CONSCIOUS DIRECTIONS
FOCUSING
Do you like the idea of accessing the wisdom of your own body?
Focusing is a simple mind-body awareness method that helps you find greater ease and clarity. It is a process that you can learn and have with you every day. With practice you can use it at any time, driving the car, working in the garden…doing anything that doesn’t require intense concentration.
Focusing shows you how to pause and reflect on any situation in your life and create a space for new possibilities.
Your body knows more about situations than you are explicitly aware of, so connecting with the body and its implicit memory and wisdom can bring fresh insights and clarity about how to move forward.
You can get a bodily feel for the 'more' that is happening in any situation. From that bodily feel come small steps that lead toward resolution. This is to embrace our humanness.
To practice Focusing is to open into an awareness that includes everything. If you would like a session, I'll invite you to open your awareness to connect with the environment and then turn it inward to be present to your body’s sensations and to find the ‘felt sense’ of your situation and its inherent wisdom.
What is focusing?
Focusing is direct access to a bodily knowing. It tells us how to trust our own truth and how to let it come fully into our lives. It is a process that opens one up to direct observation of the innate wisdom of the body by learning that we can be present to it and hear its messages.
The process was founded by Dr Eugene ("Gene") T. Gendlin Ph.D. after he conducted exhaustive studies on the effectiveness of psychotherapy, and he drew some conclusions based on his observations. He said, "those clients that were able to achieve significant progress from their course of psychotherapy were able to connect to their felt sense about what they were communicating", in their sessions with a therapist. It became clear to Gene that he could determine whether a course of therapy was going to be "successful" within the first half hour of starting the first session.
"It consists of six simple steps that identify and change the way thoughts and emotions are held within the body. It can be done virtually anywhere, at any time, and [sometimes] an entire "session" can take no longer than ten minutes, but its effects can be felt immediately - in the relief of bodily tension and psychological stress, as well as dynamic shifts in understanding and insight.
As you learn to develop your natural ability to work with this process, you'll find yourself more in sync with both mind and body filled with greater self-assurance and better equipped to make the positive changes necessary to improve and enhance every aspect of your life". (1)
Extract from the back cover of Eugene T Genlin's book "Focusing" a classic self-help best seller with over a half a million copies in print.
I think for me it was powerful and profound. I think it went incredibly well considering I hardly know Alistair and am quite a shy person. It was deep, surprising, very informative and ‘easy’. I appreciated his calmness, patience, the warm tone of his voice, the way he informed me at the beginning of what to expect and how we would proceed. I also appreciated his innate sense of when to speak and when not to, and his ability to course correct seamlessly when I gave him feedback.
Renee - Musician