A personal review by John Keane

Many Focusers encounter a difficulty in sharing the “idea” and “experience” of Focusing with friends, family, and colleagues. It is my hope that this review will help in this respect.

Most people know Eugene Gendlin as a psychologist, what some may not realise is that he was first a philosopher. As such he was well versed in the how language functions in human interactions.

So, let us dip into his sense of “what” a body is, and how we can have bodies that are not just physical structures but can connect us directly to our lived experience.

Gene opens this paper with a provocative question “How is Focusing theoretically possible?” And if you are familiar with Focusing you will know this is not an easy question to pose. So, Gene wonderfully sets out his agenda to explore this in terms that people unfamiliar to Focusing may appreciate. As such he points towards bodily sentience as an essential part of the human experience. It is not something we add on – it is already there, but Focusing gives us direct access to it. Gene tells us that “Everyone has at times had it, and yet-isn’t this odd?--hardly anyone talks about it. Our language has no name for it.”

Let us explore how Gene offers to describe the human body in a way that makes Focusing possible.

He begins with intuition or what we might call a hunch. Intuition/hunch points towards something important that emerges in our living, but we cannot explain how this emerges. Gene wants to explore this kind of emergence, this kind of experience.

“To think further about how Focusing is possible, we have to think differently about the living body. So it is important to notice that when we talk about Focusing we use the word “body” in a certain way: We use it to talk about how we feel our bodies from inside.”}

1st Assertion about the Body – The Body Knows the Situation.

This leads Gene to introduce his first assertion about the body – the situational body – an assertion that “the body knows the situation!” There is a novelty in this assertion because many people think that we know the situation and the body simply reacts to this knowing, and of course that is true to some extent, but our bodies can also feel the situation directly.

“For example, you see someone you know on the street but you don’t remember who it is. This is totally different than seeing a stranger. This person gives you a familiar feeling. You cannot place the person, but your body knows who it is. What is more your body knows how you feel about the person. Although you don’t remember who it is, your felt sense of that person has a very distinct quality… Any other person would give you a different body-sense.”

Gene insists that to explain this kind of experience we need to allow the experience itself to function/work in our explanation. To enable this experience to function/work in this way we need a kind of thinking that has the following characteristics:

• “The experience is felt rather than spoken or visual. It is not words or images, but a bodily sense.”
  
  
• “It does not fit the common names or categories of feelings. It is a unique sense of this person or this situation.”
  
  
• “Although such a body-sense comes as one feeling, we can sense that it contains an intricacy”.
  
  

Setting out the characteristics of the situational body in this way allows Gene to offer us a new kind of bodily concept – “implicit intricacy”. The body sense that forms in the context of a given situation contains many strands or parts that are not immediately identified separately but emerge at first in one sense.

So, if I have an argument with John, the bodily sense that emerges has an initial complexity that may not first be clear. If we “open it and if we enter, we can go many steps into it.” The initial anger that first emerges may hold an implicit (not initially clear) complexity about all of the arguments I have had with John, about other arguments that have a similar kind of pattern, and perhaps more patterns or strands may emerge from earlier experiences. An implicit intricacy emerges that contains all about that kind of experience.

Having introduced this kind of “implicit intricacy” Gene can now proceed to consider the situational body as an interaction with its environment rather than something separate. The implicit intricacy becomes a doorway through which we can enter deeper into our situational experience – allowing us to separate out the strands of that experience. This opens up the richness and relevance of any kind of experiencing. As we dance with our experiencing in this way, we discover that things and circumstances are no longer just out there and unchangeable, rather experiencing can be lived forward and elaborated.

2nd Assertion about the body – We Have Plant Bodies

I remember the first time I heard this assertion; I thought that Gene had lost the plot! What was he talking about? Gene is very clever in how he offers new concepts and ideas. He is careful not to phrase them in language that could lapse back into a different kind of understanding. He is very clear about what he means and wants us to follow him in this way. The assertion about our plant bodies invites us to open up what we mean by the body in a new way.

