Focusing
mindfulness based counseling & therapy
Focusing is an integral part of my daily work, which enables a way out of the limiting "house of thoughts" and the often one-track carousel of thoughts, and at the same time opens a way into the systemic-gestalt-psychological work with inner parts.
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What is Focusing?
"Focusing is what I call the time when you are with something you physically feel without already knowing what it is." (Prof. Eugene T. Gendlin. Psychotherapy researcher and developer of the Focusing method).
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This process is especially helpful in therapeutic encounters with difficult or blocking emotions, in addition to developing a balanced self-relationship with conscious as well as often unconscious, unwanted parts of the personality.
The body is the most integrating and multifaceted medium in counseling & therapy:
Our body lives in the situations (embodied situations) and relationships, it always knows more than we can know purely cognitively. Thinking and cognitively we process only single aspects of reality at the same time. However, numerous inner and outer aspects are always involved and effective in a situation, which we cannot put into words and perceive. This information is stored and processed especially on the body level. If we can consciously experience this in Focusing, we promote our "self-understanding" and the mindful basic attitude of "being able to understand ourselves".
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Focusing is a form of introspection:
In complementary extension of everyday consciousness, with the help of which we think analytically through past and future, the Focusing method takes us one level deeper. Here, thinking is just as present and retrievable, but through introspection, mindful feeling and sensing now move more into focus. Likewise, intuitive abilities and body-based intelligence, which humans possess quite fundamentally or universally, become accessible here.
Mindfulness plays a central role here, but the process differs from meditative practices in that Focusing involves actively relating to inner experiences, images and parts. Through Focusing and the non-directive work with the so-called "Felt Sense", meanings also become visible and (therapeutic) movements possible. Finally, solution processes and changes can be initiated, integrated and consolidated.
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The three described levels of everyday awareness - Focusing awareness and mindfulness/meditation are sometimes also illustrated with the metaphor of an elevator:
- In everyday life (the upper floor in the metaphor) is the unconscious thinking and doing mode.
- In Focusing (first floor), thoughts and body/emotions, doing and being are in conscious interaction
- In meditation (lower floor) there is the conscious being-mode, the silence, the active not-doing
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