Dr. Eugene Gendlin shows how Focusing is helpful.

J. asks ‘When I do meditation I feel it achieves the same as that of Focusing, in that it’s a way of getting into Presence. What are the differences with Focusing? And in what life situations is Focusing the better tool?’

Both meditation and Focusing enable you to access Presence.

However, whereas one of the purposes of meditation is for you to become established in a state of being in Presence, Dr. Eugene Gendlin says Focusing is more often a vehicle for enabling felt shifts and inner changes to occur. So what life situations might call for inner change? There are two main entry points for Focusing. The first is when you have a problem or something feels stuck and not working in your life. The second is when you are working on a creative endeavour, and you need to sense inside for the right next step.

When you have a problem, and you decide to use Focusing to help you, you do not move away from the problem into a state of being in Presence, thereby sidestepping the issue and going towards a good feeling. What you do is turn towards the bad feeling with compassion and curiosity and find out more about it. You can enquire into it, and ask it what gets it feeling so bad; sad, angry or fearful; whatever it is feeling. You do not move away from it into a state of being in Presence.

Focusing was developed when Professor Eugene Gendlin of the University of Chicago worked with Carl Rogers in the 1950s and 60s. He researched the question: ‘Why is psychotherapy helpful for some people, and not others?’  He and his colleagues studied tapes of hundreds of therapy sessions and made an important discovery, that successful therapy clients had a vague, hard to describe inner awareness; a bodily felt sense about their problems.

Paying attention to the ‘felt sense‘ in specific ways proved to be the key component of successful psychological change. Dr. Eugene Gendlin discovered how to teach this skill, which he called ‘Focusing’.

Dr. Eugene Gendlin says, ‘Focusing is a mode of inward bodily attention that is not yet known to most people. 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 unconscious. Most people don’t know that a bodily sense of any topic can be invited to come in that zone, and that we can enter into such a sense.’

Eugene Gendlin explains further, ‘What is split off, not felt, remains the same. When it is felt, it changes. Most people don’t know this! They think that by not permitting the feeling of their negative ways they make themselves good. On the contrary, that keeps these negatives static, the same from year to year. A few moments of feeling it in your body allows it to change. If there is in you something bad, sick, or unsound, let it inwardly be and breathe. That’s the only way it can evolve and change into the form it needs.’

The Focusing way of being with something in you that feels angry, sad, upset or painful is to find out how that feeling is living in your body. How do you actually experience the painful feeling and what does it actually feel like? You might start with an overall or general feeling of discomfort. As you stay with it, it gradually reveals more information to you. You will need to be patient and willing to take some time.

After a while, what was a general feeling becomes more specific. You will be able to identify exactly where in your body you feel it; your chest or your stomach, for instance. And you will be able to describe exactly how it feels there. What words, phrases or images come that would help you to describe it? What was a general feeling of unease becomes very specific. What comes is often surprising. You couldn’t make it up. A Focuser I know describes this process as bringing fresh metaphors every day.

Eugene Gendlin discovered that the words or image has come from somewhere, and your body confirms it, by being able to breathe more easily, and by releasing tensions that have been held there. You feel more relaxed and easier in yourself. As you said in your question, you have moved more towards a state of being in Presence. And you have also addressed and taken steps towards resolving whatever was painful in your life.