Thursday 1 December 2011

Is your meditation safe?

Insights from Focusing
Mini-Tip:  1st December 2011

Although nativity cribs and mangers may be far away from Buddhist minds at Christmas, there’s a mythic theme that speaks to me. How to find a haven, a safe place at this dark time of the year? Not a cattle stall as such, but still, an inner sanctum; a place of simplicity, surrounded and supported by nature – where what wants to struggle into new life can do so; where what is yet unborn can find birth. 
The questions evolve as I practise. How can I be a safe haven, in myself? Can I become, myself, a place where other beings, whoever they are, find rest and comfort when needed?
My wish trickles into my meditation. Sitting becomes a crucible where safety distils. In meditation, I meet and interact with inner impulses, I discover inner selves. That’s where unknown and unexpected guests arrive each moment. 
As I watch myself greet each guest, I discover how safe I really am. How do I respond to each impulse? With subtlety and skills gained from my practice of Focusing, I listen and watch with curiosity.
I’m not entangled in each impulse; I’m not separate from it. I don’t measure distances here. It’s all about relationship. I seek to feel that vital connection with life, in whatever form it comes my way. I don’t presume to know better than any impulse – be it thought, feeling, sensation, image, or dreamy nothingness. 
I lose it; I find it. I lose it again. I enjoy doing both. That’s when safety is most alive.

Explorations in Focusing and Buddhism: 1. How Focusing can help Buddhist practice

Article published in: 
The Focusing Connection
Vol. XXVIII, No. 5. September 2011: Feature Article 




**********************************    **********************************   **********************************


Editorial, by Ann Weiser Cornell

In  this issue, we bring you two very practical articles about applying Focusing principles to ‘real life’. The first, starting on this page, is on how Focusing can assist Buddhist practice. There has been interest in this topic for a long time. We have a great list of back issue articles on Focusing and meditation. Recently there seems to be an extra surge of interest. Locana (Elizabeth English) is both a certified Focusing teacher and an ordained member of the Triratna Buddhist Community, and she has agreed to do a series of articles for us — of which this is the first — under the title, “Explorations in Focusing and Buddhism.”  

**********************************    **********************************   **********************************

Gendlin says, ‘There’s always more.’ And I imagine for many Focusing Buddhists, his recent interview on Focusing and Buddhism (http://www.tricycle.com/feature/focusing) taps into a well-oiled curiosity. I’ve been a Buddhist for almost thirty years, and in that time, I’ve explored a range of Buddhist practices. I’ve attended retreats in wild and lovely places, practised meditations of different kinds, chanted mantras within strange and beautiful rituals, studied exotic Sanskrit texts, followed ethical precepts and founded friendshipwithin the Buddhist community or sangha. These experiences have certainly informed and enriched the person I’ve become. Even so, in my onward journey of becoming (it’s a process that never stops, after all), Focusing has become an invaluable aide. Over this past half decade, Focusing over has opened up whole new seams of inspiration, and furnished fresh approaches to familiar practices.


But when two profound practices meet – such as Buddhism and Focusing – it’s probably best to pause before leaping to compare how they differ or overlap. Any distinct system will hold its own particular insights and jewels. Often, it’s good to experience those first on their own terms, and within their own frame of reference. And yet, we cannot separate what we are now from the threads which have informed and influenced us in the past. Our exploration of different practices, and how they relate to each other, is inevitable and ongoing. So it is with some caution, as well as excitement, that I add my own voice to the others which have gone before, and to share some ways in which, for me at least, Focusing and Buddhism interact and intertwine.

In this article, I look at how Focusing enriches the way I understand, experience, and so practice Buddhism. This may amount to little more than glimpses into something larger. Still, I hope it might be the basis for further, ongoing explorations (by others, as well as myself) into the insights that come when Buddhism and Focusing meet.

Ways into Direct Experience
Buddhism and Focusing both tackle the issue of life and how we live it. And both begin by looking within at our own, direct experience. In Focusing, Gendlin’s extraordinary contribution is to point our our implicit knowing, a ‘preconceptual feeling’ he calls the felt-sense. As Focusers, we know that the felt-sense encompasses the whole of an experience; the ‘all-that’ of a situation which is here, but which as yet has little form or no words. It’s the first inkling of a response as it stirs into awareness; a creative opening, as when a new poem comes, complete and whole. As a seasoned meditator, learning about the felt-sense, made immediate sense to me. It addressed a whole aspect of my experience, one which came to m often, but confusingly, because I had no words or concepts to describe it (a lovely example of what Gendlin calls ‘an instance of itself’). In discovering the felt-sense, I find a new dimension opens up. I discover afresh the tremendous subtlety, accuracy, beauty, depth and infinite possibilities of my inner world. I gain a far fuller appreciation for our human potential; a new sense of what it might mean to become someone ‘fully awake’ – a ‘buddha’.

So Focusing supports my Buddhist practice in two ways. On one hand, it brings a freshly felt understanding of where Buddhism is heading – of what it might mean to be awakened. On the other, it gives new impetus to the practices which lead there. The classic metaphor here is that of a journey, of inner growth as an active exploration. It is one embedded deep within Buddhism, as dharma (the Buddhist word for ‘Buddhism’) is often translated as Path. Yet dharma also means the Teaching or Truth. This implies a different kind of process; transformation which grows organically from the gradual unfolding of what is real and true, from within. For me, it is this second perspective which chimes most closely with Focusing.

