This series will point to ways that Focusing can help us access, deepen, embody, and integrate “luminous” or “heightened” states and experiences.

This first post on this theme offers a short tour of several kinds of experiences – some of what can show up or be invited through Focusing.

As this is a vast field, let’s start gently, with a bit of history:

Focusing emerged from research on outcomes of therapy clients about 60 years ago. This breakthrough has opened doors for many people to have powerful ways to help themselves and others navigate difficulties. It also can give an impression that Focusing is primarily for working with problems and issues. This can limit a realization of how much more is possible through Focusing.

Two pioneers in bringing Focusing to spirituality - Ed McMahon and Peter Campbell - described Focusing as a body-based spirituality, and created “Biospiritual Focusing” in the 1970s. More details are available on the International Focusing Institute website: https://focusing.org/biospirit

(They link to the main Biospiritual website .You can find more here )

Gene Gendlin wrote that a bodily felt sense of anything can be invited to form. Sometimes, I have found that they invite themselves!

Some of these experiences feel deep, others can feel “larger than life”, profoundly sacred, or very powerful energetically. Here are a few examples, each quite different:

I. “God” shows up in a Focusing session:

Back in 1991, while working at an HMO, a local media personality was referred to me for stress reduction. I guided him through Focusing, which he found quite helpful.

About the third or fourth session, he had a felt sense of something different.

As he stayed open to what was happening, being with his felt experience, he suddenly described feeling something that felt much greater. It was quite profound; he was very touched.

I encouraged him to keep the connection and just be with it, which he did.

At some point, he said “I feel God with me!”

He stayed with the experience of this Presence feeling very close to him, connecting, comforting…. It felt both powerful and gentle at the same time.

I was quite surprised, held space, and a listening attitude. This continued for the remainder of the session, and he felt quite moved by it.

Sadly, I have no further follow up for you. Honored and intimidated by the power of his experience, I did not set up any further visits. As he was in contact with this powerful spiritual presence, I assumed that I did not have much to offer in comparison to God’s presence once God showed up for him.

[If I had known then what I have learned since, I would have offered a few gentle suggestions, and stayed open to the layers of unfolding in future sessions. More on that in the next blog posting.]

II. “You can’t say ‘Hello’ to Me! 😊 “

Over 20 years ago, during a scheduled Focusing session with a partner, I was being with a very angry place inside of me that felt quite scary.

As my companion gently invited: “What feels like the best way to be with that intensely angry and scary place inside?”, I had a very unusual sequence occur.

Generally, my Focusing does not involve imagery or motion sequences. But this time, what came was:

“I want to ring its doorbell and then run away before it can see me!”

What?! This did not sound like any Focusing experience I have ever heard anyone describe before…

But I did feel a great deal of delight in this – quite the contrast from feeling the fear and feeling helpless.

It got even sillier. I imagined placing dog poop on the doormat of the house where the angry place lived, placing newspapers over all that. Then lighting it on fire, quickly ringing the doorbell and running around the corner to peek and watch when the angry place went to stamp out the fire on its doormat.

I was aware of how inappropriate and juvenile this would be in real life, but there was a felt rightness to allowing the process to unfold in its own way, so I went with this within the Focusing space. There was a lot of laughing on my part as this happened.

Within about two minutes, an incredible warmth came over me, and I felt a deep Something that began to greet me and be with me in the way that I can be with people I dearly love, such as my children.

[ “I” had previously sometimes felt that warmth ‘in my body’, but I had never felt it towards ‘my sense of me’ before.]

Coming back to more standard Focusing, I acknowledged it, and I started to say “Hello” to it.

To my surprise, with an incredible love and sweetness, it replied:

“You can’t say hello to me – I AM Hello!”

It smiled and laughed at me. Then we both laughed and smiled together.

Wow, felt nice to have Hello move through me. Quite fascinating and lovely to feel that pure essence of warm welcoming actually greeting me. “I” didn’t need to even do the loving and caring. I could relax into the experience and not have to work at ‘being present’ or ‘inviting caring or presence’. I could just rest into the experience.

[Looking back, my sense is that this wouldn’t have been able to occur until I allowed this silly prankster in me to offer its gift in my psyche! A good lesson in how all parts of the personality have the potential for life-forward movement in them.]

This event had long lasting effects. After this experience, there was an ongoing shift in my Focusing - the beginning of what I call ‘being Focused’.

Rather than intentionally directing my Focusing, I simply got quiet, tended to my body and mind, and felt what I felt, and let “it” do what it wanted. I didn’t need to offer guiding suggestions, because “it” guided me. Not only that, but instead of “me” asking, resonating, or attempting to ‘be with’ something, “It” would be with “me”!

III. Visit From the Future

A friend of mine, a social activist, told me of his first Focusing session.

While being guided, he had a sense of something unclear but quite significant. (Classic Focusing – unclear, fuzzy felt sense….)

What happened as he stayed with it, was not classic at all.

Some kind of being or cluster of beings in one space became present!

As he stayed with it, allowing things to unfold, it took more form. It gave its name as SevGen, informing him that it was a presence of the next seven generations clustered together – both discrete and yet one entity.

It then described/displayed a bleak set of scenarios of what was to come for the next seven generations if nothing were to change, and urged him to do something to help the world avoid that fate – reminiscent in a way of the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come visits Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

As you might imagine, this encounter has shaped and inspired his work ever since.

And, I wonder - when the Native Americans talked about “the impact on the next seven generations” in making their decisions, were they in contact with some presence like this one?

IV. Expanding and Deepening What Animates Us

On a much more everyday level, we can connect with profound qualities and nourishment when Focusing-into processes or practices that have deep meaning or joy for us: skiing, painting, meditation, gardening, hitchhiking, singing in hallways, to name a few - anything that has a deep resonance or nurturance for us. As we explore these things that call to us, that attract and engage us, they offer easy access to powerful connection with deep, often transpersonal, places inside of us.

This does not have to be some huge life calling. it can be a much smaller activity that is special for us.

Why?

Because, in the language of Focusing, a ‘calling’ can be understood as a felt sense of the next steps that the Universe, Spirit, or Life itself is wanting to take through us, into the world.

Therefore, offering Focusing attention to this felt sense of a “calling” puts us in contact with very powerful energies and guidance.

(from https://www.serviceoflife.info/focusing/callings1.html )

One way to do this is through Savoring, described in an earlier blog (https://learnfocusing.substack.com/p/focusing-as-savoring-a-positive-psychology )

This deepens the experience and registers it in our long-term memory, shifting our narrative of ourselves and our experience.

An even more powerful, though less obvious way to do this is to use Focusing to connect with the “something larger” from which the sense of deep meaning originates.

I call this “Focusing Upstream”. This movement may not be habitual for many Focusers, but is quite easy to do once people are invited to do so. In fact, we have offered this process to many people who did not know Focusing, and they were able to access a strong felt sense of this ‘something larger or deeper’.

(The link above is quite clear in itself. However, if you want further description and information about the difference between “Focusing Upstream” and Focusing Downstream”, it can be found here https://www.serviceoflife.info/focusing/lifeflow1.html )

The kinds of questions we ask when we engaging in this movement include:

“What is the essence of this experience for me?”
“What larger or broader ‘something’ is this particular thing an expression of?”

This is like following a flower backwards into the stem, and then into the ground and the roots - try it, and see what opens for you!

In closing, it is my hope that these experiences point to a small portion of the variety of luminous experiences possible – from rather low-key to quite powerful and dramatic.

This area is one that is rarely shared publicly in Focusing. It could be an inspiration if you wish to share your own experiences with luminosity in the Comments section.

In a subsequent post, I shall describe some ways that Focusing can help integrate more powerful luminous experiences, including numinous dreams, ‘spiritual emergence/spiritual emergency’ type situations, and how Parts work can apply even when the ‘part’ is more powerful or larger than ‘we’ are!

Thank you for reading this,

Bruce

A few years ago, during my second year of the Focusing Oriented Therapy and Complex Trauma Training program, the organization running my spiritual director program offered a short course with Frank Rogers Jr. on compassion‑based soul care using Internal Family Systems. Something in the course description caught my attention, so I signed up.

As part of it, Rogers teaches a five‑movement process called PULSE: pay attention, understand empathically, love with connection, sense the sacredness, embrace new life. It’s a way of turning toward one part with curious, non‑judgmental presence, what IFS calls Self‑energy.

I understood the framework, but I didn’t yet know how it fit inside my Focusing practice.

However, over time, I started noticing something. Whenever I go through my Focusing process, it feels spacious. Maybe because there is the entire situation implicitly involved somehow, and I am sensing that. And the felt sense dips in and out of what is “whole.” But there have been occasions when something just wouldn’t budge. Session after session it stayed the same, like a part is tight or repetitive, or simply refuses to come forward.

Bruce Nayowith mentions three ways he works with problems in his own Focusing practice: wearing something out, getting to the heart of the matter, and bringing a higher energy to a lower one. I recognize all three in my own work. And when none of them shift, I found a different way. I am zooming in closer on that part, like switching a microscope to higher magnification for clearer detail.

This is where the PULSE exercise comes into my work. Not as a separate modality, but as a way of meeting one part directly. I sit down with the one place that’s asking for more from me.

The first time I tried this, I used PULSE on just the part that was stuck, my full attention was on just that one part. If other parts wanted to interfere, I asked them to step aside for a little while. It’s almost like PULSE had me sitting down across from one part. And the block shifted. Suddenly there was a whole lot that part had to say.

Since then, this is how I work. If something won’t budge after several attempts, I zoom in with PULSE, and return to Focusing after the block has resolved.

I’ve brought this into my sessions with clients as well. One long-time client, a certified Focusing professional and spiritual director as well, found it so helpful that he went on to take Rogers’ training himself.

If you'd like to try it, pick one part that's been stuck lately. Then go through the five steps below and see what it says when you finally sit down across from it.

Step One
Before you begin the PULSE exercise1, please give yourself a few moments of being still. It might be helpful to close your eyes, and as you do, try slowing down your breathing.

(P) Pay attention:
Turn your attention inward, and allow into your awareness a difficult emotion, thought, or part within you that has been a common companion in your inner world. Without suppressing it, becoming carried away by it, or judging yourself for experiencing it, cultivate a non-reactive, non-judgmental awareness that this emotion is simply present within you.

It may be helpful to:

• refer to the emotion in the third person: ‘Anger is within me,’ as opposed to ‘I am angry.’

• locate the emotion in your body: ‘I am aware of fear tightening my chest.’

• imagine the emotion as held in your hand some distance away from you.

• greet the emotion with an accepting attitude: ‘Welcome anxiety, I accept your presence within me; I trust you are here for a reason.’

Step Two

(U) Understand empathically:

Trusting that this emotion is present for a reason, empathically connect with the suffering hidden within its cry.

Sense from within the emotion:

What is the deep fear underneath it?
What is its deepest longing?
What ache, or buried wound might it carry?
What gift does it offer that may be stifled and obstructed?

Allow its cry to unfold until you feel a sense of deep understanding for the root reasons that it strains to get your attention in the way that it does. As you do this, it may be helpful to invite the emotion to materialize in your imagination as a child or figure, a symbol, a memory, a gesture, or a sound that captures its experience.

Step Three

(L) Love with connection:

As you open in your understanding, extend a warm loving regard toward the emotion and tend to it in any way that helps it feel heard, honored, and cared for.

Allow the emotion to receive the care you offer to it. Soak in this compassionate connection for as long as it feels right.

Step Four

(S) Sense the sacred:

If it feels right, invite a compassionate sacred presence to be with this emotion or its image.

Allow the sacred presence to tend to this emotion in any way that feels healing and restoring. This sacred presence may appear in a variety of forms: a radiant light or the sun’s warmth; a healing energy; an image like cradling hands or an embracing blanket; a divine figure, or an ancestor like a kind-hearted grandmother; a soothing sound or encouraging voice.

Step Five

(E) Embrace new life:

Before you surface from this contemplative space, notice any gift you are receiving from this practice.

Allow this gift to soak into you, seeping into every tissue of your body, and into every part of your inner world.

This grace may be a sense of healing; a gift budding within you; a quality of wholeness or goodness; a power being kindled; or even a deepened awareness of a longing that aches to be satisfied.

About the Author

I’m Simone — an embodied listening practitioner. My background is in engineering geology, and I spent years working in extractive industries before turning toward the intelligence the body carries. I’m interested in what becomes possible when we stop overriding what we sense. More at simoneislistening.com and on Substack at Between & Becoming.

Practice: Felt Sensing Another Person’s Essence, Forming A Symbol, continued

If you would like to listen to the audio version of this blog post, you can find it on YouTube.

In this blog post, we will continue with the Double Empathic Moment, including some frequently asked questions (FAQs) and examples.

The Single Wing of Interactive Focusing

Let’s take a look at what we have discussed so far. The Single Wing of Interactive Focusing, which is the first turn, starts with the Focuser telling their story, then finding the felt sense of “all that”, proceeding with their Focusing turn, and coming to a gentle close.

