When you are Focusing, it helps to develop your capacity for awareness.
This deepens and enriches your Focusing and brings lasting change into your life…. You can find your awareness in your mind, in your heart or in your belly. You can look for it where it is most accessible, in external sensory awareness, or internal awareness.
Pain
When the body speaks through sensations
It’s not easy to be with something that feels uncomfortable, and it’s also hard when you don’t know what it’s about, or why it is there.
It might be a feeling of tightness or constriction in the throat or chest, or any kind of physical sensation that causes discomfort…
Something in you is feeling discomfort and it is showing you through the symptoms of the painful body sensations.
What does it mean to take care of yourself?
How many times do we say to each other, ‘take care’, or ‘take good care of yourself’, or ‘look after yourself’, usually as a way of saying goodbye?
Do we really take care of ourselves? Do you?
What often stops us is lack of time, or perhaps an unwillingness to slow down, pause and listen, and take the action that is needed.
Sometimes we may not listen because we don’t want to hear what our body tells us.
Focus on the positive
In these difficult times, it’s easy to get sucked into negative feelings.
In the winter, when the days are dark, many people struggle with minor and major physical ailments, and it can be easy to fall into a negative pattern of thinking and feeling.
It’s sometimes hard to pull ourselves out of negative ways of being. These days also carry the weight of world issues…
When I find something difficult in my Focusing, I go to a soothing peaceful place.
A Focuser says: ‘Sometimes when I find something difficult in my Focusing, I go to a soothing peaceful place with a calm peaceful lake and I feel much better.’
There is nothing wrong with doing this.
…This enables you to give your friendly, non-judgemental attention to whatever is difficult.
As long as you don’t stop there…
Focusing with climate change and other world events
How can we live with the distress caused by climate change, Brexit and other major world events; with climate change being the biggest challenge to us all?
…My experience is that I have lived with the anguish and distress all my life. It’s under the surface much of the time. Periodically I turn towards it, and simply listen….
What comes is how much sadness and pain is there. Something in me finds it unbearable…
As well as hopelessness, I also sensed and recognised the enormous hopefulness I feel…
Don’t just focus on the problem
A Focuser says, ‘Sometimes if I Focus on the problem, it just gets worse. Maybe it’s best if I don’t think about it. How does Focusing help?’
It’s true that when you Focus on a problem, it can seem to get worse. This is what I call intensification. What is happening is that when you bring your attention to something, you become more acutely aware of the pain it is carrying.
Focusing with Joy
Usually most of us tend to go towards what feels difficult or problematic in our lives, and this is naturally right and proper.
I also wonder how often we Focus with what feels good in our lives.
I suggest that it is helpful to spend at least some time in every session with what feels good. And then to identify and to Focus with exactly how it feels good, and where in your body does it feel good. There are a number of reasons why it is helpful…
Inner conflict – Part 1
Conflicting feelings
H. writes, ‘I’m very aware that in a Focusing session, there are several parts of me that want a stake in the process! …How would you suggest addressing this whole scenario of conflicting parts trying to get a piece of the action…?
Feeling stuck in your life?
When does Focusing help?
Both meditation and Focusing enable you to get into Presence. Whereas the goal of meditation is for you to become established in a state of being in Presence, Focusing is more often a vehicle for enabling felt shifts and inner changes to occur. So what life situations might call for inner change?
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