These two ways of describing inner change are reflected in one of Buddhism’s central approaches to realising our human potential: the practice of meditation. Some meditation is about actively generating buddha-like qualities. Other meditations seek to create conditions in which our inherent qualities can shine forth. This latter is about being where we are now more and more fully, and the alchemy that follows when we are. And it’s here that Focusing practice has become such a vital support for me. The Focusing attitudes and approaches, which I learn and re-learn in every Focusing session I do, have become the bedrock for my meditation. For example, one of Focusing’s great gifts is the way it allows us to accompany and welcome our experience, even when that experience feels difficult, confusing or contradictory. Even experienced meditators may be surprised at the subtle wisdom that Focusing brings to the inner world, particularly the way a Focuser can nurture a clear awareness of what is unclear; the process of watching and waiting as a felt-sense gathers, grows and shifts. 

In Buddhism, this sort of awareness is sometimes described as a deep recognition of the way in which our experience ‘self-liberates’; that is, how our feelings, impulses, thoughts and sensations naturally arise, continue and pass. Experiencing felt-shifts within Focusing has helped me to understand this. Whether Focusing or meditating, I can watch with fascinated attention as some unknown energy or impulse emerges (often fuzzy and vague), then forms and shifts. For me, this happens mostly through images, metaphors and association, mixed with symbolised body-sense and feeling. So it’s with relief I’ve discovered that body-sensation does not have to be the sole or primary means of grounding my experience, as some meditation practices advise. Again, in some types of meditation we are offered the choice to let our thoughts and feelings pass ‘like clouds in a blue sky’. Focusing has taught me the value of watching and befriending the clouds as they gather, storm and swirl. So I rest with those clouds (not inside them, but with them, in a way I sense that they might like) until, through the power of empathy and presence, they are ready to dissolve into space. As both Focusers and meditators know, when the ‘clouds’ are strong emotions or old patterns, the way they shift and release is some sort of miracle.

Ways to Awareness and Presence
As a result of all this, I often feel more empathy. I find I can better embrace other people’s experience as it forms and moves for them, even when that might be challenging. The more I hold my own experience within this kind, spacious awareness, the more natural it is to do that for them. In the gentle words of Kevin McEvenue: the more space there is for me, the more there is for you. I now know more deeply that, 'as within, so without'. Many Buddhist practices focus on ways to develop kindness and compassion for oneself and others. Through Focusing, a natural kindness has come into my life, unbidden. It has opened up new vistas for me onto the ideal, so beautifully expressed in Buddhism, of limitless compassion and understanding.

The down-to-earth reason for this is because Focusing is so good at helping us spot when we are embedded in a tangle of thoughts and feelings (I’m hurt/angry/upset/good/bad). Buddhism talks about feeling the pain of two arrows. Initially, there is the ‘first arrow’ – the fear, pain or hurt triggered by something which happens. Then there is the extra dart we introduce when we try to do that impossible thing of pushing away our experience, or of grasping after it. So the ‘second arrow’ refers to the added wrangles and tangles which happen inside us when we don’t like feeling things like worry or pain. Focusing practice has helped me understand the two arrows in a very practical way. In Inner Relationship Focusing
,
we come into relationship with the parts of us that are wanting or not-wanting our experience, and learn how to move forward by holding them both in presence. This is a precious insight for any Buddhist whose classic dharma teachings revolve around the human impulses of craving and aversion. In this way, my Focusing practice has brought me a new sense of freedom and hope; a welcome lightness around what is difficult or painful.

Buddhism has a lot to say about the way we merge and identify with our experience (‘this is me!’). It talks about this as the creation of self or selfhood, as if we have a special faculty for creating ideas of who we are: (the ego, or ‘I-maker' (ahamkara). Focusing practice gives me a wonderful opportunity to see how I forge and coagulate around my experience from moment-to-moment, creating ongoing ideas of a me or self. In the course of a Focusing session, I begin to disentangle and unmerge from the me’s and somethings that make up my usual sense of myself. Whether I feel overwhelm, uncertainty, pain, or inspiration, uplift and wonder, I’m more able to welcome these simply as aspects of what is happening right now, watching them shift and change organically. So I feel safer around experience, my own and other people’s.

This means that, at root, my understanding of my self is changing. I’m learning more about the flow and process of life – how utterly fluid experience is. I gradually find a space where I know that I am not really made up of any one fixed thing; I come into a new relationship with my ideas and deep-rooted sense of self. In fact, I find that there isn’t really a me here, in the way I usually feel it. I begin to experience a quality of being which Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin call Self-in-Presence.

Self-in-Presence means we can simply be present with whatever happens, whether that’s something inside us, or in the world outside. Remarkably, this is even enjoyable – however difficult or painful the experience is. That’s because once we are present with something, the qualities of understanding and kindness flow naturally towards it. However shakily or momentarily we are present, the more painful that thing is, the more compassion and empathy arise in response.

Ways to Freedom
At root, both Focusing and Buddhism are practices based on presence and awareness (I see the terms as interchangeable). These open up new perspectives, where we experience ourselves and the world in a radically different way. Buddhism describes this radical difference in terms of freedom. In one sense, this freedom is freedom from. It’s when we overcome habitual obstacles and limitations, and outgrow our inner aches and pains, our wanting or not-wanting, and the whole gamut of difficult emotions based on old ways of seeing ourselves and our lives. It’s a radical way of clearing the space (Gendlin, Focusing, Chapter 7).