When to Offer the Double Empathic Moment

At the end of the first Focuser’s turn, the Listener offers the Double Empathic Moment, or “the Golden Moment”, where the Listener takes in how it is for the Focuser, finds the essence of how it is for the Focuser with the Listener’s own body sense, and allows a symbol to form inside, which is then offered to the Focuser.

And the Single Wing is Complete!

This completes the Single Wing of Interactive Focusing, and sets the stage for the “Interactive Response”, in which the second Focuser finds what touched them inside about the first Focuser’s session. We will talk more about the Interactive Response in a future blog post, particularly because it is a departure from the traditional Focusing practice that keeps a separation or boundary between the Focuser’s material and the Listener’s bodily response.

What is it?

Let’s review what a Double Empathic Moment is, and what it is not.

Here are the things the Double Empathic Moment is:

– It is formed in the body sense (felt sense) of the Listener

– It is how the Listener senses the essence of the Focuser’s material

– It is offered as a symbol, such as a word, phrase, sentence, image, gesture, movement, or even a melody or dance step

– It is brief

– It is respectful

– It is positive

– It is formed from, or related in, different words than the words the Focuser used

– It is a gift from the Listener to the Focuser

What is it Not?

Here are the things the Double Empathic Moment is not:

– It is not the Listener’s own experience of something similar to what the Focuser has said

– It is not the Listener’s advice on what they think the Focuser should do

– It is not the Listener’s judgment or criticism, however gentle, of what the Focuser has said

– It is not what the Listener would do if they found themselves in the situation the Focuser describes

– It is not what the Listener wishes could be true for the Focuser

– It is not what the Listener hopes the Focuser will reach, achieve, find, or otherwise evolve into

– It is none of what our usual cultural or societal norms encourage us to bring to the relationship

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the purpose of the Double Empathic Moment?

The double empathic moment offers a golden opportunity to improve a relationship, instead of what has become a common cultural pattern of parting ways, or ending a relationship when there is conflict.

What is an example of a symbol given in a double empathic moment?

From my own personal experience, I was demonstrating the Double Empathic Moment in a group of Focusers. There was one gentleman who was new to Focusing. I offered a short piece of story and felt sensing, and he offered a symbol of a deep well and what could be seen from the top of the well. It was perfect! It touched me deeply and it helped my felt sense to shift a bit from where it had been before.

What this helped me to see is that this process of sensing into the essence of another person’s experience does not require advanced skills. It requires a willingness, and perhaps a surrender to the process, but even a newcomer to Focusing is able to sense into and symbolize how it is for another person.

Do you have to be an experienced Focuser to practice the Double Empathic Moment?

Perhaps not! It helps, but in this and subsequent posts, we will try to make it easy enough to understand and apply for everyone.

Can you use the double empathic moment in a traditional Focusing session?

One of my Focusing partners and I enjoy what we call “breaking the rules”. By this, we do not mean serious or important rules, regulations, or laws! We mean to innovate! Sometimes, when we have conversations that are not strictly Focusing sessions, we will stop, and give each other an empathic essence, or symbol, from the conversation. It works quite well!

So yes, in agreement between two partners, it is possible to have a Double Empathic Moment in a Focusing session, or even a conversation. What is important is this: 1) both partners agree, 2) both partners participate, each offering a symbol to the other in turn, 3) judgment, criticism, advice or the like are left strictly out of the process, 4) each partner offers story and felt sense in their turn as Focuser -- otherwise it may be too difficult for the listener to capture the essence.

Questions? We have Answers!

If you have any questions or comments, especially about applying what we have described here about the Double Empathic Moment, we would love to hear from you! Please leave a comment below!

Next time...

In our next blog post, we will talk about The Interactive Response, where the first Listener becomes the second Focuser and notices what touched them about the first Focuser’s experience.

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In March 2025, Barbara Dickinson issued a clear call to action: a “Help Wanted” message to create an On-Demand Digital Course for Interactive Focusing learners. Barbara’s core mission is to bring this specialized form of Focusing to more people in a way that is durable and accessible, independent of teacher availability, time zones, or schedules. In the international world of Focusing, keeping access open means people can practice at their own pace even when a live teacher isn’t around.

Team Formation: The Magic of Strengths

Three people from around the globe answered Barbara’s call, quickly forming a team with the perfect breadth and depth of skills, energy, and commitment. Barbara was amazed when all the needed expertise “magically” appeared—technology, curriculum design, writing, graphics, and even a “Team Shepherd” guiding the process. Barbara, Ash, Mara and Tobi became the core production team, with a few others forming our advisers behind the scenes, offering periodic work reviews, inputs, and support. From there, instead of assigning tasks top-down, we grew into a much more self-directed way of working.

Roles are Explored: We each explored the roles we feel drawn to, whether based on prior experience or areas for growth. It is less about top-down assignment and more about discovering and honoring what energized each person.

Honoring Gifts and Gaps: We intentionally leaned into our natural strengths while also learning to recognize where someone else’s strengths could support us. This built a crucial awareness of both our gifts and our gaps, strengthening the trust in each other’s unique contributions.

The result is a model of team formation, working with strengths, and, most recently, deep bonding into the feel of a kind of “family.”

Focusing-Style Management: Attunement and Process

The team’s operational methods intentionally move beyond standard business practices, creating what they call a “Focusing Style” of organization:

Focusing-Oriented Team Building: Meetings begin with check-ins that invite presence and emotional honesty. This practice is the foundation for co-creating a space of attunement and care, making the work feel more alive and less transactional.

Project Management (Felt-Sense Informed): Even setting timelines and action items holds the spirit of Focusing. We listen for what wants to happen, notice where there’s inherent energy or hesitancy, and allow for a more felt-sense-informed way of organizing. This approach is slower in some ways, but it’s incredibly sustaining.

This commitment to presence led the team to make a critical realization early on: for the team to thrive, they needed a balance of work and play. This birthed something we call ...

The Interactive Focusing Playground

The Interactive Focusing Playground occupies approximately every other meeting. This space is dedicated to experiential learning and shared exploration—a commitment that keeps the process alive and rooted in the team’s own inner connection.

This balance means part of the team’s time is dedicated to being in the process themselves (learning and growing), and part is focused on building the course. It’s an approach that ensures the course is not just a product, but a deep reflection of the team’s transformative experience.

The team views our business check-ins as fertile ground for “Thinking at the Edge” of standard practices. By cultivating emotional honesty and deep presence, the team is better able to identify and respond to the productive patterns that emerge in the work itself. 1

The Path to Completion

Looking back, how did we actually pull this together? Here is how traditional business wisdom met our Focusing style, how that “family” dynamic snuck up on us, and where we stand today.

From Team to “Family” Feel

The deep bonding that has emerged into the feel of a “family” wasn’t forced; it arose from a shared intention to be present, listen deeply, and allow ourselves to be seen. One key realization that emerged reminds us of Dr. Eugene Gendlin’s description of meaning as it relates to the words we use - like “family” - that mean different things to different people. For us, this word means “the kind of family we want to have.”

The trust created, built through practices like emotionally honest check-ins, has become a resource in itself—a feeling one team member shared by saying that “life has already improved by learning and interacting in what begins to feel like ‘family’ on this Team.” For Barbara, making lives better in interaction is what this Team is all about.

A Fit with Traditional Business Resources

Our innovative, felt-sense approach hasn’t turned its back on traditional resources. One of Barbara’s core commitments is to leverage her long experience in government, finance, and management. She views this traditional expertise as a valuable toolkit, sharing what she knows with the group: strategic planning, project management, risk assessment, production management, public relations, and more. The team utilizes this expertise effectively, viewing it as complementary once the Focusing foundation is secure.

A Felt-Sense Informed Timeline

The team is now making the final production “push” for our beta testing window this August (2026), with a public rollout following in September. As this is an innovative process in uncharted territory—a true instance of “thinking at the edge”—the expected completion took longer than it might have using more traditional methods, but the team is convinced its process improves significantly on past experiences, perfectly illustrating the principle of allowing for a felt-sense-informed way of organizing. The team recognizes that the value is in the sustaining process itself.

“Time abides long enough for those who make use of it.” (Leonardo da Vinci)

The extra time is worth every minute of this unique Team Building Focusing Style, ensuring the final product reflects the depth and transformative experience of the process.

The Team: Barbara D, with Ash H, Mara C, Tobi V and our Behind-The-Scenes Teammates

• For more about our Digital Course for Exploring Interaction, and our opportunities to learn Focusing and more, connect with us at LearnFocusing.org

Different people and schools offer potentially-contradictory wisdom about how to engage problems and challenges. It all seems useful and correct, but, how to resolve the differences?

Something that really helped me came from my friend and Focusing partner, the late Bruce Gibbs, who would quote his teacher:

“There are three ways to solve a problem:

1. Wear it out

2. Get to the heart of the matter

3. Bring a higher energy to a lower one”

Each is different.

Each can work, or not work, at times.

And, these can be done separately, in combination with each other.

I hope that this post may invite you to become more aware of your own processes around problem-solving and navigating challenges, honor the diversity of approaches, and even open some new possibilities for you.

1. Wear the problem out.

“Keep on keeping on”

This is a solid approach – persistence. Continually trying, maybe trying harder, or longer…

There are many popular movies that showcase the heroism of persistence – personal or team achievements from staying dedicated and committed to a goal or mission. I find these quite inspiring – a triumph of the human spirit.

There may be a pushing through difficulties, or, like water wearing down a stone or plowing a field before planting, it may be a long road.

Sometimes we also wear ourselves out, in the process.

There can be wisdom in persistence, and there can be wisdom in letting go of what is not working.

In the song The Gambler, Kenny Rogers sings “You’ve got to know when to hold them. Know when to fold them. Know when to walk away, know when to run…”

So, when is effort useful? When is it too much?

Here are two famous quotes about this, each pointing to a different aspect of this:

This one, by Jacob Riis, points to staying with it, having a kind of faith in persistence:

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.

Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

While this quote (often misattributed to Albert Einstein) speaks to the wisdom of recognizing the futility of an unproductive strategy:

“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results”

When it is persistence like the stonecutter?

When it is “insanity”?

Determination, steadfastness are praised as virtues.

They are.

On the other hand, what allows us to let go cycles and patterns that are not working, is the emotional registration of futility.

When the futility of what we are striving for registers in the emotional body as well as cognitively: “Oh, this will never work”, letting the sadness and despair register, the circuits of intense trying often go offline. You may not know what to do, but you know what not to continue doing… Something opens and releases.

When to hold on? When to let go?

This is a profound polarity – one with no ‘solution’, but one to be navigated as we move through life.

Our own histories, personalities, and available support affect this.

When I do feel inspired to make such efforts in relation to various challenges, profound things often occur. However, I do not feel inspired to do this very often.

I tend to wait until I get a felt sense of “This is the time to do it” or “This is not the time to invest so much effort and attention”. This often means that I wait around for that feeling, for the vague felt sense that I tend to trust. Am I holding myself back from opportunities and richness by doing this? Perhaps; I honestly do not know.

In 1987, I had been having recurrent sore throats and fevers lasting several days every few weeks for about a year.

Then, I began experiencing stomach distress every time I tried to prepare for my classes – strong enough to make it very difficult to concentrate and work on them.

After three weeks of that, I decided to Focus on the stomach distress. (I happened to be in the midst of an episode of fever and sore throat at the same time. )

Fed up, I sat down on my couch, determined to stay with it until something shifted.

“I am not getting up until I get to the bottom of this!”

I literally forced my attention down into my abdomen and invited a felt sense around it all to come, bringing myself back there again and again when my attention wandered.

This involved some driving and pushing energy.

Now, dear reader, if you are thinking “That is NOT what they teach in Focusing!” you are absolutely right!

I was determined, curious, probing – not gentle nor accepting.

But, skillful or not, it was very powerful – you can read more about it in this short article which was published in the 1999 Focusing Folio (https://serviceoflife.info/focusing/sorethroat.pdf )

This points to the power, in certain circumstances, of intention and determination.

I do not hear much about this taught in Focusing, but in this particular case, the combination of determination and sensing-into, and then asking some of the Focusing questions was quite effective.

That is an understatement. It was extraordinarily effective. Yes, my stomach symptoms went away, not to return. More surprisingly and powerfully, my recurrent sore throat and fever resolved in under 2 minutes, not to return. My immune system could regulate itself once the deep fears and tightness underneath the symptoms had shifted.

There are numerous instances of determination in Scripture – one of my favorites is in Genesis 32:22–32, where Jacob wrestles with some being (a man or an angel – this is translated differently by different people) by the Jordan River. The being asks Jacob to let him go, and Jacob responds “I will not let you go unless you bless me” , holding onto him, wrestling, the entire night.

This account speaks to persistence in faith, and a transformation through struggle. Staying with it, wearing it out.