“How can the body know our situations and know them more intricately than we do? And how can it project new ways of action and thought?”

It is commonly thought that the body can only know what it perceives through the 5 senses. A plant does not possess the senses that we have, and it doesn’t need these senses to garner information about its living. A plant is an interaction with its environment. It knows how to turn towards the sun, how to feed from the soil and water and how to synthesise sunlight. It organises and makes itself in and with its environment.

“Animals live more complex lives than plants.” And animals have the kind of information that plants have. Animals organise and makes themselves with and in its environment. For animals the plant body information is elaborated by the 5 senses. These senses give the plant body (of the animal) more information about the environment, this feeds into the complexity of how the animal interacts with its environment.

The human body has all of the complex interactions with its environment that the plant body and animal body possess but with the added complexities of language and culture.
“Language and culture greatly elaborate the life-process and the information of our plant bodies. My second main point is: We can think of our linguistic and situational knowledge not as separate and floating, but as elaborations of our already intricate plant-bodies.”

OK, there is a lot in this quotation, so perhaps we can open it up to sense what that means to us.

We have plant bodies that are an interaction with our environment, we organise and make ourselves in and with the environment. Without sunshine or water – there is no plant, without oxygen or food - there is no person. It is artificial to separate the plant from the sunshine or the person from oxygen – they are both one interaction. Traditional science breaks interactions and processes into their constituent parts. Gene’s first-person science places interaction as primary. When we begin with interaction, we can look at situations as something that are not external to our living.

In this way, our situations are not something external – a person who witnessed your argument with John will have a very different situational body-sense of the experience than you will. The strands or details of that body-sense will be relevant to the person themselves when it is opened up. The situational body knows our situations because it is our living in them and from them. This body-sense also implies our next step of living within that situation.

For plant-bodies this next step can be the usual pattern of eating or drinking, but when we add in the complexity that we encounter in the more elaborated animal body with the additions of the 5 senses and then add the human body which includes language and culture (the things that shape our interactions with others) – then the next step may be more and more complex than the usual patterns indicate.

We see Gene building the complexity of the body as it is sensed from inside. Beginning with the plant-body that is already an interaction in and with its environment. A body that already possesses information about its environment and its interaction with it. He then builds upon this kind of interaction by adding the complexities the animal-body (elaborated by the 5 senses) in addition or on top of the plant-body. When we add the complexity language and culture (our interactions with others) into the equation then we see the need for more elaborate ways of finding our next steps in complex situations. Old patterns given to us by our culture may no longer enable us to discover this kind of intricate next step.

The field of psychotherapy can illuminate these kinds of concepts. In Gene’s psychotherapy research, he discovered that people who are successful in therapy display a kind of inner interaction “It is something felt, but not yet known. It is sensed as meaningful, but not immediately recognizable. It is the … We now call it a felt sense”.

Gene went on to develop the Focusing process from this research. Focusing describes or points toward a process where we can have direct interactions with the felt sense. By first allowing the mind to quieten we can then begin to bring our attention into the centre of our body to notice what needs our attention. Perhaps there is an issue in our life we wish to work with, or we can sense into an unease in our body. Often it is a feeling or an emotion or a body sensation that comes first.

Gene tells us that we need to wait at this doorway until something more complex or global forms inside. This dimension of human experiencing is often missed or overlooked because it takes some time for this more complex/global felt sense to form. The felt sense is the bodies rendering of our plant/animal/human experiencing – it is the situational-bodies sense/expression of our complex experiential interactions.

Gene offers a wonderful explanation of the Focusing process on pages 27 and 28 of this article. I will not review this here, but I recommend that you read it.
My favourite part of this article is how Gene explore the process of writing poetry in relation to the kind of bodily interaction he is describing.

