Eugene Gendlin's Focusing

The great discovery of Focusing—as I understand it—is that all emotions are expressed first and foremost as perceptible bodily sensations, which Gendlin dubbed the "felt sense." As a psychotherapist and researcher, Gendlin found that clients who were able to access this felt sense were the ones who got the most benefit from therapy. Those didn't access the felt sense didn't benefit as much, if at all. Eventually, Gendlin devised a method for intentionally accessing the felt sense, and using it as a medium for self-exploration, transformation, and personal growth. He called this method Focusing.

The Feldenkrais Method does a brilliant job of enhancing our self-awareness through muscular movement and rest. This self-awareness has not only physical and mental implications, but emotional ones as well, as suggested by Moshe's famous assertion, "To every emotional state corresponds a personal conditioned pattern of muscular contraction without which it has no existence." (Body and Mature Behavior)

In my experience of Gendlin's work, I've come to appreciate that Focusing provides another dimension of self-awareness that is not explicitly tied to muscular contraction as expressed in movement or posture, but rather with a variety of internal bodily sensations, some visceral, some muscular, and some of indeterminate origin, that give us essential, direct, and very reliable information about our emotions.

And just as our own practice of movement awareness opens a pathway for change in the way we move--with all its broader implications for emotion, thought, and expression--Focusing seems to open another, complementary pathway for change in the way we feel, with its own broader implications for the way we move, think, and express ourselves.

I am very interested in exploring how these two distinctive methods can illuminate each other. I feel fortunate to have a close friend who is a Focusing teacher and psychotherapist who is interested in pursuing this with me. I will report on our exchanges as they occur. Of course, I am interested to hear from anyone else who is exploring within this same domain.