I find that account very inspiring, as I sometimes, when dealing with something important, I find myself taking the attitude of : “I will not let you go unless you bless me” – staying with something, struggling, bringing my attention back to it again and again, until its message, or secret, or gift unfolds…

While Focusing is generally considered a very gentle process, sometimes we may need to bring our will and intention to certain situations. I have not heard many people associate these qualities with Focusing, but sometimes there is a felt rightness in this.

It might be useful to occasionally check with mind and body “Does it feel right to continue?

Does it feel right to try harder, or to try softer, or to try different?”

2. Get to the Heart of the Matter

“To do the impossible, one must perceive the invisible”

Focusing is particularly powerful as a way of getting to the heart of a situation - when we need additional depth or perspective, wanting to go below the surface of a situation or problem into subtle dynamics or deeper dimensions. Focusing was given that name from its capacity to allow us to be with unclear, deeper aspects of something that we can only feel, and then have words, images, and bodily-felt shifts arise, into focus, from the attentional and relational qualities that we bring to it.

In Focusing we can inquire and sense into challenges and situations in powerful ways, such as:

“What is that really all about?”

“What is underneath all that?”

“What is the worst of this?”

Or “What is the crux of all this?”

Often #1. and #2. go together.

It can take some determination to stay with something uncomfortable, or with something that is not very clear. Gene Gendlin describes this quite well in this 4 minute video on The International Focusing Institute website here

- going back down again and again when we shift our attention to something else.

In my experience with the stomach tightness, the combination of determination to stay with the felt sense plus the sensing into “What is this all about? What is at the bottom of this?” are what led to the release and disappearance of my distress.

3. Bring a Higher Energy to a Lower One

This is one I can easily overlook.

We can work hard to clear obstacles from a river bed, or to sense into what is underneath them, what is sustaining them.

At times, there are ways to “raise the water level” to cover them.

Doing this may offer an experience of buoyancy and perspective that – even if temporary – can give some relief and may help us to re-orient ourselves.

Occasionally the increased flow may push away the “rocks”, creating something more permanent transformative change. (But I would not count on a permanent shift to happen often, without other things to support it.)

I would appreciate and welcome the higher energies when they occurred spontaneously while Focusing, but my natural tendency had been to stay with what is, and not intentionally bring in other elements.

However, the more I explored my preference, the more I began to question it.

On the one hand, trying to bring in other elements and energies can feel like “trying to fix something”, not ‘just being with it’. A ‘spiritual bypassing’ move.

On the other hand, I also noticed some qualities of isolation in myself that may inform my preference. I have places that tell me “You have to deal with this/solve this by myself. Don’t ask for help.” Or worse, “You do not deserve help”.

These voices are reinforced by traditional Western male culture – a strong independent streak – one that does not always serve me well.

So, I found it helpful to hear this statement by Karl-Heinz Rauscher:

“The Greater Forces need to be invited”.

(He adds, “The lesser forces often come in uninvited!”)

This relates to teachings about free will and a friendly universe, and it helps me to remember to be open to this and intentional about asking.

This was common to most indigenous people, who would routinely call upon The Four Directions at the beginning of a ceremony or healing – connecting themselves in a Larger Order, inviting allies from these Directions.

Some simple and common ways of resourcing ourselves in this way including going out into Nature, and inviting others to support us.

One way that this can be done while Focusing is to sense into and ask “What would this feel like (or, what would come in my body) if this were all resolved?”

That often brings about a sense of alignment, flow, openness, and may even shift our sense of the problem, as the body orients and begins to configure into a desired state of wholeness or felt-rightness.

This is the core of many healing practices, including some described by Greg Braden and Lawrence LeShan, where others see/imagine the person in the center as ‘already healed’.

In this case, the ‘state of wholeness’ is accessed by the group, amplified, then reflected back or transmitted to the one needing healing.

Another way is to invite in an Affection Teacher (done in Biospiritual Focusing) - some sense of loving presence to accompany us.

When Ed McMahon, one of the founders of Biospiritual Focusing, would guide someone, he would begin by inviting the person access a sense of someone or something that could hold or love them – what he would call Caring-Feeling Presence.

Only after that was present in the space, would he encourage the person to bring in the problem, challenge, or situation that they wanted to engage with.

That way, the person was in a more resourced state, and not alone with the problem or unpleasant feeling state.

He found that the time spent bringing in this Caring-Feeling Presence into the space was the most important quality needed, and, once it was there, the Focusing went much more smoothly and rapidly.

Incorporating prayer into Focusing, or seeing one’s Focusing on a problem as a prayer, can sometimes also bring higher energies into the space.

Inviting new energies to enter and reconfigure our usual patterns and identifications can be profoundly helpful.

This is an area of great interest to me, and I hope to write about “Focusing and Luminosity” next month.

For now, I shall close with this one-panel summary, hoping that you have found something useful or inspiring in this post – thank you for reading!

I know geology isn’t everyone’s landscape, so stay with me. This isn’t really about rocks. It’s about a way of meeting the world, letting something show its own shape before I name it. A way of listening I didn’t recognize as a form of Focusing until much later.

Learning to identify minerals is mostly a vocabulary of looking. Color. The streak a mineral leaves when you scratch it across a white porcelain plate. How it catches light. How it breaks. You learn this in a lab, with samples in your hand and a checklist in your head. You look and look until the checklist falls away and recognition is simply there. Quartz. Feldspar. Mica. You stop working your way toward the name. You just know it.

That’s the easy part. Rocks in the field are harder. A rock is a natural solid made of one or more minerals that have grown or been cemented together over time. Unlike minerals, which have consistent properties, rocks are mixtures. Their identity comes from the combination of minerals, the size and shape of their grains, and the conditions under which they formed. Out in the field, an outcrop doesn’t hand you a clean sample or a tidy label. It doesn’t introduce itself.

When I was starting out with field mapping, occasionally I knew right away. More often I didn’t. And when I didn’t, the only thing that worked was to stop trying to name it. To stop reaching for “that’s mica” or “that’s pyroxene” before getting more confused. To just notice what was there without deciding what to call it yet. How coarse or fine the grains were. The shapes the crystals wanted to take. The lines it broke along. Cracks running through it. Tiny flecks of another mineral included in the rock. How it sounded and felt when I tapped it with the hammer. No label, just what was actually in front of me, unnamed, while I stayed with it.

And at some point, usually without any effort I could point to, the name came on its own. What kind of rock it was, what it was made of, roughly how it had formed, arriving from somewhere below conscious thought, well after I’d stopped hunting for it.

I didn’t know how this worked, but it mostly did, surprisingly, when I remembered to do it. On my first field mapping course, I had a rock hammer, a hand lens, a map, colored pencils to mark the age and type of surface rocks, ten days alone on four square miles of land, and a professor’s voice telling me I’d see the world differently by the end of it.

But sometimes even that wasn’t enough. I’d stand at one spot, let the labels go, notice everything I could about how the rock looked and felt, and still nothing resolved. No name. Just rock refusing to become anything I could mark on my map. When that happened, the only thing that worked was to let it go entirely. Pack up. Walk to the next spot I’d marked. Watching the ground, the soil, the plants change under my boots as I moved.

And then, while doing something completely unrelated, the name would arrive. Unsummoned. Whole. As if some part of me had kept working on the problem after I’d stopped consciously holding it. That is what Eugene Gendlin calls carrying forward, the body continuing its process in its own way and its own time. In his essay Eternal Return and Experiential Meaning, he makes a related point about nature more broadly: when we stop letting something answer on its own terms, we are left only with what we have already decided about it, cut off from what it actually was. Rush an outcrop to a label before it has had the chance to show you anything, and that is exactly what you lose.

Looking back, I don’t think what I was doing out there was some separate, outward version of Focusing. It was the same thing, the body sensing what is in front of it and letting the meaning form before rushing to a name, whether that is a patch of exposed rock or a felt sense.

Fieldwork taught me that way of being with something first. Focusing gave me language for it decades later. Both come down to the same thing: slowing down and staying with what is here without naming it too soon.

I lost that way of being for a while.

I moved into a role in an industry that ran on a completely different clock. Fast pace, constant demands. Slowing down wasn’t good practice; it was falling behind. Decide, label, move. There wasn’t room to sit with the texture of a problem until an answer surfaced on its own. You were expected to already know, or to find out fast, and either way keep moving.

So I stopped doing it. Not on purpose. It became a way of working I no longer used, and a way of working you stop using starts to fade. Claire Petitmengin has a name for what that industry was actually running on. In her paper Anchoring in Lived Experience as an Act of Resistance, she argues that a culture built on speed and consumption depends on people staying disconnected from their own experience, that the pace itself needs that disconnection to keep going. I didn’t have her paper then. I just had the daily experience of it.

When I started learning Focusing decades later, something about it felt familiar in a way I couldn’t place. I know now what that was. It was the fieldwork, the same instruction coming back after a long absence. Don’t reach for the label. Slow down and stay with the quality. Wait. Be fully present with what is here, whether it is a rock or a felt sense.

In retrospect, I think a lot of what I saw in that fast industry would have gone better with some of that patience built back in. Problems labeled too quickly. Decisions made at the pace the culture demanded instead of the pace the situation actually needed. I’m not saying slow is always right, fieldwork has deadlines too. But there is a difference between moving fast because the situation genuinely calls for it and moving fast because slowing down has been treated as weakness.

I didn’t connect any of this to geology until very recently. I learned this discipline in the field, lost it under the wrong conditions, and rebuilt it through Focusing without realizing I was rebuilding something I already knew how to do. It took a conversation, someone asking the right question, for me to see the whole shape of it. Learned on rock. Set aside under pressure. Found again, with a name attached this time.

I still think about the texture of that waiting, standing in front of a section of outcrop that wouldn’t speak yet. Not passive. Not idle. A kind of active patience, noticing grain, shape, cracks, and texture without gripping toward a name. Present without demanding an answer on command. Letting the landscape speak in its own time. I lost it once, in a place that had no use for it. I found it again in Focusing, with language for it now, and I’m not planning on losing it twice.

Sources:
Gendlin, Eugene T. (1977). Eternal Return and Experiential Meaning. https://focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2221.html
Petitmengin, C. (2021). Anchoring in lived experience as an act of resistance. Constructivist Foundations, 16(2), 172–181. https://constructivist.info/16/2/172

About the Author

I’m Simone — an embodied listening practitioner. My background is in engineering geology, and I spent years working in extractive industries before turning toward the intelligence the body carries. I’m interested in what becomes possible when we stop overriding what we sense. More at simoneislistening.com and on Substack at Between & Becoming.

By Francis Fung and Barbara Dickinson

From Barbara: More than ten years of deep immersion in somatic training culminated this past June at the International Focusing Conference in Vienna, Austria. Standing before the international community alongside my colleague Tobi Vieregge, it felt like the crystallization of a lifelong query. Interpersonal dynamics have not historically been my natural forte. Yet, when I first encountered Interactive Focusing (IF), I understood from a deep body-felt sense that this was a concrete answer to an essential problem: *How do we build true relational resonance, and how do we safely repair the inevitable ruptures that happen between us?

I spent 18 intense months collaborating with my teacher to translate and edit her Japanese curricula into an English format. Yet, as a certified trainer, I soon met a familiar crossroads: traditional classroom teaching did not generate the electric joy of operating within my precise personal strengths. My fulfillment lies in leveraging technology to deliver structured, enduring value.

I formed a cross-continental digital team with three key professionals: Tobi, Ash, and Mara. For the past 18 months, we have poured our collective skills into architecting an on-demand digital course titled ”Exploring Interaction”.

From our inception, we designed our operational culture to actively subvert standard corporate friction. Guided by Dr. Eugene Gendlin’s assertion that we are ”interaction first,” we blended core corporate disciplines with deep somatic checkpoints. I brought the CliftonStrengths framework to ensure we designed roles around what is inherently right with us, alongside standard project management protocols. The rest of the team supplied curriculum design, technology architecture, and a critical systemic role held by Tobi: the Team Shepherd.

Far from being rule-bound or restrictive, our Shepherd acts as the sensory anchor for the group, tracking the subtle climate of “the room”. Tobi has an innate ability to sense when a teammate is experiencing stress, when communication is moving too quickly, or when an unvoiced question is hanging in the air. He safeguards our foundational agreement: *We must live what we teach.* Many years ago, Dr. Gendlin halted a gathering of senior Focusing professionals who, despite their expertise in solo inner listening, were failing to bring reflective presence into their immediate interpersonal friction. They were not pausing, checking their felt sense, or resonating what they heard. To disrupt this habit, our Shepherd flags operational disconnects so we can pause, step out of the project content, and utilize an Interactive Focusing loop. This role deserves formal operational status in every professional environment.

While our work in Vienna demonstrated how Interactive Focusing creates structured safety across global teams, a parallel presentation by Francis Fung shed vital light on the radical diversity occurring inside the individual processing chamber. Presenting his research and lived experience on *Focusing, Trauma, and the Autistic Mind*, Francis discussed the broad spectrum of ways in which individuals can perceive their inner and outer experiences.