In another sense, freedom is more than this: it has a unique quality of its own. We may feel freedom as a rare and precious joy. This comes having from a different kind of response to the world. Many of our entrenched responses are reactive; that is, they are created and conditioned by our current attitudes, feelings, thoughts; our past experiences and future expectations; everything that makes up my current sense of me. As that sense of self changes, and as Self-in-Presence grows, we no longer merge with our reactive responses. Open to our felt-sensing, and alive to the ever-changing flow of things, we are free to feel whatever comes into our lives in a fresh, creative way. As Buddhism puts it, we can move beyond conditions altogether, towards complete and radical freedom. The Buddha conjures up the image of the ocean. ‘Just as the ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so this dharma of mine has one taste: the taste of freedom.’ (Udana, 5.5) For me, this is where the practice of Focusing and Buddhism meet.






Focusing and Fairytales




Article published in: 
The Focusing Connection
Vol. XXVII, No. 2 , March 2010: Feature Article


1.  What do Focusing and Fairytales have in common?

Among the snippets of dreams, poems, and song-lines that pop up in my Focusing sessions, I often find themes from fairytales. So in the past few years, I've returned to some of my favourite childhood haunts – those yellowing pages of my old fairytale books, and the magical worlds they conjure up. To me the Land of Færy seems particularly apt for Focusing. I’ve been wondering why this is.

I suppose fairytales, like Focusing, often start off with a problem. For fairytale characters, this might happen in a number of ways. They may be under an enchantment – something which limits or binds them by a power which seems greater than they are – trapped into animal form, or into a 100-year sleep, for example. They may have an overwhelming longing, do something which disrupts the status quo, act unwisely – such as stealing the witch’s cabbages, claiming your clever daughter spins flax into gold, giving vital information to a wolf. Or the character inherits a set of circumstances which predate and predict the predicament – wicked relations, poverty, something which sets them off to seek their fortune in the world. The fairytale describes a journey in which the central character has many weird and wonderful encounters, and in the process of which the insoluble is solved.

This journey reminds me of Focusing. In a Focusing session we start with a felt sense of a problem – our own version of an enchantment, trap, longing, impossible circumstances. This is something insoluble on its own level, that is, the level of what we already know. As we come into relationship with the problem, we meet felt senses within us that are new and unexpected; other currents, energies, forces, presences (we might experience them in different ways at different times). Through these encounters something new emerges. A felt shift may come, and when it does, it brings resolution. As in a fairytale, we’re on a journey from the imperfect to the perfect; a journey which takes place within our own unique realm of experience, guided forward by our implicit sense of what is complete and whole.

We know as Focusers that this process often takes us beyond our everyday sense of who we are and our place in the world, into another dimension: ‘Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people – in fact, the whole universe.’ (Gendlin, Focusing 2007 p.88). Rather like a fairytale character, we may meet tangles, traps, trickery and cunning on our adventure towards a sense of ‘all all right’. In other words, we meet other ‘partial selves’ that seem to exert these kinds of influences on us and our situation. But there are also unexpected encounters, magical solutions, and rare resources which rescue us within the process. That is, the implicit knowing our body-being holds may come in forms beyond anything we would have consciously dreamed up. By definition, the felt shift comes from something beyond what we originally knew, because it comes from, and opens up to us, a deeper level of implicit knowing.

With a felt shift, then, our energies integrate, or dissolve into Presence, perhaps in relation to just one single issue. We find ourselves complete and fulfilled in that respect. At that moment, in relation to that issue, it’s as if we find ourselves at the centre of our own unique kingdom or realm of being. Like the King or Queen of folklore, we’ve been on a journey and arrived.

So Focusing has much in common with fairytales. And fairytales are rather like Focusing. For a fairytale too is ‘part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times...’. Fairytales magically conjure up that sense of ‘all alright’. It’s a world in which the Perfect Princess lives happily ever with her virtuous and valourous Perfect Prince, abundant in riches, goodness and love.

Too good to be true? That’s precisely my point! This perfect world with its perfect ending is ‘too good to be true’ – but only to those parts of me that don’t inhabit it. Elsewhere in this realm-of-me, I have an implicit knowing that I can reach a place where difficulties settle and dissolve; where I’m no longer under the spell of my merged and entangled parts, where my problems are set free to find their own inner riches, love and fulfilment.

2. Playing with Fairytales in Focusing: ‘What in me is like this?’

I started playing with fairytales (which seems more fitting than ‘working’ with them), because fairytale themes and characters often come to me spontaneously while I focus. This happens as I search for a way to describe what I do not yet have words for:
            ‘What’s this like....?’ ‘What’s this as if?’
Sometimes, I’m on a cliff-edge (fondly imagining my listener is too), because I know there’s an as-if forming in there. What’s it going to be…?
            ‘Ah. It’s like that moment the King tells the clever girl to spin wool into gold, and if she won’t, the King will cut off her head...It’s exactly like that!’ And then sometimes (not always), meaning might come...
            ‘I see now. It’s like having to do something impossible, but if I don’t manage it something awful will happen.’ This opens up some more...
            ‘And it’s like the part of me that’s worrying about spinning wool into gold is willing to give away anything for help. I can feel how awful it is for this one! It’s like when Rumpelstiltskin demands her necklace – even her unborn baby. Is that how the story goes? I think it is... he demands she’ll give him her baby when she marries the King...’ There’s more in those words ‘unborn baby’, and I sit with them, welcoming what they may hold.
            ‘Her unborn baby... my unborn baby. There’s something really strong in that. What is this? What’s this like?’... More felt-sensing, as I wait for something felt but unformed to emerge.
            ‘Is it like the best in me? My unborn, best me? My next steps into a living-forward energy...?’