The … in Poetry

He begins by pointing towards a characteristic of therapy – “In therapy one must twist language, one must poetize in order to say some of it.” This illustrates how our usual language often doesn’t suffice when we are trying to articulate the complexity, the intricacy of our experiencing.

In previous times, this kind of bodily interaction was the remit of the mystics, the artists, and the poets etc. Gene Gendlin has now offered this possibility to everyone. Exploring the process of the poet can help illuminate this bodily interaction.

The poet has written six or seven lines of a poem and they are happy enough with them. The next line doesn’t come, so the poet rereads the lines, sensing into what needs to come next. A felt sense may form and the poet can refer to this formation to sense into what needs to come next. Many words and phrases may emerge, but they will be discarded if they will not offer what needs to come next, and what needs to come will be in the context of the lines already written. The poet resonates the words and phrases with the felt sense – this kind of interaction with the felt sense is very precise.

“The …. demands, it urges, it hungers, it insists upon, it knows, foreshadows, implies, wants … something so exact it is almost as if it were already said, and yet-no words... The … is full of words that are struggling to rearrange themselves into new phrases.”

If or when something new comes – the new phrase, the new line carries the meaning, the implying of the poem forward. But the felt sense does not disappear, rather it flows into the new line or phrase. It forms a new implying – the new line satisfies what the felt sense was, or more than what was there before, but a new implying emerges. This new implying may indicate the ending of the poem, or it may imply that more is needed. It may also imply a rewording or what went before.

“And we see again that the body knows the situation, the aspect of life the poet is trying to phrase. Else it could not know so exactingly that the suggested lines fall short.”

This kind of novelty, this kind of something new is what Gene calls “carrying forward”. It is not that the poet forgot the words that were needed – the words emerged freshly from all that went before. The situational body can offer something new – something fresh. The body does not just record our experiencing – it can also offer something new. Our past is not something external, it is something that can be operational in the present, and something new can emerge from that. The emergence of the felt sense allows us to live more deeply from our experiencing.

Gene often said that we can add Focusing to any human experiencing to make it better. This may seem like conceited claim, but I sense that what he was pointing towards is that we can appreciate our lived experience more fully if we add the situational sense of our experiencing. There is a courage that is required to pause at this edge of something that is felt but not yet known. But this courage is repaid by the possibility that something new may come that carries our experience forward.

3rd Assertion – The Body Implies Its Right Next Step

This third assertion is probably the most important for us today.

We live in cultures and structures that have become much more complex than earlier generations. The metaphors, the structures, the patterns, and the answers that guided living in the past no longer suffice to respond to the complexities of the modern world.

The kind of bodily implying that Gene describes has an important role to play in the creativity we can bring to the complexity of our lived experience.

I discovered Focusing at the age of 25 after I experienced a chronic illness that hospitalised me for 6 months and left me unable to work or function normally. All of my education hindered rather than helped me to navigate this complexity. I had no map for how to proceed – I certainly did not “know” how to reimagine my life in the face of this experience. I was stuck and anxious – trying to find rational answers to a human experience that demanded more than what rationality could offer.

The wonderful Phil Kelly (many people in the Irish Focusing Network will know Phil and all of her work) gave me a copy of Gene’s book “Focusing” and soon the next steps began to emerge from all that went before. My body knew my experiencing in a very different way to how my mind understood it – Focusing enabled me to use the precision of both.

In a similar way Gene points towards an example that Einstein outlines in his autobiography. Einstein tells us that “for fifteen years while working on the problem that led to the theory of relativity he was guided by “a feeling” of what the answer had to be.”

It is clear that Einstein moved forward from what he already knew about maths and physics – something new was implied from that knowing, but it took him 15 years to be able to express/articulate what was implied. This next step was felt – his body implied the next step. And like the poet, we can infer that the coming of the step that was needed to carry forward (provide the right next step) from came from all that went before.

“The body totals up the circumstances it has and then implies the next step, whether it is relativity or inhaling. This has not been well understood. The living body always implies its right next step.”