Francis described how we can model our perception as a kind of “controlled hallucination” using a predictive processing model that navigates a feedback loop: generating world models (top-down expectations), comparing them against sensory inputs (bottom-up data), and evaluating discrepancies as either meaningless “noise” or an actionable “signal”.

In this conceptualization, autistic neurobiology arises from variations in this processing model:

* **Sensory Weighting:** Autistic brains frequently overweight bottom-up sensory data, making it difficult to naturally tune out environmental background noise, such as the constant hum of a refrigerator.

* **Monotropism:** The cognitive architecture may allocate deep, singular attention to one processing stream, struggling to distribute attention across competing inputs.

Francis discussed several traits that commonly show up in autistic people, and how they can show up within the context of a Focusing relationship, including:

* **Alexithymia:** For many autistic people, difficulty naming emotions creates a reality where internal states must be reverse-engineered from physical body symptoms alone. One may not consciously register anger or distress until the body presents flushed cheeks, clenched fists, or near-total nervous system overload.

* **Aphantasia/Hyperphantasia:** Different people can have highly different experiences of internal visualization, ranging from *aphantasia* (the total absence of internal visual imagery) to *hyperphantasia* (extremely vivid, detailed, multi-sensory internal landscapes).

* **Sensory Differences** Overweighted sensory input can show up as “overwhelm”. Autistic people can also experience being “cut off” from sensory input, particularly interoceptive and proprioceptive input from the body. They can also often exhibit self-stimulatory/self-regulating behaviors (e.g., “happy hand-flapping”).

* **Literal/Metaphorical/Ritualized Communication** Autistic communication can often be precise and binary, which can pose challenges when trying to “get close to” the handle for a felt sense. Autistic people can be very literal and struggle with metaphors, and/or can be very expansive with their metaphors, perceiving subtle, complex patterns and relationships.

Francis discussed various ways in which a Companion can more effectively show up for a Focuser who might be exhibiting these traits, with gentle, empathetic attention that is attuned to these experiences.

When we view these two distinct presentations side-by-side, a compelling speculative frontier emerges that addresses what Dr. Damian Milton calls the **”Double Empathy Problem”**. Traditional medical models often assume that autistic individuals lack empathy or social insight. Reframed by Milton, the disconnect is actually a two-way street: an empathy divide occurring because neurotypicals lack insight into autistic culture and communication, expecting autistics to do all the adaptive work to survive in a majority culture. Traditional Focusing can replicate this divide by placing the companion in a purely passive, reflective role that leaves the Focuser fully responsible for navigating their own internal landscape—a process that can induce cognitive exhaustion or immediate dissociation for a neurodivergent person navigating intense sensory surplus.

This is exactly where the outer architectural safety of **Interactive Focusing** could serve as a valuable evolutionary partner. By shifting the somatic practice from a solo endeavor into an explicitly co-created, “Interaction First” relational container, we naturally alleviate the introspective burden on the individual. The structured exchanges built into IF—such as the explicit use of the *Double Empathic Moment* or the completion of a deliberate *Relationship Check*—provide a clear external scaffold. Rather than expecting one processing style to dominate or conform, Interactive Focusing builds a reciprocal bridge directly over the empathy divide, transforming dialogue into a mutual space of shared discovery, shared responsibility, and equal care.

From September 10–13, we will offer a series of daily opportunities to intentionally explore how to bring Focusing into shared relational spaces and groups. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday - drop in for an event, a day or come for a long weekend.

Some areas we hope to explore are:

What happens when we Focus on our interactive space, and relate to it as we do with ‘internal’ felt senses?
Are there ways to deepen and encourage relationships with these kinds of spaces?

Let’s explore bringing Focusing into relational spaces with sentient life forms (animal, plant, Nature) that do not have the kinds of verbal capacities that humans do.

How can we adapt Focusing to settings such as larger groups and spaces of shared content or potential conflict?

Let’s look at assumptions implicitly built into dyadic turn-taking Focusing that can lead to difficulties in bringing Focusing into other kinds of situations that are set up differently.

What do we need to be aware of in terms of process design, sensing relational fields, and dynamics of mutual triggering?

Are there adaptations we can make that support both reasonable safety AND reasonable effectiveness in group sharing, group processing, or group problem-solving?

Our intention is simple and sincere: to come together in person to hold and honor each other’s inner processes and to create a shared field where something meaningful can unfold. For us, a shared field is always present when two or more are gathered. An activated quality of presence can form in the space between us. This space holds an aliveness from which something new, something implicit, can emerge between us. We will explore this together utilizing numerous relational practices and processes, in line with Gendlin’s Philosophy of the Implicit. Processes already on the agenda include Constellations, NVC, Interactive Focusing, possibly Dynamic Facilitation, along with whatever else folks are bringing.

If you practice felt sensing in your daily life and especially, if you have maintained a partnership practice, we’d love to have you join us. We’ve set up Friday for experienced Focusers to dive deeper into the woods with an Open Space agenda. We’ve rented Anahata Education Center. There are a variety of niches for us to gather in. Here, participants co-create workshop experiences. Have something you’d like to try out with a group of Focusers? Bring it here!

We’ve planned the weekend to welcome all skill levels. If you are curious about relational spaces and shared fields, then please join us! We will tap into some of what Floyd offers as a tourist town by organizing a Treasure Hunt guided by our felt senses. Visitors love dipping into what we offer here and we will weave in opportunities for you to dip into the nature, arts, music, food and way we create community here that brings visitors back.

You might find yourself “splashing” into a new awareness, or gently allowing something within you to come forward that has been waiting for just this kind of space. We would love for you to join us in Floyd for this unfolding experience. Our schedule is in place, we have a summary on our webpage HERE.

In line with our intention to keep event costs low, you will be invited to find your own place to stay. There is a link on the bottom of our webpage to view lodging options organized by our Visitor Center. Staying near or at Anahata or near the center of town (intersection of Hwy 8 and Hwy 221- Main Street) are suggested.

More details coming as our registration process comes together.

It’s a gift to spend time in person with others who are open to exploring the impact of shared relational spaces in these unique times.

Maybe we’ll see you in Floyd this September…

With warmth, Planning team of The Floyd Focusing Learning Community

Barbara Dickinson, Bruce Nayowith, Diane Stadnichuk, Elisha Reygle, Inge Terrill, Sandy Jahmi Burg and Tajali Tolan

From left to right, Inge, Sandy, Elisha, Tajali and Diane

This is especially true when people are encouraged and supported to make space and sense inside.

I hope that these two accounts offer you a few ways to apply Focusing principles and practices outside of formal turn-taking or Focusing time. Please share your own adventures in the Comments if you wish – we all can learn and be inspired by each other!

1-Taking time, and the value of “something in you…”:

Around 2006, I attended a presentation about human evolution and growth. After about 30 minutes of presentation, we were invited to break out into groups of 3 and answer some question related to what we are drawn to, or what is moving through us.

Ellen went first, and spoke a bit, then paused: “Umm, I really don’t know, am not sure. I can stop here and someone else can take their turn now”

From the way she was pausing and sensing into herself, I could tell that she was in touch with something, and so I encouraged her to stay with it:

“Ellen, there is something there -something that feels important. Take a bit more time to just be with it”

It was important – it was about her work in the world. That is why I wanted to pause and have her not give up on herself. She was feeling something that she could not yet express in words. That is what Focusing is all about – working with something felt in the body but not yet known in the mind. She was Focusing naturally, in touch with a sense, but, lacking words and in a group setting, she would have just stopped and given up on herself.

Within a minute or two, something shifted for Ellen, and she delightedly shared something very important to her – surprising both us, and herself with what came out.

Simple way of supporting, big effect….

2-

In 1989, I was a Community Building Coordinator for a summer music and language camp at a Quaker boarding school.

I had learned Focusing from Gendlin’s book about 2 years earlier. While I did manage a few significant experiences with it, I had no formal training in Focusing and did not feel qualified to guide.

But, I had learned that there was often something within us that knew something, and, if given time, space and welcome, it could unfold and lead to shifts in understanding and well-being. 3 years of being a teacher there offered many opportunities to just listen to people, and hold space in that way.

One evening while camp was in session, one of the counselors knocked at the door.

It was Robin. After saying hello, she apologized for bothering me, and asked: “Could you please just tell me that I am being silly and that I should just marry the man?!”

Surprised at her request, I asked her to say a little more.

For the next 5 minutes, she described how her boyfriend was handsome, crazy about her, financially well-off, and really wanted to marry her.

She paused for a while. Something about the way she was talking gave me a sense that there was another side to this….

I could feel the ‘But…’ underneath her words.

Wanting to bring her attention to this in a respectful way, I took a minute, then decided to try something. She seemed to be in touch with her feelings and her body, so I asked:

“Robin, all of that you just said – do you have a sense of where in your body you feel that is coming from?”

Within a few seconds, she pointed to one side of her head. “Right here”

“Ok,” I said.

Pointing to my chest, I then asked “and, can you just check around here and see if you hear or feel anything in this area”

Within 30 seconds, she opened her mouth, and out came - very simply and clearly : “I don’t love him”.

This surprised her greatly. Stunned at the simplicity and clarity of that voice, she took some time to let this sink in.

It felt to me that there had to be still more going on – otherwise she would not have been trying to ‘make’ herself have feelings for him. I wondered if there was something else that was holding these two opposing feelings together.

So, pointing to my mid abdomen, I asked: “Can you check in this area, and see if there is anything there?”

The air suddenly felt very heavy and thick.

A palpable sense of tender solemnity came over our space.

Robin spoke, barely above a whisper “There is just a very tiny voice in here; it just keeps repeating ‘I wish. I wish’ “

We could both feel the poignancy of the tender longing that was presenced as she sensed there.

Had I known more back then, I might have encouraged her to hold that part tenderly, and to have checked for what it might need.

As it was, we were silent together. Then I bowed with respect for what had made itself known and wished her well, happy to have been able to be of service and still feeling quite affected by the experience…..

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Something was getting clearer. I don’t remember which session it was, or what we were sitting with. What I remember is the moment the clarity shifted into something else.

A sensation in my solar plexus. A bit below it too. Not pain, not emotion exactly. A kind of settled weight. It made me stop mid-sentence and say out loud: what is this there?

My partner held the space. I stayed with it.

It’s something really certain.

Oh. It’s a knowing.

I couldn’t describe the feeling then. I still can’t. But I was not uncertain about what it was.

That’s the paradox I’ve been sitting with since. I had no way to put the sensation into words. And I knew, without question, what it was telling me. Those two things don’t usually go together. Most of the time, knowing and describing arrive together, or describing comes first and knowing follows. This was different. The certainty was prior to anything I could say about it. It didn’t need me to say anything.

After reading Bruce Nayowith’s recent essay on our attentional portfolio, I found myself back inside those moments. Bruce draws on Les Fehmi’s framework for attention: how narrow or expanded is our focus, and how close or distant are we from what we’re attending to. He maps Focusing as operating in the Close-Expanded quadrant. Attending from within the whole simultaneously.

When I read that, something in me said yes. That’s the territory.

And then a question arrived. What happens at the far end of that quadrant? What happens when Close and Expanded stop being two separate dimensions? When there’s no remaining distance between you and what you’re attending to?

I think that’s where this kind of knowing lives.

William James named something like it in 1902. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, he described what he called noetic quality: a state that carries the sense of genuine insight, of encountering something true, with an authority that doesn’t rest on argument. He noticed that these states are ineffable, they resist being put into words, and yet they carry what he called a curious sense of authority. Both, at once. Not despite each other. Because of each other.

The directness is the authority. There’s no argument because none is needed.

I’m not reaching for mysticism here. James was describing a quality of experience, not its source. And that quality is what I recognize from those sessions.

Gendlin helps me understand what’s happening in the body.

His philosophy of the implicit says the body holds a knowing that is organized and precise, more intricate than concepts, not less. Not vague sensation waiting to be made intelligent by thought. Already intelligent, in a register that language can only partially enter. The felt sense is the body holding a whole situation at once, before any of it gets named.

What I’m calling the moment of absolute knowing might be when that “implicit” surfaces whole. Not gradually unfolded through the Focusing process. Arrived. Complete before words.

Michael Polanyi said we can know more than we can tell. He meant it as a structural claim: all knowing is rooted in tacit knowing, in what the body and attention carry without being able to articulate. In ordinary tacit knowing, we use it to do something else, subsidiarily. In these moments, it doesn’t serve another purpose. It simply is. Present and full and requiring nothing.

In my last essay I wrote about sensing from inside the living process, knowing through relationship rather than extraction. I was pointing at a mode of inquiry that felt fundamentally different from the analytic kind. Less like standing outside something and measuring it, more like being inside it and moving with it.

This moment of knowing is what that looks like from the inside.

Not the gradual movement toward clarity, though that comes first. Not the felt shift, though sometimes they arrive together. Something that happens when the relational mode goes all the way. When you are so fully inside what you’re attending to that the distance between knower and known closes entirely. And in that zero-distance, something is simply known.