And so the session goes on. I’m resonating between my felt sense and the characters/themes of the story. Sometimes the resonance comes to me of itself, and sometimes I go looking for it because it draws me. What exactly is Rumpelstiltskin? Is he something in me? Is he some kind of energy or way of being? An attitude? Or is there something in my life which is like that? It may take a while for the story and the meaning to unfold. Sometimes the meaning seems quite secondary, and only comes some sessions later.

At this point, Focusing with fairytales is very like Gendlin’s description of working with dreams. Only after giving real space to the different aspects and symbols of the dream do we come to the point where we ask, ‘What in my life is like this?’ (Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams Ch.1.5). Or perhaps, in relation to the fairytale, ‘What in me is like this?’

3. Drawing on the Richness of Story

I work (or play) with fairytales, myths and legend in different ways. Having discovered first-hand how much richness these tales hold for my unfolding Focusing journey, why wait for them to come to me? I can also go to them. This is like giving attention to dreams, writing them down or recording them, and so encouraging them to come. In the same way, I enjoy reading fairytale and myth, and discovering themes that catch my attention.

I remember noticing a sense of shock which came to me in the story of Little Red Riding Hood. It’s when she tells the wolf where her grandmother lives.            
            ‘No!’ I want to call out to her. ‘That’s a wolf you’re talking to!’
I’m almost squirming with hopeless frustration.
            ‘Don’t do it, Little Red Riding Hood!’
With such a strong response, it’s clear there’s something worth exploring in me. So I begin by opening up the felt sense in my ‘No!’ The distress I’m feeling as I know Little Red Riding Hood is about to divulge the address of her beloved, sick grandmother, to a WOLF.

I don’t just take this to Focusing sessions. I live with it as a problem. Every now and then, I take it out, dust it off, muse on it. I witness again the distress of all that – the motif in the story. I spend time with that felt sense, letting myself feel and acknowledge how awful some part of me feels about telling a wolf where someone special is, someone who’s wise and loving, but sick... And gradually, the themes begin to open up, or some felt shifts in relation to the issue.

I find it’s important not to rush the themes, or to try to understand them too quickly. Our aim is to come into relationship with what is there, not (necessarily) to understand it. As Ann Weiser Cornell says (Focusing Tip 234), ‘Focusing is not a process of insight, it's a process of relationship. It's through relationship that change happens in the direction of fuller life.’  Or in Gendlin’s words, ‘understanding is a by-product’ ( Focusing 2007 ed. p.79). Our experience is often in danger of being hijacked by what part of us knows – often our clever, analytical, critical, want-to-know-and-solve-things selves. Working with dreams, Gendlin suggest we apply ‘bias-control’ (Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams Ch.10). This might involve applying the opposite sort analysis on purposein order to loosen the grip of our consciously-held views and values – because if we identify solely with those, it means we may lose a new growth direction, and just become more of the same (Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams Ch.8 p.49).

Sometimes, like a dream, fairytales come to me unbidden. This happened recently when I watched Tim Burton’s animation film, The Corpse Bride. I hadn’t expected a major Focusing moment to emerge, but it did, suddenly and unexpectedly. Having started the film in a downcast mood, by the end of it, I felt transformed. Something has changed in me – the story has in itself produced a felt shift. So I begin to muse and focus on what this may be.

I can feel at once that it relates to the figure of the Corpse Bride herself. So I sense and search for those energies in me with the question:
            ‘What in me is like this?’
The response is clear and immediate. Suddenly I’m with an old, familiar aspect of myself, but in an entirely new way. Many a long Focusing session has revolved around this complex knot, but now I find I can accompany and empathise with that partial-self, because I have a way to perceive it more fully through the character of the Corpse Bride. Once again, I’m resonating between my felt sense and the character: her faded, maggot-ridden beauty, her dashed hopes, her longing, her desperate attempts to grab what she needs (in this case, the young groom) and to fit it into her world. I begin to feel how she’s present (in me)  at any moment when a hope, or wish or life-energy is un-acted, unexpressed, unrequited – whenever there is life-energy which doesn’t quite find its way into life. Like the Corpse Bride, that beautiful fresh energy is ‘murdered’ just as it’s about to be fulfilled. I can sense how this relates to specific moments of my life, as well as in more general ways, when a life-direction wants to be lived, and yet is cut short.

Through Focusing in this way, I’m able to welcome the Corpse Bride felt sense in me much more fully. I feel a whole new freedom to be in her presence. Or to be in presence with her. Then other characters from the film also start asking for attention… what or who, for example, is doing the murdering?

The answer to that comes to me one day as I give a little space to a moment of grumpiness over my work. In my mind’s eye the wicked aristocrat from the Corpse Bride suddenly appears. Having killed the Corpse Bride years before, he’s now planning to marry, abduct and murder the New Bride. There he is in me – a sort of nasty ‘I don’t care how you feel, just get back to work’ attitude. I see immediately how he drives underground the more receptive, flowing parts of myself, which then feel stressed and sore. So I live with this wicked male energy  –  and begin to see links with other fairytales; other characters who seem to act for the best (in worldly terms), but at great cost, like the King who threatens to cut off the clever girl’s head if she won’t spin flax into gold. Once again, this gives me a clearer way in to exploring my felt senses of those aspects in me.

