Tag Archives: Focusing

Focusing and the Cognitive Iceberg

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Focusing is a simple technique that helps you to become aware of what’s called a ‘felt sense’ – a feeling in the body that has a meaning. Focusing has myriad applications including personal growth, creativity and psychotherapy. I’m nearly halfway thorough my two-year Focusing Oriented Therapist training and it’s deepening my work in all kinds of ways.

For example, it’s opening new insights into how the cognitive iceberg might be applied to psychotherapy. First, let me outline how the cognitive iceberg can be used to illustrate the Focusing process. Gendlin, who first identified the felt sense, writes that it “comes between the usual conscious person and the deep, universal reaches of human nature, where we are no longer ourselves ” (Gendlin, 1984). On my cognitive iceberg the felt sense is represented by the dotted area just below awareness. Focusing is the process that enables the felt sense to emerge into awareness, as illustrated by the vertical arrows.

Focusing and the cognitive iceberg diagram
Focusing and the cognitive iceberg diagram

Now, what happens when a client and therapist are working together? The therapist is paying careful attention to whole situation; the client/therapist relationship, their own processes and what is going on for the client. A Focusing Oriented Therapist will be ‘listening’ with their whole body and be in touch with their felt sense.

Therapist and client Focusing diagram
Therapist and client Focusing

The arrows on this diagram schematically illustrate something of the process – note that I haven’t included the verbal exchanges which will also be going on. There is an exchange of ‘information’ between the therapist and client below awareness at the level I call the ‘deep body’. Both the client and therapist are also Focusing, becoming aware of material arising from felt senses.

There are many therapeutic processes going on here. The client will often be working through something difficult and the presence of the therapist can facilitate that: It’s as if the feeling is shared between them and the therapist’s embodied engagement processes some of the pain. Sometimes the therapist’s felt sense will alert them to something going on for the client and their embodied empathy can help the client. It’s also possible for the therapist to have a felt sense of something that comes from outside the client’s awareness and, with care, they can help it emerge.

I’ve covered a lot in this short post and I hope it’s reasonably clear. Please do ask me for clarification if not. I’ll add that this is all very speculative, but I hope that’s what makes this blog interesting!

Phenomenology: What is it and why should you care?

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Would a sentient fish ever wonder what water is? Do you ever wonder what time is? Probably not: Some aspects of our experience are so ‘obvious’ that we just don’t notice them. Phenomenology is a philosophical approach that aims to uncover the obvious. The aspects of our experience that we take for granted can be difficult to identify, but these hidden assumptions and attitudes entwine us.

Phenomenology originated with Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century. Husserl wanted to very carefully examine our experience, teasing out our presuppositions and interpretations to try to get closer to the things themselves. He called our everyday, habitual way of experiencing the world the ‘natural attitude’, and phenomenology offers a way to step back from that. Phenomenology is similar to mindfulness in the way that it invites us to become “aware of the fullness, variety and transiency of experiences in the stream of consciousness” (Patrik). In other ways we might see phenomenology as a scientific project. Husserl saw it a rigorous “science of the essence of consciousness” (Husserl), and there’s some validity to that. Phenomenology is influential in psychology, and has been applied to both Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science.

Phenomenology is essentially the study of phenomena – that is, things as they appear in our lived experience. It’s grounded in careful observation and description. Phenomenologists investigate all kinds experience, including perception, imagination, emotions and bodily awareness. Phenomenology was foundational in my psychotherapy training and it’s vital in Focusing Oriented Therapy: Being able to pay careful attention to my own experience and that of my client is essential to good therapeutic practice.

Husserl begins with the notion of “intentionality” – the way that all consciousness is “consciousness of something”. That sounds very obvious but that’s partly what phenomenology is about; paying attention to what we think is obvious. It can be quite revealing to pay careful attention to our awareness. Let’s say I’m signing a document. We might assume that I’ll be aware that I’m holding a pen while I’m signing. But let’s look more closely: In the moment that I’m signing, I’m not paying attention to the pen at all. In a strange way the pen is transparent to my awareness. If it stops working, then the pen will leap into the foreground of my consciousness, but if not I’ll just sign my name as I have so many times before.

Phenomenology isn’t just for therapists and academics; it can be usefully applied in everyday life. It can help us avoid errors in reasoning like confirmation bias (preferring perspectives that support our pre-existing views) and projection bias (assuming that most people think just like we do). I invite you to question what seems ‘obvious’ in your own life. My guess is that you’ll become more aware of the nuances of experience that we miss when we rely on the habits and unthinking assumptions of the ‘natural attitude’.

Wholebody Focusing – Grounding into being here

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I’ve only done an introductory week-end of Wholebody Focusing (WBF), so these initial thoughts are somewhat tentative, but I want to touch on the role of grounding in WBF.