I noticed it first in sessions with my Focusing partner. The partnership gave it a container, and maybe that made it possible to say out loud: what is this there? To let it name itself. But I’ve since recognized the same quality arriving in solitary Focusing. Which tells me the partnership didn’t create it. It made it visible. The knowing was already there.

I don’t know what to do with that yet, fully.

I know it asks something of how I hold sessions. Not to rush past these moments toward meaning, but to let them be what they are. A knowing that doesn’t need to explain itself is not incomplete. It might be the most complete thing available.

I know it changes something about what I think Focusing is. Not a technique for arriving at insight. A practice of making yourself available to what the body already carries. The knowing isn’t produced by the process. The process is how you get close enough to receive it.

What that asks of each of us is different. But I suspect the first thing it asks is the same: stay. When the knowing arrives, before you reach to explain it or use it or verify it. Just stay.

The “oh” before the words.

I’m curious about yours. Have you had a moment like this in your Focusing — when you knew it was a knowing? Not because you worked it out. Just because it was there.

How do you recognize it?

About the Author

I’m Simone — an embodied listening practitioner. My background is in engineering geology, and I spent years working in extractive industries before turning toward the intelligence the body carries. I’m interested in what becomes possible when we stop overriding what we sense. More at simoneislistening.com and on Substack at Between & Becoming.

“The way of knowing I’d been slowly finding my way toward, sensing from inside the living process, knowing through relationship rather than extraction, was never lost everywhere…”

With that as inspiration, I would like to explore several perspectives on different styles of attending and their relationship to daily life and Focusing.

A Neuroscience Perspective:

Seeking information about Roger Sperry’s Nobel Prize winning brain research, I found a short video featuring Joe, a man who had his corpus callosum surgically severed for a medical condition. This effectively cut off communication between the two hemispheres of the brain. It is quite fascinating to watch.

7 minutes into the video,

, a researcher shows Joe some images created by arranging books or fruit into faces.

When looked at with his right eye (connects to left hemisphere of brain and his speech center), Joe could see the detailed components of the picture (vegetables or books), but could not recognize that they formed a face.

When looked at with the left eye (which connects to right hemisphere), he could recognize the face, but not the distinct books or fruit that created that sense of the face.

We all have the capacity for both of these – the more linear modes of perceiving, and the more relational, big picture, bodily-felt intelligence that we can access through Focusing and other processes..

Relating this back to Simone’s recent posting, our “left-mode”, analytical linear processing mode can identify specific individual components, and make those distinctions, but loses the larger context. It experiences things – and life - more detached and distinct, rather than relationally.

A Systems Perspective:

One negative effect of the last several hundred years of profound breakthroughs from logical analytic thinking has been such an emphasis on using this mode for what it can accomplish in engineering and technological advances, that there has been a pattern of less and less relational engagement with the rest of the world and nature. This has a kind of force of its own, away from the more big-picture relational, and into more and more detached/analytic ways of engaging with life, nature, ourselves, and others.

The Systems Archetype called Success to the Successful offers perspective on how easily we can fall into this pattern:

For example, if A is Work, and B is Family.

We have only so much time and attention to offer to these.

The more time spent at Work, the more likely that will pay off in accomplishments there, then the more recognition, then one feels drawn to spend more priority and time devoted to Work, which further increases success at Work.

But, given the fixed amount of time and attention, this also results in less time with Family, with the predictable result that things are less successful and less enjoyable there.

In response, it can be easy to devote even more time to Work because that is where the rewards are coming from, and avoid time with Family, which intensifies the cycle, and is not good for the relationship, either!

Many people get caught up in this cycle without recognizing it. If we are not aware of this larger perspective, we may continue with “Let’s keep doing what works”, devoting even more energy into Work, which creates all sorts of problems at home. Then we may think “Oh, I am just not very good at that family stuff…”

We need to see the interrelatedness in order to realize what is happening and what needs to be done to bring things into balance.

Here is another image of this archetype created by AI that shows this more succinctly:

[You may notice how this applies on much larger scales - within companies, and globally. If A is Developed Nations and B is Underdeveloped Nations, we can see what happens when the money, time and attention goes to the more successful, and less to the less successful. “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”.]

How does this system archetype relate to where our attention goes?

If A is Time and Attention spent engaging our analytic, linear, separate-distinction processes… Left Mode Processing

And B is Time and Attention spent engaging our body-somatic, relational, holistic-perception processes… Right Mode Processing (which includes bodily-felt intelligence, as we access in Focusing) …

… then, the more we and the culture devote to A, this reinforces A, and the more dominant it becomes.

Which leaves less time for B, and the more atrophied it becomes. It can become less valued and not included in decisions and actions. This also can lead to a habit of directing most of our time and attention into a worldview and operating system of separateness from the body, self, others, and the natural world.

Attending to How We Attend:

Les Fehmi, in his book “The Self-Regulation of Attention in Everyday Life”, described something similar as he tracked attention from his perspective:

-How Narrowly or Expanded is the focus of our attention

-How Close (In it) or Distant (Out of it) are we to what we are attending to. How relational, how detached…

He then describes four general modes of attention, illustrated by AI here:

If you see these as two axes – Narrow/Expanded Field Attention and Distant-from/Closer-to Experience, we have four quadrants:

The style of attending for many people in Western culture is primarily within the Narrow-Distant quadrant.

Fehmi proposes that the high percentage of time spent habitually in this quite narrowly focused and separate form of attending is a major factor in people’s sense of isolation and disconnection in the world – they keep experiencing it from a distance and disconnected from the larger picture and context (like Joe’s left hemisphere that could see the books or fruits but not the intention of the picture – the face that they formed)

It can feel natural to keep doing what works, to stay with an attentional style that we are good at. This is why it often requires conscious effort and intention if we wish to rebalance the momentum of Success to the Successful - in terms of work-life balance and to the balancing of our attentional and processing styles.

The value of these perspectives:

Being aware of these different modes can help us shift back and forth between them to have a more complete and richer perspective on life.

For example, these diagrams and systems archetypes that I have presented here are examples of the Distant-Expanded mode. We are exploring something at a distance, with a wide lens. It lets us see habitual patterns in the context of the larger picture and then make decisions based on more complete perspective and information.

A number of the experiences and ways of perceiving and being in the world that Simone spoke about in her post are examples of the Close-Expanded mode.

Focusing, with its attention to felt experience and ‘a sense of the whole of it’, is one way for us to relate from within the Expanded and More Intimate/Connected dimensions of attention, offering more perspective, connection and balance.

Speaking about this from an investment perspective, most financial planners encourage people to “diversify their portfolio.”

This applies to how we invest our time and mode of attention, as well as how we invest our money.

Instead of over-investing the majority of our time and energy engaged in linear, individual-focused, disconnected ways of engaging with self, others, and the world, it would be a ‘sound investment’ - in the future of ourselves and the planet - to balance that with time and energy spent in ways of perceiving, interacting, and relating that are also within us, available to us, and are more relational and connected.

This is where regular intentional engagement in relational and somatic processes, such as Focusing, can help create a more balanced attentional and relational profile.

Focusing involves a more somatic, right-mode processing, and checking with both verbal and symbolic functions – narrowing in on something and also widening the attention and including more of our natural intelligences. It helps balance all of the quadrants and modes.

The more we perceive and operate from the diversity of operating modes that we were born with, the more we offer this and reflect it back to others.

This has benefits far beyond our own personal health and well-being. Marshall Rosenberg, founder of Nonviolent Communication, taught:

“If you reflect back thinking, you get more thinking.

If you reflect back feelings, you get more feelings.

And, if you reflect back an alienated (disconnected) view of the world, you just get more alienation.”

We have plenty enough alienation in our world today.

The good news is that, when we attend to ourselves and others with connection and aliveness, we get more connection and aliveness in the world. Devoting more time to ways to offer attention in a more embodied and connected way feels like “sound investment advice” for a better personal and societal future.

Thank you for reading,
Bruce

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Something stayed with me after Part 4. The felt sense is the whole situation forming, not a private interior event. That recognition didn’t stay contained. It began to feel less like a personal insight and more like a thread that connected outward. To something older. Something I hadn’t yet let myself look at directly.

I sat with that for a while before I could name what it was pointing toward.

The way of knowing I’d been slowly finding my way toward, sensing from inside the living process, knowing through relationship rather than extraction, was never lost everywhere.

Indigenous knowledge systems, across enormous diversity of culture and place, have largely never separated the knower from the known. Knowing rooted in land. In relationship. In reciprocity. Not as philosophy, but as practice. A lived way of staying inside the whole rather than stepping outside it to measure and control.

When I really let that land, something in me went quiet. Not the quiet of understanding. The quiet of recognizing something I hadn’t wanted to look at directly.

Because that knowing wasn’t just philosophically sidelined. It was targeted. The age of separation that Hutchins and Storm describe wasn’t a shift that happened quietly in universities. It was enforced through colonization, through the deliberate dismantling of land relationships, through residential schools that stripped children of language and ceremony and the elders who carried the knowledge. Entire ways of knowing were declared primitive, not because they failed to make sense of the world, but because they stood in the way of what the dominant worldview wanted to extract.

People died for this. Cultures were broken on purpose.

I can feel that in my body in a way I can’t quite put into words. Not guilt exactly. Something heavier and more specific. A recognition that what I’m finding my way back to was protected at enormous cost by people the world I grew up in tried to silence. That changes how I hold this inquiry. It asks me to carry it with more care than I would if I’d simply discovered something new.

Two Ways of Mapping the Return

Hutchins and Storm’s Regenerative Leadership names the shift I’ve been feeling: from ego-system logic to eco-system logic. From a worldview organized around prediction, efficiency, and control, to one organized around participation, sensing, and regeneration. What strikes me is that they don’t frame this as idealism. They frame it as necessity. Living systems can’t be led from the outside. They have to be sensed from within.

I recognize that necessity in my own body. Every time I reach for certainty before I’ve actually sensed what’s here, I can feel the ego-system logic still running. The tightening. The reach for the plan. It’s not gone. But I can feel it now, which means I have more choice about it.

Otto Scharmer maps something related but different: the movement of attention itself. Theory U traces how awareness can shift from reacting out of habit and assumption, through opening to what’s actually present, to what he calls presencing, the moment of sensing what wants to emerge before it has form. The bottom of the U is a quality of attention, not a technique. A willingness to stay in not-knowing long enough to feel what’s actually here.

Both are pointing at the same movement from different angles. And both, in their own way, are pointing back toward what Indigenous knowledge systems never abandoned. The West finding language, from inside its own tradition, for something it spent centuries destroying.

I try not to smooth that asymmetry over. It matters.

What keeps coming back to me is how intimate this is, even when it’s systemic. Presencing, eco-system sensing, regenerative leadership - these sound large. But they require something that happens in one body, in one moment, in one person willing to pause before they know.

When I sit with a felt sense, staying with what’s here before it has words, letting it shift rather than pushing it toward meaning, I’m practicing the same quality of attention Scharmer describes at the bottom of the U. The not-knowing held with care. And what Hutchins and Storm call eco-system sensing is what happens when that becomes a way of moving in the world, not just in a quiet room, but in a conversation, a decision, a relationship. Sensing the whole before acting.

This is why Focusing doesn’t feel like a personal tool to me anymore. It feels like a doorway into a different way of knowing, one that was always available, that some traditions never stopped living, and that more of us are slowly finding our way back to.

What I’m Left Sitting With

I don’t want to close this with a vision. Something in me resists that.

The capacity to see from inside the whole was never gone. It was suppressed, marginalized, and in many places violently removed. It was held alive by people who paid a price for holding it. And it’s still here, in land-based practices, in somatic traditions, in the quiet persistence of ways of knowing that refused to disappear.

Something is shifting. Not a trend, something more stubborn and slower than that. A growing recognition that what was discarded as unreliable is exactly what’s needed now.

I keep returning to a question I don’t yet know how to answer. Some of this inquiry has happened in conversation with AI, and that fact doesn’t sit neutrally. It sits in the middle of everything this piece is asking. A new paper just published through the Meta-Relationality and AI Research Project at the University of Victoria is asking something I find I can’t set down: that AI systems are part of nature, not outside it, and that questions about what AI is changing in humans need to be held in the same relational frame as everything else that’s changing in the living world.

I’m sitting with that. I don’t know where it leads. But I can feel it carrying forward.

Everything Is Nature: Meta-Relationality, Nervous Systems, Systems Thinking, and AI — Senge et al., 2026

About the Author

I’m Simone — an embodied listening practitioner. My background is in engineering geology, and I spent years working in extractive industries before turning toward the intelligence the body carries. I’m interested in what becomes possible when we stop overriding what we sense. More at simoneislistening.com and on Substack at Between & Becoming.

In our previous blog posts we have talked about the overall process for the Interactive style of Focusing, Focuser as Teacher, and Focuser as Storyteller.

It is Time for the Double Empathic Moment!

Today we are going to talk about the “Double Empathic Moment” in Interactive Focusing. The originators of Interactive Focusing called this the “Golden Moment”, and with good reason!