Then the New Bride herself begins to speak. I explore her energies, the felt sense that she brings...beauty, love, fresh life. I notice how often I’m unaware of the New Bride, how blank she seems for me. But as I approach that blank-unaware place with curious wonderment, I now find I’m holding two things within me: the Unlived-and-Unloved (the Corpse Bride), and the Living-and-Loving (the New Bride). Both are there equally. With this comes another movement forward. I find the Living-and-Loving one is making her presence felt in me. She’s taking up her natural place. Her beautiful being begins to find a fresh, clear voice, no longer drowned out by the part of me that has merged and identified with the Corpse Bride. She fills me up intensely for several days.

So the themes continue to blossom and unfold. Often other fairytales help to bring the understanding which one tale alone does not. I notice other aspects of the Corpse Bride – sisters in Færy  –  such as the Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel. All aspects of the feminine in various stages of fulfilment: dead, sleeping, trapped. Of course, at this point, it would be very easy to turn to other sources, and to read classic interpretations of these tales by others  –  and that may prove valuable and fascinating. But in the first instance, what’s important is how the themes emerge and land in me. As with dreams, ‘The interpretation comes inside the dreamer or not at all.’ (ibid. Ch. 3.6). Classic psychoanalytic-theory may be helpful, but it’s our own felt-response to the story that holds the richness for us.

This reminds me that coming into relationship with ourselves is itself a journey. For some deeply-merged, deeply-engrained aspects of ourselves, that journey may take time, and different approaches can prove useful. The approaches are gateways which allow whatever needs attention to move into awareness  –  not necessarily into understanding, but into wholeness. So whether it comes as a body-sense, or movement, or feeling, or image, what is key is that we allow it to arrive within us, resonating with it – trying to allow it the form it needs. And at times, a fairytale or myth may speak just the language we need to reach down to the exiled parts, and allow them to come to life. Then we can engage with them, and they can come to life in us. 
  

Sleep-Focusing: A Pathway to Sleep

Article published in: 
The Focusing Connection
Vol. XXVII, No. 2 , March 2010: Feature Article


I wake up, sensing deep night all around, with just a hint of dawn. I float deliciously for a few moments in a dream-filled, sleep-soaked, semi-conscious state; then roll over. I’m intending to snuggle down again into that sleepy warmth – but the sad fact is, I’m still awake.

Sleep is still close by, and I can feel it in and around me. But now there’s something else too – an anxiety, a dread even, about what this night will bring. Groggily-tired, I begin to search for sleep: it grows elusive. I start to grow restless, with a touch of creeping despair, as I wonder how I’ll cope next day. I’m even wider awake now, and feeling helpless too, because my mind has dispatched itself to some buzzy hinterland, and I know that I might as well give up on sleep, although I’m too tired to do anything else…

Instead, I’m wandering amidst hazy thought-streams; or bumping up against some hard, knotty core; or I’m pinioned in a place where inner voices chatter unpleasantly; or a fantasy has taken hold, an anxious impulse that won’t quieten, a tense, fretting day-dream that obtrudes into the space where night-dreams ought to be...

I imagine most of us know what a sleepless night can be like. And how for some people sleeplessness comes in bouts, even in periods of debilitating insomnia. I’m lucky in that my sleepless nights have come mostly in phases. Over the past few years, since I learned Focusing, I’ve tried to deal with them by Focusing alone during the early hours. But I’ve found it hard to do at that time, tending to drift, or becoming easily merged with what is in me, not quite having the energy or resources for the Focusing to be effective.

So I was quite stunned, on a particularly wakeful night about eighteen months ago,  when I happened upon a rather different way of Focusing which magically and dramatically opened a clear and almost immediate, pathway back to sleep.

Since then, I’ve applied my discovery regularly, whenever needed, and it has become a practice in itself; a sort of Focusing that I now call sleep-Focusing, and which seems to brings about a fresh relationship between my wakeful self and sleep. Nowadays, sleep finds its way back to me almost every time; and often after doing sleep-Focusing I have extraordinarily rich and lucid dreams. The couple of times I have not been swept back into sleep, I’ve felt surprisingly alert and whole during the following day, as if I had really rested deeply.

The discovery of sleep-Focusing has been a journey, and I’ve needed to practice it, because it is quite different from the way I would normally focus. Still, I would like to share what I’ve discovered so far. Perhaps my best approach is to let you know the steps I follow, in so far as they are linear, and the  results these bring. If you try them, your experience may of course be very different.
But this is how it goes for me.

