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A breakthrough method of "unlocking the wisdom within your body" to solve specific problems and achieve dramatic personal growth and change� This original, innovative program of self-therapy enables you to tap into your deepest level of wisdom, the "gut-level" knowledge that already exists within your body. By accessing this subliminal body-mind awareness (or "felt sense") that lies beyond thoughts and feelings, you can get to the root of the conflicts within you, gain a fuller comprehension of your unresolved problems, and solve them. What is focusing? It is a technique of self-therapy that teaches you to identify and change the way your personal problems concretely exist in your body. Unlike methods that stress "getting in touch with your feelings," there is a built-in test: each focusing step, when done correctly, is marked by a physical relief, a profound release of tension. Focusing guides you to the deepest level of awareness within your body. It is on this level, unfamiliar to most people, that unresolved problems actually exist, and only on this level can they change. Both a practical guide and a powerful philosophy of personal growth, this effective, proven procedure has wide-ranging applications, including healing, education, business, creative pursuits, and problem solving.… (more)
User reviews
It is a book I will have to buy since I can’t fully get how to “focus” just be reading the book once. It will need to be practised and worked with.
The book tells us how to contact our body, ask it questions and get answers.
It
Traditional therapy often doesn’t succeed. The skill of focusing can help those people.
Focusing “will enable you to find and change where your life is stuck, cramped, hemmed in, slowed down. And it will enable you to change – to live from a deeper place than just your thoughts and feelings”.
People can do focusing for themselves and with each other.
The change process in focusing feels good. The skill is not easy to explain and many people (like me) can do it only after practice.
In focusing you make contact with “a special kind of internal bodily awareness – a ‘felt sense’”.
A felt sense is not an emotion - “it is vague and murky. It feels meaningful but not known. --- When you learn how to focus, you will discover that the body finding its own way provides its own answer to many of your problems.”
“The process brings change.”
A therapist is not necessary. “By yourself or with a friend who knows how and when to keep quiet, you can achieve focusing results,”
“Only your body knows your problems and where their cruxes lie.”
Focusing consists of six movements. When these are successful there is a physical change in the body, a felt shift. Then the problem seems different.
The nature of the problem changes as each shift comes. “Without tapping the deeper bodily level, which is at first always unclear, one would stay stuck with the thoughts and feelings of what the problem appears to be at the beginning.”
What the problem seems to be about changes with each bodily shift.
One effect of the focusing process is to bring hidden bits of personal knowledge up to the level of conscious awareness. But the body shift, the change in a felt sense, is the heart of the process.
A felt sense will shift if you approach it in the right way. When your felt sense of a situation changes, you change, and therefore so does your life.
It is an “unfamiliar deep-down level of awareness” that psychotherapists have not found.
The stages of focusing are a bit complicated so I can’t explain them here.
I do not find the process easy, in fact I can’t at present even feel any “felt sense” but I absolutely believe that focusing is something that is possible to learn and that it will be helpful for me when I do.
Gendlin provides us with elucidating and convincing case histories of people he has helped with focusing.
The book also includes a very useful chapter called “The listening manual” explaining how to listen optimally.
Focusing can help free stuck relationships, even those which have been stuck for a long time.
Though this is an old book I have found a bookshop on the net where I can order it and will do so.
I can firmly recommend the book.