What would the world be like if…

Imagine if everyone listened to each other with curiosity, compassion, and reflection, instead of judgment, advice, solutions, or criticism.

Imagine further that the response of the listener was a deeply considered and compassionately delivered symbol that they had formed inside from their own felt sense of the speaker.

The world could be a very different place!

How is it for you really?

A recurring theme in these posts is listening to understand instead of listening to respond, and that is exactly what the Double Empathic Moment is designed to do. There is an elegant structure to it that invites us to immerse ourselves as Listeners in how it really is for the Focuser. Of course we have only their words and perhaps their body language to go by. But that is enough!

We talk a lot about the role of the Focuser in our earlier posts -- Focuser as Storyteller and Focuser as Teacher. Now it is time to talk about the Listener!

What is it like to be the Listener?

In traditional Focusing partnerships, there is generally an understanding that the Listener remains neutral to whatever they are hearing from the Focuser. They may have their own bodily responses to what they are hearing, but those are not invited into reflection or suggestions the Listener may offer to the Focuser.

The originators of Interactive Focusing decided to address the relationship aspect of partnership through the form of Interactive Focusing. While the Listener at first offers the same neutral reflection and suggestions (according to the Focuser’s preference), when the Focuser comes to a resting place, the Listener then invites the Double Empathic Moment for both.

The Listener’s Moment

In this moment, the Listener offers the Focuser a specific form of what comes from their role as Listener. The Listener sits quietly with what they have heard. Noticing how they hold that inside their own body, letting a felt sense form, and noticing if something symbolic comes along with that felt sense, they then offer that symbol to the Focuser.

Symbols can be images, sounds, gestures, or any other (preferably brief) expression of the Focuser’s essence as held by the Listener.

Simple but not necessarily Easy

On a personal note, when I first learned the Double Empathic Moment, I found that it was fairly simple to explain it, but it was not so easy to achieve it. That is simply because our cultural norm is to reply to someone we have just heard with our own experience, or advice, or solution to a perceived problem, or even judgment, or criticism, although these last two are not necessarily conducive to compassionate interaction.

The key to the double empathic moment is holding the essence of *how it is for the other person*. That is very different from how it is for me.

If the symbol fits, “wear it”!

Once the Focuser has heard the symbol, they have the opportunity to hold it inside, see if it resonates entirely, or in part, or not at all. It is a hallmark of Interactive Focusing that the Focuser does not have to accept the symbol. And that is not a criticism of the Listener!

A metaphor for this might be trying on clothes. I might like the way a particular piece of clothing looks on the rack, but when I try it on, it does not really fit me. And that is OK! What is important is that each of us has the opportunity to say what is true for us - what fits.

Try this Exercise alone

If you would like to try a small exercise, you do not even have to hold a Focusing session, or be actively engaged in a conversation. The next time you are listening to someone speaking, see if you can notice what is the essence, or crux, or key point of what they are saying for them.

Further notice how they seem to be holding that crux: is there an emotional quality? If you are in person, is there body language? Or it may just be the words that they are using that give you an indication of how they are holding their topic.

Notice, when you go inside to your own inner world, what is it like to hold that inside you? How is it for them? Notice if a symbol forms, and perhaps just make a note about it in your journal, or simply be with it.

How is this experience different from everyday listening?

Try this Exercise with a friend

If you would like to try this with a partner, either in a Focusing partnership, or in an everyday conversation, you can use this suggestion:

Take turns as speaker and listener. As you listen to the speaker, see if you can notice what is the essence, or crux, or key point of what they are saying for them. Further notice how they seem to be holding that crux: Is there an emotional quality? If you’re in person, is there body language? Or it may just be the words that they are using that give you an indication of how they are holding their topic.

Notice, when you go inside to your own inner world, what is it like to hold that inside you? How is it for them? Notice if a symbol forms, and offer it to the speaker gently. There is no need for either the listener or the speaker to comment on the symbol. Just give it and receive it.

You might also notice, how is this experience different from everyday listening?

When you are ready, change roles for a second turn.

We would love to hear from you if you care to share your experience of this exercise!

In Closing

This is a very good start at explaining and “dipping a toe in the water of” the Double Empathic Moment. It is going to take more than one post to do justice to this “Golden Moment” and its enormous potential for supporting relationships, addressing relational discomfort and conflict, and so much more.

In upcoming blog posts we will continue with the Double Empathic Moment, and then talk about the next steps in Interactive Focusing:

• FAQs about the Double Empathic Moment

• The Interactive Response, where the Listener becomes the second Focuser and notices what touched them about the first Focuser’s experience

• The Single Wing, which is the first turn, and the Double Wing, which is first turn and second turn of Focuser and Listener in Interactive Focusing

• The Relationship Check, which is the closing of the Interactive Focusing session.

The Next Virtual Changes Meeting for Exploring Interaction

Virtual Changes Meetings for Exploring Interaction occur once a month on the third Sunday, in two time slots to accommodate as many time zones around the globe as possible. The next date is Sunday, June 21, at 11 AM Eastern DS time and 7 PM Eastern DS time, for 90 minutes, all on Zoom.

To register for one of our Virtual Changes Meetings For Exploring Interaction click this link.

Our Upcoming On-Demand Digital Course for Exploring Interaction

We’re delighted to share that our Exploring Interaction On-Demand Digital Course is on its way this summer. It’s a video course designed to bring the skills of Focusing and Interactive Focusing into your partnerships, your relationships, and your everyday life — the kind of deep listening and felt sensing that can change how we meet ourselves and each other. If you’d like to be among the first to know when it’s live, add your name here »

Until next time!

• You can find our Monthly Virtual Changes Meeting schedule here.

• Read more about Exploring Interaction here.

• Resources about Interactive Focusing are found here.

Let’s stay connected! Join our Substack community here!

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For purposes of this post, I look at creativity not as a professional category per se — reserved for artists or designers — but creativity, more broadly, as a way of moving through life; a quality of engagement available to all of us, whether we’re painting a mural or leading a board meeting, parenting a rebellious toddler or creating a dashboard for a data set. This post focuses on one concept from the scientific creativity research on “problem finding” and how it applies to the felt sense in Focusing.

All the images included are selected paintings from Paul Klee that are in the public domain.

Problem Finding

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, a PhD research scientist at Yale, has spent her career studying creativity. A chapter in her recent book The Creativity Choice focuses on what scientists who study creativity call problem finding. Research shows that creative ideas that become successful realities (business ventures, artistic projects, inventions, etc..) involve extensive problem finding. It’s important to note that the word problem in creativity research, carries a different meaning than how we think of it colloquially. Rather than an obstacle or something wrong, creativity researchers define a problem as an inquiry, something that gets us going, a question that drives our work.

“…the key to creativity is what scientists call problem finding—the process of asking questions, identifying opportunities for creation or examination, and framing and reframing questions in ways that interrogate existing ways of doing something and exploring new ones.”

An essential aspect of creativity is an ability to engage with the problem finding process thoroughly enough for new solutions to be discovered. However, this is not easy to do.

There is a common misconception that problems inherently exist as fully formed entities that can be named and defined. It turns out this isn’t the case. Creative problems tend to start out in general and broad terms. Through experimenting, rearranging, reframing, and redefining they come into clearer focus and become fully formed.

The work of moving from the general to the specific usually involves conflicting ideas and uncertainty. Often it elicits strong emotions and feelings. Especially in contexts with pressure to meet a deadline or produce a result, prolonged problem finding can feel daunting. This often limits creativity, rushes the problem finding process and leads to unsuccessful projects.

On the contrary–whether it’s a business venture, artistic endeavor, organizational initiative, or scientific discovery— engaging in thorough problem finding often leads to creative solutions that do a better job of addressing the problem at hand.

Problem Finding and The Felt Sense

And so, what does this have to do with Focusing? How does problem finding in the creative process of a new scientific discovery, start-up business, or artistic project connect with what happens internally, in a Focusing session?

In a Focusing session, we often start with a “problem” - an inquiry or “question that drives our work”. We make the arrangements for a felt sense to form. We slow down, find a quiet space, pause and, in the company of a supportive companion or guide, invite a felt sense.

The felt sense arrives - often as a broad, not-yet fully formed mashed-up stew; some combination of body sensations, emotions, sense perceptions, thoughts, possibly memories or images, simultaneously co-arising. In a focusing session, what do we do with all this information?!

Similar to successful problem finding in the external world, how we choose to work with this moment is crucial.

We can’t push, rush, force or simply will the felt sense into an answer to our inquiry. And yet, the process isn’t void of volition.

There are specific actions to take, ways to use our will and direct our attention towards establishing a relationship with the emerging and evolving felt sense. This excerpt from an article by Eugene Gendlin about creativity in focusing speaks to the movement of a felt sense:

When the felt sense forms, you might call it “discomfort” or “queasy” or “unresolved” or some other quality word – but very soon you will see that it is vastly more than that. It is a sense of the whole complexity of the situation.

There is a second discovery: The felt sense wants to move. It has a directionality. With certain specific steps we can teach, one finds the felt sense moving a step. This is experienced as a distinct inward stirring. An exaggeration of it would be to say that it feels like a stomach cramp releasing and easing. But it can be a very slight stirring and you learn with practice to detect it quite unmistakably even if it is slight. And, along with such a physical release something opens and you get a step concerning the problem.

Instead of using the will to push the felt sense forward in a given direction, the will is used to form a relationship with the felt sense. Consciously and deliberately we make space for the felt sense and create the conditions for it to release and communicate its directionality.

The process is greatly supported by the presence of another human being - a companion, guide or facilitator - whose role is to help us stay in relationship with our own felt sense.

We start with acknowledgment, something like - “all this is here”. This may be enough for some time, simply to acknowledge, walk alongside, and learn to simply be with the felt sense; giving it room to breathe.

Maybe over time, we learn to greet the felt sense with a hello - a metaphorical wave or smile. We move towards an interaction and a back-and-forth dialogue.

And then, maybe with more practice we’re able to create enough space to embody the sentiment of Rumi’s Guest House.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

We learn to welcome the elaborate felt sense stew - whatever it may be - with a spirit of curiosity and intrigue. We discover, in our own way, how to be a gracious host, listening for what the felt sense wants and needs as we pursue this creative approach to problem finding.

Creativity Resources

Three of my favorite resources regarding creativity:

The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin: I highly recommend interviews with him speaking about the book and the creative process that bring concepts from the book alive.

The Creativity Choice, by Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, PhD: As mentioned above, a scientifically rigorous, yet highly accessible book on creativity.

The Creative Independent: An incredible compendium of interviews with a range of contemporary creative people and their process.

How about you? Any resources on creativity that you’d like to share? Please add a comment with your ideas!

About the Author

Initially on the playgrounds of youth athletic fields and now as a professional coach and facilitator, Alex has been exploring human relationships, team dynamics and new experiences for as long as he can remember. These days his inquiry centers on his roles as a father, husband, coach, consultant and aspiring writer. You can find his writing on his Substack, Crossing Over and more about his coaching work on his website. He’s a Focusing Trainer in Training working with Sandy Jahmi Burg and Rod Francis.

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Those of you familiar with the origin story of Focusing know that it emerged from studies of people in therapy.

As most of the early Focusers were psychologists and therapists, Focusing was most often used with dealing with distressing situations and life challenges – to such an extent that some people are unaware of other ways that Focusing can enrich their lives.

Many blog posts in our Learn Focusing series have spoken to some of these other uses of Focusing; this one is about using Focusing for more life enjoyment and happiness.

A Few Positive Psychology Principles

The field of Positive Psychology emerged from the study of “what promotes well-being”. A number of important findings have emerged from this field; I shall share a few that you may find useful, that you can bring into your life and your Focusing practice for yourself and for others.

(Much of what I am writing here comes from a few books on the topic, and from Joan Klagsbrun PhD, a Focusing Coordinator who presents often on this subject at international conferences. She invited several of us to teach at a Focusing Retreat with a Positive Psychology theme in Mexico about 13 years ago.)

I.Negativity Bias:

You may have heard the saying “Good experiences are like Teflon; bad experiences are like Velcro.”

Studies show that unpleasant experiences register in our long-term memory more easily and more powerfully than pleasant ones. The unpleasant is often easy to access; we tend not to forget those. They can easily become part of our narrative and shape our outlook and attitude towards life – without us trying to remember them.

This negativity bias gives species a huge survival advantage. Not happier, but surviving.

Animals that are happily running through the forest and not tracking possible threats to them are much more likely to be caught and eaten than the more cautious ones. This is highly functional in those conditions.

Scanning for possible danger is a normal part of our nervous system. The issue is how active or overactive this scanning is. Too little, and we can be in danger. Too much, and our lives can be clouded by excessive fear.

This negativity bias can cloud our perceptions of life and reality, making us more concerned and less happy. The stories that we tell ourselves may have a disproportionate amount of unpleasantness in them compared to the actual balance of positives and negatives.

