A Focuser says, ‘I love your Focusing CD. But listening to it, I got desperate.’

A. I suggest that you slow down when you practice Focusing. Taking your time allows the process to deepen, and unfold at your own pace.

In our culture, we rarely take the time to slow down, stop and really listen. We are conditioned to believe we have to give a fast answer; that there’s no time to wait for a slow unfolding. We’re impatient, and expect the answer to our dilemma to arrive instantly, if not yesterday. We also expect instant clarity. I must know the answer to a problem or I am failing. I am inadequate; not up to it.

Life is a process, unfolding at its own rate of change. If you want to change something in your life that is not working, you can help it to change by working with the process of change, rather than against it.

What are the best conditions for change to occur? When something feels stuck, how can we help it to unstick? Gene Gendlin, who developed Focusing, says when a natural life process is stopped, what is needed is to supply the thing that is implied, but didn’t happen. It doesn’t need to happen in the exact same way that would have happened in the past, if the process had not been stopped. For instance, if the baby didn’t get the mother love, or the carer love it needed, at the moment when it needed it, the lived experience of being cared for didn’t happen. It continues to be implied, or wanted, in the stopped process. We can’t go back and make happen what didn’t happen then, but we can give the inner infant the care and the love that it wanted, in the present moment now. This is how healing can happen, experientially lived in the present moment, many years later. It won’t be in the same way, but you can offer it what it needs.

It is important that you ‘get it’, exactly as it is, when you err Focusing. You need to be able to identify and differentiate exactly how it feels. There may be a feeling in the body which is hard to define. Images or metaphors may come which show you how it feels there. There may be words coming into your mind that seem to fit somehow. They are somehow right, in relation to what you are feeling in your body

‘Instances’ or examples may come to mind, when you experienced that same kind of feeling. You might remember there was a time when you felt vulnerable, mad the people around you didn’t understand, and this inner child place in you felt that same kind of not-being-cared-for, that you feel now in your body.

By listening to it, attending to it in an open and caring way, you are giving it the kind of loving attention and caring that it needed back then as an infant, and then, and then, in later life situations. If begins to fill itself in. What was missing then is here now. You can get specific by asking what it wants, what kind of company it would like, once you have made good contact with it. And then wait patiently in the wordless place. The body process needs time and space in which to unfold. This is real Focusing.