Steps Towards Sleep

i. Interrupting sleep
When I notice I’m awake, I roll over onto my back (I sleep on my side), and I bend my knees so they are raised up towards the ceiling, my hands folded onto my stomach. This is probably the hardest step, and the most important. In a groggy-tired state, making the effort to roll onto my back feels utterly untempting. Even now, there are nights when I am sleepy enough to think that I will fall asleep again soon–when the heaviness I feel in my bones is so strong that I don’t want to move. But I know that if I short-cut this first step, I am liable to lie there for ages, drifting in and out of some half-awake-half-asleep place, or growing more and more awake.
Because as long as I try to bury myself back in sleep, I am actually merged and identified with my sleepy parts. And in that state, I do not want to be awake at all. This sets up a conflict, a restless tension, between my wakeful self and the rest of me that wants to sleep. So I have learned that without purposefully interrupting my sleep, and giving my attention to what is awake, I will not succeed. I turn onto my back, settle myself there, and begin.

ii. Searching for ‘Awake’
Paradoxically then, I start by searching for a felt-sense of ‘Awake’. This is actually a step away from Focusing as I normally practice it. Usually, I would sense into the heart of the wandering thoughts, or the tight, constricted impulses which seem determined to keep me awake. After all, I know that there, in those very places, are rich seams of felt-sensing, waiting to be experienced. So not to turn towards these places is a radical departure from my normal Focusing practice. But here, I gently turn away from the felt-sense of what is present, however strong it may be. And I start to search for something wider, or different: a felt-sense of awakeness.

iii. Finding what lies between me and sleep
I am trying to find an edge or a place which is different from the uppermost thoughts or feelings, what I might call the content of my experience. The actual activity of my buzzy night-mind is, from this perspective, not my main focus. It is just a consequence of being awake; and the thoughts and feelings are symptoms or ramifications of awakeness. They are like ripples which emanate from the state of wakefulness itself. (I know that if I were asleep, those same impulses might still be experienced, but they would arise differently, and communicate themselves to me differently, for example, as dreams.)
It is as if I am giving attention to the one thing that lies between me and sleep. When what is awake can be held in my presence, then there is space for sleep to come naturally, of its own accord. So what lies between me and sleep is something more than the present content of my mind. It is a sense of ‘Awake’ which is beyond or behind the mind’s activity; it is a kind of final frontier between my wakeful mind, and sleep itself. That is what I am looking for.

I wonder whether this process is akin to experiencing some aspect of Presence, or Awareness? I don’t know. Perhaps I’m simply trying to describe what it is like to be directly conscious of what is conscious. What I do know is that, for me at least, this sense of ‘Awake’ does seem to be something that has its own quality and its own location. So I see it more as the last ‘something’ between my conscious awake self and the very different consciousness of sleep. For you, who knows? That may be different.

iv. Exploring ‘Awake’
Finding the sense of ‘Awake’ is not always easy, and it can take me a while–especially as my sense of ‘Awake’ may shift as I explore. I use various questions to help me:
What is this ‘whole thing’ of being awake like?
What is ‘being awake’ like, right now?
What sort of awakeness am I feeling?
What is the quality of this ‘Awake’?
What is its texture?

Here I am on a real Focusing-edge, feeling my way into what ‘Awake’ is like in the moment; allowing myself to feel that as fuzzily, fully or mysteriously as it comes.
Where is ‘Awake’ in me?
Whereabouts is ‘Awake’ around/ outside of me?

I try to find the exact location I feel most awake. The place where the conscious mind is pin-pointed. For example, it might be right in the centre of my skull; or something like a bar running through me, or somewhere just outside my actual physical body.

This ‘Awake’ is like–what? [Looking for a metaphor or image]

Often a felt-image comes, sometimes in the form of daylight flooding me, or light from a high-up gothic window in a cathedral. For me, this is often the fullest and most potent experience of ‘Awake’ I can have.

v. Knowing ‘Awake’ may be hard to find
In case my description of ‘Awake’ still seems rather abstract and elusive, perhaps it would help to say that this is actually true for me too. A little akin to a background feeling, it can be hard to describe (and maybe not even be wise to, as your experience of it may be so different from mine). So it helps me to know that it can take time. No wonder! ‘Awake’ is so embedded in us; our conscious minds must be deeply merged with it all through our waking day. My body-mind is so intimately tied up with my experience of being awake that it’s a bit like trying to see the surface of a mirror; I know the mirror has a surface, but it’s so full of reflections that it’s easier to see those than the edge on which they are formed.

So it makes sense that this discovery has also been a journey for me. Although nowadays I find it quicker to find, sometimes almost immediate, still on some nights, my wandering thoughts seem to dominate. On those nights, I try to notice when I have been caught up and merged in some thought-stream. Then I bring my intention back to finding and experiencing ‘Awake’, whatever that may be. This process is a little like meditation, where it is a constant return to my intention that itself forms the practice

vi. Allowing ‘Awake’ to enter in.
Spending time with ‘Awake’ in the middle of the night feels paradoxical and counter-intuitive, if not rather crazy. When my whole being is aching for sleep, why would I allow myself to move towards more wakefulness? But I know that unless I truly allow myself to experience the awakeness, then the genuinely sleepy-tired feeling will not come. I recall Gendlin teaching that “what is not felt remains the same” (Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams, 1986: 178). So it seems that when I consciously open up to receive the sense of awake – despite the strangeness of doing this in the middle of the night – I allow it to be felt more fully; and this is what enables a more global shift to take place. Sometimes it feels like throwing open the curtains to allow daylight to flood the room – quite the opposite of what I want in the dark, inward-seeking hours of the night. On some nights, it takes me a while to do this, because my sleep-wanting parts need time to agree to this radical change of direction.

