Focusing

Focusing invites the person to connect to bodily wisdom and to enter the unknown through the unclear sensations that hold the meaning of the emotional conflict stored in the body. During the conflict the person experiences a blockage in the flow and movement, and these blockages often arise from personal fears, assumptions or the inability to deal with the tension of the situation. In order to make a deeper connection, the person needs to engage the cognitive, emotional and behavioural aspects by locating and asking the sensations about the problem. Consequently, the connections made will inform the feelings, thoughts and actions of the individual.

Focusing produces bodily shifts, which could be a feeling of relaxation, stabilising of heart rate and breathing, which in turn plays an important part in the behavioural reactions during the distressing situation. This somatic processing called a ‘felt shift’ is a connection or transfer of knowledge between the levels of awareness, manifests in a tangible shift in a body experience – a feeling of relief, release, or resolution. Thus, the practice is able to produce embodied shifts in being and behaviour and help the person to develop both feeling and thinking by engaging cognitive perceptions together with the inner bodily sensing. The practice can teach the client to stay present in the distressing situation by paying attention to their bodily being.

Thus the role of the therapist is of a facilitator who is helping the client to hear the messages and to find the right symbolizations in which the bodily experience can move further into meaning. The expertise is given back to the person, who is learning to experience the situation fully through the body without giving in to the impulse of fleeing the distress through dissociation; thus, one is learning to act according to a deeper meaning one embodies. The teaching of accessing such embodied understanding is now widely practiced and taught as a skill in various different fields, such as hospital patients, overcoming poverty in Ecuador, medical decision making, and business corporations.