be so challenging to describe? This essay will address the dilemma of how best to define or describe Focusing. It will include thoughts and ideas of a variety of Focusers. Before reading the following you might like to take a moment to consider how you might describe Focusing to someone who has not yet had the good fortune to experience it for themselves.

Some descriptions

Eugene Gendlin, the originator of Focusing, gives the following description in Focusing Oriented Psychotherapy: “Focusing is a mode of inward bodily attention that is not yet known to most people…. General descriptions do not convey focusing. It differs from the usual attention we pay to feelings because it begins with the body and occurs in the zone between the conscious and the unconscious. Most people don’t know that a bodily sense of any topic can be invited to come in that zone, and that one can enter into such a sense” (pg. 1).

Ann Weiser Cornell, in her book, The Power of Focusing, defines Focusing as: “A way of listening to your body with compassion, without assumptions” (pg. 1). “Focusing is a body-oriented process of self-awareness and emotional healing. It’s as simple as noticing how you feel-and then having a conversation with your feelings in which you do most of the listening” (pp. 2-3).

Kevin Flanagan in Everyday Genius presents another description: “On one level Focusing is a bodily felt way of knowing and assessing a situation or a problem, one that is ruled not by the intellect or reason but by intuition or gut feeling. This visceral (gut) feeling is almost unconscious; it knows something, but that something may be unclear to the conscious mind, like a vague or uneasy feeling in the body. That is until you focus on it. Then everything starts to become clear” (pg. 18).

And still another description by Focusing instructor Bebe Simon: “Focusing helps you to move forward in your life with the wisdom of your whole self, not just your logical mind…. A way to guide your life from the inside, to know what is right for you without always looking to outer authority or other people’s opinions…. A broad purpose skill of inner awareness….”

And, finally, a description by a relatively new Focusing student: “Focusing is allowing for the body – the sensations within the body – to guide one to deeper feelings or intuitions within oneself.”

My thoughts

Throughout my years of studying, practicing, and teaching Focusing, I have continued to attempt to refine the best way to describe this process. To avoid sounding stale, as well as to stay true to my sense of Focusing in the moment, I often find myself describing it in different ways. For example, at varying times, in response to the question “What is Focusing?” I have answered:

  • Focusing is a way to connect more deeply with oneself and others, to hear the wisdom of the body and spirit.
  • Focusing is a way to hear what our bodies are wanting us to know regarding what is going on for them, at a deeper level that that to which we have ready access with our conscious minds.

From these descriptions it becomes clear that:

  • Focusing is a process that involves a unique way of paying attention to oneself that is both inwardly oriented and that involves the physical body.
  • Focusing, while grounded in the physical body, Focusing has implications for a much broader spectrum of life.
  • The attitude held by the observing self is critical to the Focusing process.

Uses of Focusing

In enhancing inner awareness and promoting acceptance and compassion towards oneself as well as others, Focusing offers an approach to solving a variety of personal dilemmas, such as the following:

  • Feeling blocked, or unable to do something important to you, such as writing, losing weight, letting go of a relationship that is not right for you, looking for a new job;
  • Feeling misunderstood, or not heard in an important relationship;
  • Suffering from chronic physical complaints;
  • A desire for more peace and joy in your life.

Focusing is a gentle, yet powerful process that promotes the deepening of understanding of oneself and others, and thereby facilitates healing and growth. Focusing has the advantage of being a process that may be done by oneself, with a partner, or with a professional such as a therapist, bodyworker, or spiritual leader or guide.

Focusing is a special way of listening to oneself and to others. Based on extensive research into successful positive change and growth, it involves listening to the way that anything and everything that we experience, including individual people, relationships, situations, ideas is being carried in our bodies.

Focusing has been described as listening to the body rather than to the mind. My sense is that this definition only partly describes this process. Focusing does indeed involve listening to the body, yet it also involves attending to oneself at a level much deeper than the physical. Through the body, Focusing permits us to listen to the psyche, to the soul, and/or to some “higher power” which seems to be able to be heard more clearly through this process than it is through the mind alone. Thus, Focusing is a process which puts one in direct and gentle contact with wisdom that each of us has inside.

Focusing vs. Other Inner Awareness practices

Focusing differs in two important ways from many other techniques, which involve listening to an “inner voice”. First, it is grounded in the body. Second, it involves a practical, specific process that may easily be learned. Three essential aspects of the process include the important steps of acknowledging, accepting, and caring about whatever is present. Focusing is a profound approach to honoring and understanding aspects of inner experience, which are often hidden from conscious awareness.

Normally we move so fast that we see only surface layers of reality. There are so many more layers that are important to us, that affect us in many ways, but of which we are not consciously aware. The process of Focusing allows us to “see”, to “hear” at increasingly deeper and subtler levels. It is akin to using a powerful microscope to attend to our hearts, to our souls, to our inner depths.

Focusing and Personal Growth

Change requires self-knowledge. We all have a certain degree of this. Yet many of us know that there is more- more that we are either unable to access, or perhaps scared to access. Fearing that what we find may upset us, or hurt us, or in some way throw us off the course that we have set for ourselves, many find it quite difficult to open ourselves to the simple reality of what is true for us.

However, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to grow or to change without knowing, really knowing, what we are dealing with. In growing a garden, we know that we cannot simply plant seeds, or starter plants, and expect them to flourish. Plants do best if they are put into soil that has been properly prepared, by weeding, tilling the soil, and then having been treated in some way so that it has the correct pH, nutrients, and such.

It is the same with us. We may have been in therapy, read self-help books, meditated, done different exercises, even affirmations- and these may have helped, given some relief, created openings in our lives. However, many of us have found that in spite of our efforts to change and to grow, inner peace continues to elude us.

In order to truly change and grow it is imperative that we first experience what is true for us- i.e. to look at the soil carefully, as it is, first, before beginning to add supplements to it. Carl Rogers, who many regard as a founder of the Humanistic Psychology movement, discovered that an increasingly deeper therapeutic process can arise from within a person if one simply listens, without adding interpretations or advice.

Focusing is a process that is available to all of us to enable us to listen to ourselves, to begin to understand our own essential nature, to truly know more about the composition and needs of our own personal soil- that is, of our psyches and souls. Focusing also enables us to listen more deeply to others.

In conclusion, following is my current favorite description of Focusing:

  • The essence of Focusing is to be present in a compassionate and spacious way with what is true in the body, mind, and spirit at a given time. While the Focusing process does involve specific steps, what is most important is not so much the structure of the process, but the maintaining of an attitude of kindness, curiosity, patience, spaciousness, and general acceptance that we bring to whatever it is in us that is wanting to have our attention, to be “birthed”.