This is not a revolutionary call to discard all tacit knowledge and to throw away all of the patterns and structures of the past. Indeed, Gene warns us of the peril of discarding old forms because it is sometimes easier to do so. The novelty and creativity that bodily implying can provide a means of creating a map to guide us when our living is stuck or frustrated when the old maps no longer work or guide us. These new maps may contain elements of the old structures and patterns.

“When we don’t know what to do, we sense more than we can say. Once we pay direct attention to what we do sense, it is like a hunch: the …. knows more than we can say or do. Like Einstein, we have a “feeling,” an unclear sense for the solution we are looking for. Our sense of it is sufficient to make us reject all the available ways, although the new move that would carry this more into action does not yet exist”.

This quotation reminds me of my training in Philosophy – where I learnt over a period of time, that it is the questions we ask that are more important than any answers that may emerge. What Gene points towards in this article is that our bodies are an interaction with our environment and that the body implies it's right next step. This right next step emerges from the stoppage/stoppages (question/questions) in our living – if we sense into or open up what stops us then we can sense the more, the next step of where this stoppage (question) needs to go. And this next step is not an end in itself because it carries its own fresh implying forward with it.

We can begin to appreciate how Gene has built a sense of the human body that goes beyond static definitions to a developmental process that carries with it the implicit intricacies of our situational human living and experiencing.

Reflection:

So, the next time someone asks you to explain what Focusing is – what will you say?

I invite you to pause for a moment and sense how your body holds that question now….

In a recent discussion a colleague shared that trying to explain Focusing to a person who has never experienced it is like trying to explain what falling in love is like to someone who has never been in love. Of course, this is true to a large extent, but this should not stop us from trying to communicate the essence of the process to others.

Do Gendlin’s 3 assertions about the body assist you in trying to communicate something of the Focusing experience?

I will finish by outlining what I find helpful in this article:

• Many people will translate what we say into concepts they are familiar with and comfortable in using. So, if we say that Focusing is about the body and feelings, then they may translate that in a different way than we intend. Gendlin illustrates that he is talking about the body in a very different way than it has traditionally been understood, and that feelings are different to what many people understand because when we talk about feelings in this context, what we are pointing towards are the doorways to a more intricate and complex felt sense.
  
  
• The body that Gene is describing is the body as it is sensed from the inside. He offers us examples of how we can build the complexity of that body in a manner that goes beyond the traditional understanding of the body as a physical structure that is mainly a transportation system for the mind.
  
  
• This body “knows”, but it does so in a different way than the mind “knows”. As complex human beings living in a complex world, we need the precision of both kinds of “knowing”.
  
  
• The body that Gene explores in relation to how Focusing is possible, is an interaction with its environment. This interaction is evident in all of the phases of the human body that he describes i.e., the plant body, the animal body, and the human body. When we begin with interaction then we sense the world in a different way – we sense a world that includes us and our experiencing.
  
  
• The culture we live in spends so much time developing our capacity for conceptual thought but has forgotten its capacity for bodily knowing and carrying forward. This is not something we add onto human living – it is already there, and Focusing offers us the means to access and develop this capacity.
  
  
• Sensing into the questions is more productive than finding answers in our living. The questions can imply a deeper living – a way forward that the answers can never offer. There is a wonderful paradox implicit in the Focusing process, where it is the stoppages and questions that can offer us the possibility of living more creatively. For me there is a freedom and a hope in that possibility…

We can all become poets and live in a way that is full of creativity. When I teach Focusing to children – I tell them that I will offer them something that most adults don’t know – this peaks their attention. The younger children know Focusing in the marrow of their bones, but the sad thing is that we educate them out of it. So perhaps we can all become children again in this way…

[1] I will use quotes from Gene’s article in quotation marks to indicate that these are Gene’s words taken from the article being reviewed.

To read the complete article from the Gendlin Online Library click here