Gene Gendlin, the philosopher/psychotherapist who developed Focusing, states that the body extends beyond the skin so that the body “lives immediately in its environment, both physically and socially” (Gendlin, 1994). Wholebody Focusing takes that idea forward more explicitly than traditional Focusing and I find that very exciting.

The first crucial stage of WBF – which is absent from traditional Focusing – is grounding. I’m familiar with grounding from both my spiritual experience and my embodiment training, so at first assumed I knew what this involved. But I realised that WBF grounding was something subtly different. My usual grounding process is to sense the weight of my body on the ground, feeling my weight as if I were a rock on the earth or visualizing myself as a tree with roots deep in the soil. WBF involves a similar sensing of our physical selves, but also opens out to relationship with everything else. Astrid Schillings calls it ‘grounding into being here (Dasein)’ (2014) to emphasizes how it requires both being in the world and being with others. Through grounding into being here we become aware of the body as “an ongoing interaction with its environment” (Gendlin, 1992). We thus become grounded in “all the ongoing interactions that we are” (Schillings, 2014).

There are many crossovers with other ideas I’ve explored here. I’m especially struck by how WBF seems to relate to ecopsychology, notably my experiences with Focusing in nature which now seems more like Wholebody Focusing in nature. WBF might also offer a new way of understanding my experience of sensing the pulse of the seasons at Imbolc last year. It’s a powerful approach and I’m already finding that WBF is enhancing my spiritual practice and my therapeutic work. My sense is that WBF could be a space where many themes of the body mind place meet.

Focusing: A tool for troubled times

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I’ve been feeling unsettled over the few days and I’m not alone. Many of us feel the chill shadow of uncertainty cast by the events of the last few months. What’s the best response to such troubled times?

The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr offered us a prayer which I find valuable:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Reinhold’s prayer implores God to grant serenity, courage and wisdom. I’m going to take some theological liberties, and suggest that an embodied approach – which for some of us is fundamentally spiritual – can facilitate that work beautifully.

Experiential Focusing provides a means of accessing the wisdom of the body. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but it’s worth repeating because it reminds us that we have the power to find serenity, courage and wisdom within.

First serenity. Ann Weiser Cornell draws on Focusing to offer a simple but effective way to be with difficult feelings. Instead of identifying with your emotions, which often means they overwhelm you, she explains how to be with your feelings.

Next, let’s consider how we might find the courage to create change. Mary Hendricks-Gendlin claims that:

“Focusing is a force for peace because it frees people from being manipulated by external authority, cultural roles, ideologies and the internal oppression of self attacking and shame”.

If you’re intrigued to know why Mary holds that belief, read her article on Focusing as a Force for Peace: The Revolutionary Pause.

The ‘revolutionary pause’ is just one of the valuable tools Focusing offers to help us change things. Focusing skills have been taught to activists to since the Vietnam War protests of the 1970’s. Rather more recently I’ve facilitated training in Focusing skills for activists and advocated using it as a tool for the Transition Towns movement.

Where does all this leave prayer? I have no doubt about how the divine – however you understand that – provides spiritual inspiration. The BioSpiritual Focusing website puts it well:

“In their connection to the Universe our bodies are our direct link to the Spirit that fills the Universe”.

Imbolc: The Pulse of the Seasons

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February 2nd is the Pagan festival of Imbolc, and to celebrate I went for a long walk in the countryside. Imbolc is the time of ‘the quickening of the year’ when the first signs of the coming Spring appear, & many Pagans honour Brigid, the great Celtic Mother Goddess. Some Pagans are quite particular about the date that they celebrate the festivals, but many, including me, go with the day that feels right. It was UK Shaman Gordon MacLellan that really got me thinking about this. Rather than following the traditional dates of the Pagan Wheel of the Year, Gordon senses the “changing pulse” of the seasons (Harris, 2008). Gordon seems to be using a “bodily sensed knowledge” which Gendlin calls a “felt sense” (Gendlin, 1981) and it’s that same felt sense of change that guides me to the time to celebrate.

I’ve done this same walk at various times of the year, but this particular Imbolc there was something in the woods and fields that felt particularly powerful. I was walking across a barren muddy field patterned with the stubble of dead stalks. A cold wind was blowing and the Sun sat low in the sky.

Trees at dawn

Suddenly I felt a tingling as a wave of energy flowed up my body from the land. As I looked at the dark earth, I had a mental image of the virile stems of the growing crop I’d seen in that very spot last Summer. In fact it was much more than an mental image; it was a powerful felt sense of the fecundity of the land. The fullness of the ripe crop in Summer and the dark quietude of the sleeping land in Winter were simultaneously present the quickening of Imbolc : it was if I could sense the whole cycle of the seasons in one moment.