Members Piece
Is attention to the felt sense enough?
by Jim Bagnell
When I learned focusing, I found it difficult to go from thinking to felt sensing. A body-scan helped the transition. First, I attended to my breathing and then attended to each part of my body, from head to foot, allowing any tension I noticed in the body to dissipate on exhaling.
As I became more proficient at focusing, I continued to use the body-scan at the beginning of each session, whether that was alone or with a partner. I then attended to the centre of my body to see how I was doing or to see if there were issues that needed attention. Often nothing emerged and I just stayed with that felt sense until the session finished. I always found value from the session whether I attended to an issue or not.
Joan Klagsbrun & Susan L. Lennox taught Clearing a Space to a group of women recovering from breast cancer. The women reported significant improvements in the quality of life, emotional self-regulation, and body image after the interventions. The improvements may have happened because they were enabled to distance themselves from the issues or simply that they spent some time noticing how these issues were held in the body.
Herbert Benson, M.D in “Timeless Healing” (Simon and Schuster (1996)) describes a simple exercise which he called “The Relaxation Response”. He found this relaxation technique to be very effective in helping his patient to heal.
Attention to the inner body is at the crux of focusing and there are many healing modalities that either directly encourage this or imply a similar kind of attention. Examples are Yoga, Tai Chi, Reflexology and many more.
Bruce Lipton, a developmental biologist and author of The Biology of Belief, postulates that beliefs and perceptions, rather than just genes, control our biology. According to Lipton genes don’t cause disease, but they malfunction when stressed and disease is the result. He controversially believes that 90% of disease is directly related to stress.
Because of the discovery of neuroplasticity in the brain we now know that every experience and even every thought leaves a physical imprint on the brain and that that has an effect on the body.
In his book Bodymind (Pantheon Books 1977) Ken Dychtwald describes a workshop he attended that was delivered by Dr John Pierrakos. Ken is standing naked before a room full of men and women of all ages. Dr Pierrakos walks towards him and carefully examines the texture of his skin and the overall quality of his body’s musculature. He asks him to walk around the room for a few moments so that he can observe his body in motion. He then tells him about his parents and about his relationship to them. He describes his general attitude regarding life, love, relationships, movement, change and performance. With remarkable accuracy, he discusses the sorts of relationships and styles of behaviour that he would naturally seek out and tells him the way he deals with them. For a finale, he describes his personality strengths and weaknesses.
Everything he said, every observation he made, every description he offered, was entirely accurate. How did he do it? They had only met the day before and Ken had shared nothing of his personal life with him. He did it simply by observing his physical body.
In conclusion, I believe our bodies hold the remnants of every experience that we have ever had and that the effects of these experiences may be accessed by attending to the felt sense. This attention may help us to make positive use of our experiences and may prevent our past experience from keeping us from moving forward and growing.