I also find that my experience of ‘Awake’ needs to be well-established before I tune into the sleepy tiredness I now feel coming over me. If I roll over to sleep too soon, the sleepiness is not strong enough to engulf me, and I stay awake. So I return to the first step, and again lie on my back, knees raised – interrupting sleep in a pointed way, giving a real physical weight to my intention to be present with my waking consciousness. Some nights, I repeat this process several times before rolling over for the last time and falling asleep.

vii. Checking my intentions
The final steps are the most crucial – and the most unfair. I have evoked the promise of finding sleep, and now I must tell you the worst of it: The only way to guarantee sleep is to genuinely give up wanting to sleep. In fact, the goal of sleep-Focusing is not to go back to sleep!

So what is the goal? As in Focusing in general, it is simply to spend time with whatever it is within me that wants to be heard. In other words, I need to spend time with my sense of ‘Awake’. I assume ‘Awake’ really does want to be heard, because it has cleverly caught me at one of my most vulnerable and receptive moments: at night, while I’m sleeping. And I imagine ‘Awake’ has an important reason, because it is in strong competition with the rest of me, which still wants to sleep.

Sometimes I have the impression all that is needed is for me to spend some quiet time with this wakeful mind; as if my daytime busyness has prevented it from really having the space it needs. So it asks for it later, when it knows I will not be doing anything else. Just stopping to be with ‘Awake’ now is the best thing I can do. The goal of sleep-Focusing is to be with it, however it wants that, and for as long as it wants. As Ann Weiser Cornell often says, “We can only move as fast as our slowest parts.” Of course, the part of me that feels deprived of sleep may need my empathy too. Sleep-Focusing is a practice in holding both.

viii. Not wanting to sleep
So if my practice of finding ‘Awake’ is not sending me back to sleep, I check to see what my goal is. I look to see whether I am attached to sleep as an outcome, and where that wish may be hiding in me. Why is this so important? I believe it is because my wish to sleep is lodged in my waking mind. It is driven by the waking mind. So in order to be fully present with ‘Awake’, I must dis-identify from what it holds. While I cling to a wish to sleep, I am still part of the awake mind; I am merged with it. I am not fully present with, and listening to, the real nature of what wants to be awake. So the wish to sleep is like an invisible thread which holds me within the awake mind. It is something else to welcome in a ‘no-wonder’ sort of way, simply as another ripple emanating from that sense of ‘Awake’ itself.
This final step is interesting because it must be genuine, and making it genuine may take a little time. In order to free up any lurking intention to sleep, I remind myself that just by resting in a sense of ‘Awake’ I have found myself refreshed and rejuvenated in the morning. Also, that the ‘Awake’ mind is in itself a pleasurable, expanded state. Of course, as I lie there practicing sleep-Focusing, I dip in and out of contact with this enjoyable sense of ‘Awake’; I touch into it only as far as my worried or wandering mind will allow. But by doing this, and honestly giving up on an intention to sleep, I find I relax, feel calmer, and most of the time (so far, all but twice since I discovered sleep-Focusing), I fall asleep.

The effects of sleep-Focusing
The extraordinary thing about finding that sense of ‘Awake’ is, that as soon as I It feels deeply and healthily tired, just as it does before one slides easily into sleep. The tiredness is delicious and very real. When I feel this, I know I can roll over onto my side, and sleep will nestle into me, often within seconds. Sometimes it takes a little longer, but by keeping the sense of ‘Awake’ with me, sleep arrives.

Curiously, even on disturbed nights, when I have been woken because I am ruffled or upset by something, I have found it more useful to look for the sense of ‘Awake’ than to give my usual Focusing space to the upset. Once I have found ‘Awake’, I experience it as innately pleasurable. My body relaxes and my mind expands. As I have discovered through Gendlin’s work: “The process of…changing feels good. … like a relief and a coming alive.” (Focusing, 1st Ed 1978 / 2007: 9)

I also practice sleep-Focusing in the daytime when I want to rest, and the process is the same. Sometimes I find my body responds to the sense of ‘Awake’ by growing suddenly warm and cosy, my temperature rising naturally, as it does before we sleep.

Focusing approaches to sleep
I am sure there are other things we can do to help ourselves sleep – especially as a preparation for good sleep. I imagine many other people could add their own methods or suggestions. An article on the subject was published in The Focusing Connection by Rudnick and Kappy (‘Softening at the Edge: Focusing into Sleep.’ 2006 Vol. XXIII, No. 6 pp.1-3), which included questions which “assist in creating a better relationship to the wakefulness.” For example, “What is it that my body needs right now to relax?” Or, “What is it that I am thinking about that is keeping me up?” I also find ‘Clearing a Space’ a very helpful preparation to sleep-Focusing, as it allows the minutiae of my daytime existence to settle, and opens a gateway into the “vast space” (Gendlin, ibid. 2007: 71-82).

Whatever we do to prepare for sleep, the most important thing is probably our attitude toward it. I try to treat sleep like a welcome guest: something I can prepare for in a way that will make it most likely to arrive, and most willing to pervade me when it does. As focusers, we know that the body can take time to move towards some new state, often needing time to adjust to external change. So giving the body space to realise where we are heading when we set off to bed seems a good way to allow sleep to arrive, happy and consenting.

Conclusion
Nowadays, I always practice sleep-Focusing before I sleep as a preparation for a good night’s rest. It brings me a better quality of sleep, and my dreams are clearer and richer. If I wake in the night, I often find sleep-Focusing quite miraculous. I stop searching for sleep, and give attention to what it is in me that holds the sense of ‘Awake’, a part of me which wants attention, and which seems to lie between me and sleep. This clears a way for natural tiredness to re-surface, and find its course once more. And, as that happens, rejuvenating rest– usually in the form of sleep–comes to me naturally and easily.

