Focusing — Listening to Your Inner Experience
Sometimes you understand a problem intellectually, yet something remains unresolved. You can explain what happened and recognise familiar patterns, but still feel a knot in your stomach, a heaviness in your chest, or an uneasiness you cannot quite describe. Focusing offers a way to give this experience attention and discover what has not yet found words.
Eugene Gendlin developed Focusing from research into recorded psychotherapy sessions, finding that clients who paused to consult their immediate, often unclear bodily experience—and checked their words against it—tended to achieve better therapeutic outcomes.[1]
What is a felt sense*?
A felt sense is the bodily sense of a whole situation: how a relationship, a decision, or a difficulty feels to you before you can fully explain it. It may contain several emotions, expectations and concerns together.
You might recognise that you are anxious about a conversation, yet sense that “anxious” does not quite capture it. Taking time to attend to that feeling may bring something more precise: perhaps a sense of being cornered, or of having to choose between speaking honestly and keeping the peace. These are possibilities to explore; the description needs to fit your own experience.[2]
*Felt sense — a term introduced by Eugene Gendlin to describe an initially unclear bodily sense of a whole situation, carrying meaning that has not yet been fully put into words.
Giving the experience time
In Focusing, you bring a patient, curious attention to what you notice inside. You allow a description to emerge—a word, a phrase, perhaps an image—and return to the feeling to sense whether it fits. You can adjust the words as your experience becomes clearer.
This checking is central to the process. An explanation may sound convincing while still missing something important. Pausing allows you to notice that difference and leave room for something you have not yet considered.
There is no need to force an answer. Even a vague sense of “something about this feels difficult” can be a beginning. You are making space for the experience to unfold at its own pace.[2]
A different relationship with your feelings
The accompanying guide invites you to acknowledge what is present and spend time with it. Wording such as “Something in me feels afraid” may help you recognise the fear while retaining enough space to listen to it.
You may gradually sense what concerns this part of you, what it needs, or what has been difficult to acknowledge. Sometimes this brings a clearer understanding or a noticeable easing in the body. At other times, the change is subtle: you can describe the feeling more accurately, or feel less at odds with it.[3]
Using the accompanying guide
Read the script through before beginning, then keep it nearby as a reminder. Choose a quiet time when you are unlikely to be interrupted. Allow pauses between the prompts; some may need time, and others may not be relevant on that occasion.
You do not need to complete every step or resolve the whole issue. Leave a few minutes to finish gently, noticing anything you would like to remember or return to.
The guide is intended to support your practice between sessions. If the experience becomes overwhelming, pause and bring it to our next session.
Focusing — A Guide to Working with Yourself
1. “Which way today?” or
2. “I’m sensing into my body.” or
3. “What wants my awareness now?” or “How am I about that issue?”
4. I’m saying hello to what’s here.
5. I’m finding the best way to describe it.
6. I’m checking back (description) with my body.
7. “Is it OK to just be with this right now?”
8. I’m sitting with it, with interested curiosity.
9. I’m sensing how it feels from its point of view.
10. I’m asking if it has an emotional quality (what emotions are there?).
11. I’m asking it, ‘What gets (makes) it (so)…?” [emotion or description word]
12. I’m asking it what it needs.
13. I’m asking my body to show me how ‘all OK’ would feel.
14. I’m checking if it’s OK to stop soon.
15. I’m saying, “I’ll be back.”
16. I’m thanking my body and the parts that have been with me.
Based on “The Power of Focusing” Ann Weiser Cornell
References
[1] Gendlin, E. T. (1969). Focusing. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 6(1), 4–15.
[2] Gendlin, E. T. (1984). The client’s client: The edge of awareness. In R. L. Levant & J. M. Shlien (Eds.), Client-Centered Therapy and the Person-Centered Approach: New Directions in Theory, Research, and Practice, pp. 256–279.
[3] Cornell, A. W. (1996). The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing. New Harbinger Publications.