When I was researching this subject about 10 years ago, I read that a study suggested that people suffering from depression had about 97% of their mental scanning directed towards possible threats and concerns (inner and outer). This means that only 3% was available to be directed towards creativity, enjoyment, etc…

What surprised me was reading that happy people averaged about 94% of their mental scanning towards this. For them, about 6% is available for creative endeavors, enjoyment, etc.

Does not seem like a big difference, does it? Pretty wild – that small difference of 3% makes a huge difference in life enjoyment! Then again, that is twice as much life-forward focus than in people who are depressed.

When these researches examined long-term spiritual practitioners with a powerful ongoing sense of well-being, they found that these people still had 90% directed towards possible threats and concerns, with 10% available for life-forward endeavors.

[The reference and the book that described this study was on my bookshelf in another house. When I find it, I shall post it. ]

Two big take-aways from this for me were:

1-A small shift in focus to the life-positive/life-forward can make big differences in life satisfaction and engagement, without putting ourselves at risk.

And

2- There is no need for us to ‘totally clear our mind’ or ‘eliminate all fear’ to have profound experiences of joy and the sacred on a regular basis. Even people whom we might consider “enlightened” still have 90% of their mental processes engaged in scanning for possible threats and concerns!

Another piece of the puzzle before we explore what role Focusing can play in this:

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II. Savoring:

Another finding in studies from Positive Psychology, is that - unlike the rapid registration of negative events in our memory - positive events may require 30-40 seconds of being held intentionally in memory in order to register in long-term memory as part of a narrative, for it to help shape our stories.

This has been called ‘savoring’– taking some time to be with it, holding onto it - its feel-quality, thoughts and feelings associated with it, and letting that dwell in our mind and body.

This requires intention – making the time to pause and dwell on something pleasant – when it happens, or afterwards.

It is easy to skip over this in our busy day. This is where Focusing can be helpful.

Focusing is based on allowing a felt-sense to develop, staying with it in a bodily way, and then allowing words or images to come that resonate with that felt sense. The body-sensing, slowing down, taking in, and resonating – all of these act to encourage us to savor our experiences in a whole body-mind way, and to take our time with them. Instead of saving Focusing for a problem or challenge, we can also bring it in for positive, meaningful, touching experiences, and allow that to expand.

A few practices that include savoring, which you can do alone or with others are:

The Love Exercise – The late Bebe Simon, a Focusing trainer, used to teach this regularly. It is a great way for people to begin to experience a felt sense - in the context of something enjoyable, rather than starting with a problem.

The Love Exercise involves being with something you love, then allowing the felt sense of that to form in your body.

Often the experience becomes more whole-body, and one gets more words, symbols, images that deepen their sense of connection with something that they love and also handles that allow them to access this more easily.

A 6 minute video of this is here, if you wish to watch and follow along. As the participants spend more time with and sense into their experience, they are also savoring it, actually ‘having’ that experience more deeply in their minds and bodies.

Evening Reflection-

I learned this from Rachel Naomi Remen during a workshop she offered Finding Meaning in Healthcare:

In the evening, reflect back upon your day, and ask yourself

—“What surprised me today?”

Just go back slowly through your day – either from the present backwards, or from the morning forwards. If you wish, stop at the first thing you remember that surprised you. Once you find that, write it down, or share it with someone listening, and stay with it for a minute or so – the event, the surprise, the feelings around it…

If doing this with a partner or group, the next person does the same, etc.

—Then, ask yourself “What inspired me today?”

And do the same, reflecting back until you find something, and then staying with that, savoring it for a while.

—And third, ask yourself “What touched or moved me today?”

And do the same.

This can be done in bed, in a classroom, with partners, or in a group. We did a version of this as a group in the retreat in Mexico during our evening group circle, with each person sharing one (because of the group size) of the three questions into the circle. An interesting perk of the bilingual nature of that retreat was that people got to stay with what was shared while it was being translated into the other language, so it could land more deeply. This was quite a warm connecting experience for the group in our evening circle. It is also a lovely practice with a friend or partner.

During her workshop about 15 years ago, Rachel Remen told the story of an oncologist suffering from severe burnout and depression to whom she assigned this exercise in a journal.

He did this diligently and honestly.

For the first 2-3 weeks, what he wrote in his journal each night was:

What Surprised me today: Nothing!

What Inspired me today: Nothing!

What Moved me today: Nothing!

After several weeks, through his time and effort spent reflecting back on his day with an eye towards meaningful positives, he began to notice small moments of surprise, inspiration, and when he realized he had felt impacted or moved during interactions with his patients.

Within a few months, his emotional state shifted profoundly, and began to impact others around him. He became more aware of the beauty and care and connectedness amidst the heartache and loss in his day-to-day oncology practice.

The entire energy of the office changed as a result. He was inspired to install a cork board on his office, where he posted letters from grateful patients, as well as pictures they sent of themselves with their children and grandchildren that they lived to be able to be with -as a result of his treatment of their cancers. He kept these on public display, as an inspiration both to himself, and to other patients in his office.

Notice that savoring does not require ‘doing more things’ or ‘pursuing more joyful experiences’. It only involves making the intention to take the time to notice the already-existing experiences of aliveness, contact, sparkle, warmth, and impact, and allow them to inform us and our cellularity.

We can do this as they arise, or reflect back on them from afterwards. Either way, this scanning for joy, warmth, and contact, pausing to savor, and Focusing with the positive experiences brings more joy to life, and re-orients our nervous systems for a different kind of interaction with our moving forward into life.

Thanks for reading this. I would love to hear your experiences with this process, if you wish to share.

Bruce

Leave a comment

Something stayed with me after Part 3. Not a question exactly — more like a pull. The body I’d been describing felt too alive to fit the word I was using for it. And the more I sat with that, the more I started noticing how the mechanistic worldview shows up in the tools we build.

What I kept noticing was that the system I was working with couldn’t feel when something was off. It could generate patterns, but it couldn’t participate in a situation. It had no edge to sense. I recognized that — because I had been trained to operate like that too.

As I stayed with this, the inquiry shifted toward my own experience. I could feel the cost of the mechanistic story in my body. The tightening in my solar plexus I experienced when in engineering school. The way I pushed through fatigue in the oil field. The way I trusted plans and abstractions over what I was sensing. I could feel the places where I had separated from myself to function inside systems that valued separation.

As I kept sensing into this, something in me softened. It wasn’t a conclusion arriving, it was more like a held breath releasing. The bracing I’d carried for years, the learned override, the efficiency reflex, none of it had been protecting me from anything real. The body I had learned to dismiss wasn’t the obstacle. It was the only place where things could actually shift.

But even as I felt that, the word body didn’t feel accurate. It felt too narrow. Too anatomical. Too shaped by the worldview I was questioning.

A Question I Couldn't Leave Alone

That's when a question from a Focusing and AI gathering came back to me — what if you don't need a body for Focusing? And with it, something Gendlin himself once said: "Maybe it's not all about the body." That line made sense to me. It matched something I had been sensing: that the word body in Gendlin's work is both necessary and misleading. Necessary because it grounds experience. Misleading because it sounds like he's talking about the physical organism or an inner emotional space.

What I’ve come to understand is closer to the body as situation — the whole process of a person in interaction with their environment. Not a container. Not a machine. Not a set of internal feelings. More like a field of relationships that shows up from one side. When I pause and sense something in me, I’m not accessing an internal object. I’m entering a process that shifts as I attend to it. It carries forward because I’m in relationship with it.

This is why the felt sense doesn’t feel “inside” to me. It feels like the situation forming in my body because my body is already part of the situation. When I sense into something, I’m sensing the interaction, not a private interior state. That's why that line made sense to me — it's not all about the body if "body" means the organism. It is all about the body if "body" means the ongoing interaction.

How This Changes My Sense of Knowing

As I stayed with this, the idea of oneness also shifted. Not as a spiritual idea, but as a practical one. If the body is interaction, then the boundary between “me” and “world” isn’t clean. The felt sense isn’t something I own. It’s the way the situation shows up in me. Living systems thinkers describe something similar — life as networks of processes shaped by the flows they participate in. Gendlin adds that we can feel those flows. We can feel the situation forming. We can feel the next step before it becomes clear.

This is why the felt sense feels relational to me. It’s the body sensing the whole. And when I understand the body this way, my sense of knowing changes. Sensing becomes a way of knowing, not a private feeling. Meaning becomes something that emerges, not something I construct. Change becomes something that happens in the interaction, not inside me alone. Clarity becomes something that forms between me and the situation.

“Maybe it’s not all about the body” becomes “maybe the word body is too small.” Gendlin wasn’t stepping away from the body. He was pointing to something larger — the body as the whole process of interaction that includes environment, history, culture, and the next step trying to form.

This is the body that is more than a body for me. Not the organism I was taught to manage. Not the emotions I was taught to regulate. The whole living process of a person in interaction with their world — sensing the situation, carrying the past, feeling the next step before it has words. I don’t yet know all that follows from this. But something in me is already moving toward it.

—

About the Author

I’m Simone — an embodied listening practitioner. My background is in engineering geology, and I spent years working in extractive industries before turning toward the intelligence the body carries. I’m interested in what becomes possible when we stop overriding what we sense. More at simoneislistening.com/blog and on Substack at Between & Becoming.

Celebration!

We are celebrating 2 years of our Virtual Changes Meeting for Exploring Interaction. The first one happened on Sunday, March 17, 2024, and it was magical!

Back in those days, we were “small but mighty” with two participants and two hosts. We had the advantage of plenty of time to talk about Focuser as Storyteller, Focuser as Teacher, the Double Empathic Moment, and we even had time for the Relationship Check in one of our sessions.

Now, we have 6-8 participants in each of 2 Changes Meetings on the 3rd Sunday of each month and we would be delighted to have you join us! Find out more here.

We made Mini Podcasts!

In that first Changes Meeting, we even made two mini podcasts during the session. One is about the Focuser as Storyteller and Teacher. The other is about the Double Empathic Moment. You can refer to our previous blog post about Focuser as Teacher and Storyteller here, and find the mini podcast here. In our next blog post, we will describe the Double Empathic Moment, but for now, you can find the mini podcast here.

And then, there is more!

So much has happened since then!

We now have 3 of the late Dr. Janet Klein’s books on Interactive Focusing for sale as e-books. Check them out here. Recently, we received a collection of Janet’s books from a friend and will be producing them in e-book form to add to our collection soon. Stay tuned!

We are creating an on-demand video course teaching the basics of Interactive Focusing, available online, free of the need to schedule a class. Look out for news of the release of the course in the coming months.

Our presentation on our “Focusing-oriented project management” and the creation of that course has been accepted for the International Focusing Conference in Vienna, Austria, June 3-7, 2026.

Last, but by no means least, the International Focusing Institute has launched a page on their website devoted to Interactive Focusing here.

Interactive Focusing “in the House”

On a personal note, Interactive Focusing “in the house” happened when a Focusing partner of mine visited for a week. We had a Relationship Check every morning, which was special for lots of reasons. For one thing, I have been interested for some time in the question, “Why only have a Relationship Check at the *end* of an Interactive Focusing session?” Why not have it at the beginning as well?

Good question!

What would the world be like if…

Do you ever wonder what the world would be like if something like this happened between people every time they interacted?

Imagine this:

You wake up every morning, make your tea or coffee, and sit down with whoever you are close to. (This could be in person (“in the house”), or virtually.) You sense into the question, “How are you now compared to how you were yesterday?”

After you say something about that, you sense into the second question, “How are you now with the person in the room?” And say a few words about that.

You are listened to in a compassionate, non-judgmental way, with reflection, but no criticism, advice, or any other responses we may be accustomed to hear.

Then the person you are with does the same.

And then at the end of the day, no matter what else has transpired, you both do the same.

Sounds good to me!

Time to Explore

It is worth considering how our interactions and relationships develop without this kind of pause-and-reflect practice, and how they might develop with it. How lucky you are if you already have this kind of practice in your life!

Just for fun, you might try this the next time you have a Focusing partnership. Start with a Relationship Check. And end with a Relationship Check. Every time I perform this piece of Interactive Focusing I am astonished at what comes both from me and from my partner.

What I Admire In You

In Interactive Focusing we often do this from the point of view of what we admire in the other person. I would like to add that it is worth doing a Relationship Check from the point of view of what we admire in ourselves too. Not to be bragging all the time, but to practice forming and holding a positive mindset about ourselves.

For example, how am I now compared to how I was when I started writing this blog post? Something I admire in myself is my ability to be creative. I feel better -- more comfortable -- now that I have written this, compared to the slight unease I felt when I started. I wondered then, “Would I be able to express what I wanted to say?”

And what do I admire about you? That you are interested enough in Exploring Interaction to read/listen to this entire blog post!

In Our Next Post

Next time we will explore the Double Empathic Moment in some depth. This is “the Golden Moment” of Interactive Focusing. To be truly heard, understood and reflected in a symbolic way by another person is perhaps the greatest gift one human being can give to another. It is a simple, if not altogether easy, piece of the process, and something that we hope you will return to learn more about.

Until next time!

• You can find our Monthly Changes Meeting schedule here.

• Read more about Exploring Interaction here.

• Resources about Interactive Focusing are found here.

Brief pauses like this to savor what is going well for us is a powerful resourcing and rewiring practice. We can literally flip the cultural emphasis we’ve learned that worries how others might judge this, toward feeling a bit safer in following our own sense of inner rightness.

When people outside of Focusing read this suggestion quickly, they might assume we are stroking our egos here. It’s not at all like that. One of our underlying assumptions is understanding that always we are effecting and being affected by our environment. We share something about how spending time together lit up a sense of aliveness within us. We can best have this type of experience in spaces that feel safe to be our unique self. Our sharing comes as a compliment to those here with us now.

For most of us, the current state of the world brings a complex mix of feelings. There is a muchness that can be hard to take in. We find ways to limit our exposure.

Sometimes we look and are horrified! Our brain holds what it has learned over the years about how to keep us safe. Much of what we’ve relied on is no longer reliable.

At the same time, some new ways of interacting and functioning are emerging that are working really well for us. Generally, our brains are wired to pay attention to what is not going well and flitting over what is. It turns out paying attention to what is going well is a better way to embody and live our life values.

When we feel the angst of ‘no longer reliable’, we have a choice.

1. We can place our attention on what is no longer working. Note, we might want to do this at times to grieve what ‘was true’.

2. We can Pause and use our Power of And. In pausing, our goal is to expand our awareness in this moment to include both this no longer working and invite our bodies to find something new that we could apply here.

A recent example for me is understanding on a deeper level that the majority of our USA corporate structure is designed to pull me into an addictive pattern. The pattern makes life easier on the surface and harder on many deeper interconnected levels for myself, others and/or the world. I am teaching myself to pause and step back from how I engage with everything from shopping to service providers. I am still engaging in many ways that I’d like to change and there are more and more wins where I feel an authentic sense of aliveness with how that situation unfolded.

If this resonates, you might try this exercise over the coming weeks.

Pause to savor what is going well for you.

If it feels right, cross your arms and give yourself a hug in that moment.

Or maybe clasp your hands in appreciation.

Adding the gesture of right and left arms (or hands) invites both hemispheres into this special moment.

You might watch for small examples to grow what does feel good for you. The whole thing does not have to feel good, just some aspect.

Maybe you give yourself or others more space around meeting expectations...

...invite that sense of spaciousness, changing things up is ok.

Or someone recognizes you or something you did in a way that feels good...

...invite that sense of connection and appreciation for being seen.

Maybe you find a way to get supplies that brings less stress about money...

...invite that sense of confidence in your ability to take care of yourself.

Maybe you prioritize your health by choosing self-care...

...invite that sense of caretaking your body.

You might even get a whole body response like this:

Our bodies will respond in ways that may surprise us. Since we often do not give these open, flowing sensations much attention, do not be surprised if the sense of appreciation whizzes right by followed by suggestions for improvement. We can acknowledge those suggestions as needed. Our goal is to turn toward and intentionally STAY WITH and SAVOR the inner appreciation, the sense of spaciousness, gratitude, whatever comes that we want more of in our life.

We are building our sense of an inner team that is wired together and resilient. Over time, our body will naturally move toward adapting in the moment of another ‘no longer reliable’ realization. Cheer your inner team on when this happens!

Whatever comes as mutual appreciation between your SELF and the incredible intricacy that makes us human, is worth celebrating. Enjoy celebrating being you!

About the Author

I’m Sandy — I create extraordinary results by lovingly tending to potential spaces of belonging. One of those spaces near and dear to my heart is our Learn Focusing Community. This Substack if one of our projects. We appreciate our connection with you here.

If you would like to stay in touch with our other projects emerging, consider joining our newsletter or browsing our website.

The Question Beneath the Question

After finishing Part 2, Knowing From Within: Focusing Through a Living Systems Thinking Lens, something in me wouldn’t settle.
There was a sense that what I’d written was only the surface of something larger. It sat there, murky and insistent, the way a felt sense does when it’s pointing to more than I can yet name.

Each time I paused and sensed into it, the same question kept forming:

If my body can sense the whole of a situation from within, why did I learn to treat that knowing as unreliable?

Why did I learn to trust abstraction over experience, control over relationship, prediction over presence?

I could feel the tension in myself every time I worked with AI.
It would offer clarity, structure, possibilities — and yet something in me would tighten, as if the words didn’t quite match. Even when I didn’t have the right words yet, my body knew the difference.

That mismatch kept pointing me back to what Gendlin meant by “body.”

Not the “flesh suit.” Not my emotions.

But the body as interaction — the place where the meaning of a whole situation gathers before it becomes language.

And as I stayed with that, something else came into view.

There are cultures — Indigenous cultures especially — that never lost this way of knowing.

Knowing rooted in land, in relationship, in the body as part of the living field.

Knowing that is lived with, not extracted from.

But the worldview I grew up in had no place for that.

It taught me to override the very process that now gives me direction.

I didn’t see this at first.

I had to feel the absence of it in myself before I could recognize what had been lost.

And once I sensed that, something clicked:

The problem isn’t that we don’t know how to sense.
It’s that we live inside a worldview that makes sensing seem suspect.

That’s the thread this piece follows.

The Age of Separation

When I read Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm describing “the age of separation” in Regenerative Leadership, something in me tightened — not in disagreement, but in recognition and… excitement.

In this chapter they are pointing toward the cultural era in which we learned to see ourselves as separate from nature, separate from each other, separate from our own bodies. It’s the worldview that taught us to value independence over interdependence, control over relationship, efficiency over aliveness. It’s the worldview that made relational openness look weak, and made the living body — the sensing, relational body — seem untrustworthy.

This exactly named the worldview I grew up in.

It also brought into view a quiet suspicion I had learned toward my own sensing.

What struck me was how recent this was. Hutchins and Storm trace the beginning of the age of separation around the 15th and 16th century. The shift didn’t happen everywhere or all at once, but it took hold in Western Europe as thinkers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes began to redefine what counted as knowledge.

They weren’t quite trying to erase the body’s wisdom; they were trying to build a method that could produce certainty.
And in doing so, they separated mind from body, human from the more‑than‑human world.
Knowing became something extracted, measured, and controlled — not something lived with, sensed, or participated in.

And once that frame settled in, everything that didn’t fit it — including Indigenous ways of knowing — was pushed outside the boundaries of what was considered real and valuable.

Francis Bacon’s language was also explicitly about domination: nature as a woman to be subdued, interrogated, and forced to yield her secrets. Reading him now, I can feel how that logic shaped the world I grew up in: the natural sciences, the oil and gas industry, the engineering mindset, the sense that the Earth was something to take from rather than participate with.

Once the Earth becomes an object, the body becomes an object too.

And that’s the part I’m beginning to question.

Reading this chapter again made me realize how this shift also caused a turning away from the feminine — not only as gender, but as a way of knowing rooted in relationship, intuition, and the body’s sense of the whole. Ways of knowing held by women, Indigenous cultures, and other communities grounded in land, connection, and reciprocity were dismissed as unreliable or irrational. Anything that couldn’t be measured or controlled was pushed aside. In that move, the body’s wisdom didn’t just become irrelevant; it became inconvenient to the systems that were taking shape.

Maybe this worldview didn’t arise because people were cruel or careless but because it worked, at least for a while. It gave us tools, infrastructure, predictability, and a sense of control. But it also narrowed our ways of knowing. It taught us to trust what can be measured and to dismiss what can be felt. It trained us to see systems from the outside, not to sense them from within.

But the body I sense from — the body Gendlin meant — doesn’t behave like an object.
It’s too fluid.
Too relational.
Too alive.

Too fluid to be managed, too alive to stay inside the lines. The mechanistic worldview trusts what is rigid and repeatable, not what moves and responds.

Where This Leaves Me

As I sit with all of this — with AI, with Gendlin, with living systems — I’m beginning to sense that the body I’ve been taught to override is not the problem but the doorway.

But even as I sense this shift, I can feel that the word body is too small for what I’m pointing to. Something in me knows that what Gendlin meant is larger than the organism, larger than sensation, larger than anything the mechanistic worldview would call “the body.”

And that if I want to understand what comes after separation, I need to follow that thread.

That’s where the next part of this inquiry leads.

If you want to follow this inquiry with me

If this exploration resonates — if you’re sensing your own version of this shift — you can subscribe to Learn Focusing to receive the next part of the series when it’s ready. I’m following this thread slowly, from the inside, and I’d love to have you alongside me as it unfolds.

About the Author

I’m Simone — an embodied listening practitioner with a scientific background in engineering geology. After years in extractive industries, I turned toward embodied discernment and living systems thinking. I write about thresholds, liminal spaces, and the intelligence that lives in the body. More at simoneislistening.com/blog.

By Barbara Dickinson

If you would like to listen to the audio version of this blog post, you can find it on YouTube.

As we prepare for our first gathering to explore interaction, let us take a look at the first practice distinguishing interactive Focusing from basic or traditional Focusing: Focuser as Storyteller.

If you have some experience with Focusing, then you probably know that story content is not a necessary part of a Focusing session. Neither the Focuser nor the Listener in a partnership needs to know “The Story”.

Focusing, like we said in the previous blog post, is first and foremost Felt Sensing – the sensations plus feelings our body is producing in response to whatever is going on for us.

But to maintain and improve relationships, one key is to understand the other person. In the practice of interactive Focusing, that’s where the story comes in.

We call it “Focuser as Storyteller”. In the first several minutes of the Focusing turn, this is the time to give context to what is happening inside — what is prompting the bodily response.

Let’s go back for a moment to create even better contrast. In a Focusing session without the interactive component, the Focuser senses what’s inside. This could take any form, like images, sounds, words, colors, textures, shapes, movements, etc. Because Focusing works so well with a Listener, the Focuser can say out loud what they are experiencing. The Listener can reflect. There are even Focusers trained to both reflect and make helpful suggestions, as guides.

In the interactive method of Focusing, the Listener plays the same role, but they are hearing the context of the Focuser’s experience in the story, as well as hearing what follows the story — the felt sense experience.

For the second part of the Focuser’s turn, they do the same as traditional focusing: they describe the felt sense that comes with their story. The Listener can reflect or even guide in the same way as described above.

Let’s go back for a moment to an even earlier blog post that talks about listening to understand, rather than listening to respond.

The interactive form of Focusing is all about listening to understand. Later, the Listener is going to give back to the Focuser something called the “double empathic moment”. We will talk about that in a later blog post. It is a precious gift the Listener offers from having deeply understood how it is for the Focuser, after hearing about their story and their felt sense.

Here is a bit of focusing wisdom from friends far and wide: a word about trust. Focusing is a deeply personal experience. In a world where feeling safe with another person is a precious experience, we can still have the experience of being heard, reflected, and understood without ever telling our story. That is one of the “miracles” of felt sensing and listening in the Focusing exchange. I can describe my sense of an experience without ever telling the Listener what it is about. Some people call this “contentless Focusing”.

A closing word about trust: It is important to notice when trust is present in an interaction and when trust is absent. I may be able to understand another person deeply, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily trust them. Being aware of how we are with trust is another key to maintaining and improving relationships. If I trust you, I may share more about how it is for me. If I do not know whether I can trust you, I can always share something without context or content. It is easier to say “I feel a bit fearful” than it is to say “I feel a bit fearful because my friend yelled at me yesterday”. In the former, there is nothing for the Listener to know who I am talking about. In the latter, I’ve shared a piece of what might seem like confidential information.

Let’s not take this too far yet. Maybe just consider as you begin an interaction what is your level of trust in the person in front of you (even virtually)?

Here are some ideas to try out in the coming weeks:

1. When you are about to have an interaction, pause for a few seconds and ask yourself a simple question like “Do I trust this person?” If it is possible, close your eyes and notice any reaction that comes in your body. It might be a small voice saying “Yes!” Or “No!”. It is not necessary to do anything; just notice.

2. Take a few minutes out of your day in a quiet place to close your eyes if possible, and ask yourself a gentle question like “What is between me and being perfectly fine right now?” Then wait and just notice what happens next. Is there a bodily sensation? Does a sentence come? Does an image come? Is there a story connected with what comes? You might make a note of what the story is and what the sensation was that accompanied it.

3. Like we said in the blog post about listening to understand versus listening to respond, you might keep practicing that skill. Keep noticing in your conversations whether the other person listens to understand? Or listens to respond? And you might notice whether you are listening to understand? Or listening to respond? Here’s the link to that blog post if you would like to take a second look.

Our first monthly gathering, the Changes Meeting to Explore Interaction, is happening soon! It is listed on our calendar of courses.

It is also listed on The International focusing Institute event page.

And you can find more resources for exploring interaction at this link.

Stay tuned for our Interactive Focusing On-Demand Course coming soon!

In our next blog post we will talk about the skill of empathic listening in a Focusing Way.

Until next time!

• You can find our Monthly Changes Meeting schedule here.

• Read more about exploring interaction here.

• Resources about Interactive Focusing are found here.

• Read Sandy’s latest Newsletter here.

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