Whether you try out my discoveries, or find your own ways into sleep, I hope you sleep sweetly and deeply tonight… and often enjoy the blessings of peaceful sleep!

Why Focusing? A Brief Introduction

This brief introduction is what we offer people thinking of attending a course, or taking Focusing lessons or coaching. A pdf download is available on my website (www.lifeatwork.co.uk).

Here, we give a brief overview of Focusing, then go on to describe some of its applications, who learns it, and why.

*******************************    *******************************    *******************************


‘Experience is a myriad richness. We think more than we can say. We feel more than we can think. We live more than we can feel. And there is much more still.’*





About Focusing
Focusing is a gentle, yet transformative approach to listening to ourselves and others. Asking the question, ‘What wants my attention right now?’ we allow a space to open within us. Into this space, our deeper impulses come more fully into our awareness and begin to find a voice. As we learn focusing, we discover how to respond to this space creatively, and how to enable fresh directions to open up with the issues and people that concern us, and in our lives in general.

By simply sitting and listening within, without judgement (supported by a focusing teacher or partner), focusing gives us a way of understanding the meaning and implicit wisdom held by our bodies, combined with spontaneous images, metaphors and dreams. We do this by tuning into our felt-sense of a situation – taking in the whole of it, and feeling its effect on our whole being.

Finding our Felt-sense
The felt-sense is like an inner compass. it gives us a tangible, felt-experience of what we need in order to move forward in any particular moment or situation. It is freshly experienced and unique to us and our situation. 

The felt-sense is a kind of natural knowledge that, if we can give it space to be heard, will give us the inner resources to deal with whatever is present, and carry us towards our cherished goals. It is as if we hold a deeper knowing about what we need in order to move forward and grow, and by creating the right conditions for that wisdom to be heard, we also discover the means to achieve this. By cultivating this natural ability, we are able to align ourselves more fully to what we want to do, and how we want to be.

‘When you give your awareness to something, it is carried forward. That is why it is so powerful to attend inside.’*

What are the benefits of Focusing?
Healing past rifts, pain and depression
Moving beyond blocks 
Making clearer choices 
Fostering self-respect and innerconfidence 
Better relationships with others 
Increasing health and happiness 
Improving sleep 
• Benefitting from dreams


‘[T]he process of ... changing feels good. ... The change process we have discovered is natural to the body, and it feels that way in the body... The experience of something emerging from there feels like a relief and a coming alive.’ *

More about the benefits of Focusing

Healing past rifts, pain and depression
our body-and-being has an implicit knowing of what is right for us (although we often experience instead a feeling of what is wrong with us). in focusing, the felt-sense gives us a safe and profound way to be present with our painful feelings, and enables us to discover what it is they are wanting to contribute to our lives.

Moving beyond blocks
our mind can move across time from past, present to future. But change happens here and now. so when your life is somehow blocked, the first thing to do is to come fully and naturally into the here and now. this is the only place where change is possible. focusing gives us a way to be fully and naturally present with what is alive in us. as we do this, we can also discover what holds us back. We then find ourselves able to cater to the different sides of ourselves in a way that leaves us free to act as a whole, complete person.

Making clearer choices
inner conflict (ranging from how we do a small task to major life-decisions) is uncomfortable and, at worst, destructive. focusing opens up ways for us to hear the wisdom of each part of ourselves, without getting bogged down in confusion, anxiety or fear. as we learn to trust and identify our ‘inner compass’, we can move forward with clarity and confidence.

Fostering self-respect and inner confidence
as we learn to hear the wisdom within our thoughts and feelings, we gain confidence in our own unique path. We learn to greet whatever is within us with an attitude of radical acceptance – with interest and curiosity about what is there, without ‘falling in’ to old, familiar or difficult states.

Better relationships with others
as our attitude to our inner world changes, so does our attitude to what is around us. We begin to greet other people with the same interest and acceptance – recognising the impulses that drive them, and responding with the same natural compassion that we are able to give to ourselves in the focusing space.

Increasing health and happiness
as our innate happiness begins to be felt more tangibly in our lives, we naturally want to orientate our lifestyles in a more healthy and compatible manner. the sense of freshness and aliveness that comes from experiencing the shifts in focusing also pervades our physical being. there is much anecdotal evidence, not just of radical shifts towards better health, but of healing major sickness.

Improving sleep and understanding dreams
We also teach applications of focusing for finding better quality sleep, and ways of dealing with insomnia (see: www.lifeatwork.co.uk). in addition, by finding our felt-sense of a dream, we can explore and open up the language and symbolism of dreams, so that the beneficial message of a dream is understood and felt in our body and being.


Who learns Focusing?
While used by many counsellors and therapists, focusing is also learned and practised by non-professionals worldwide. it provides a safe and confidential environment to explore our inner worlds, and to experience the felt-shifts within us. focusing is supported by a long series of operational research studies conducted first at the University of Chicago and now internationally (see www.focusing.org).

Learning Outcomes:
• How to locate, find and create space for a felt-sense 
• Exquisite listening that allows the felt-sense to move and shift 
• ‘Clearing a space’ to cope with over-loaded and busy life-styles 
• Subtle approaches which bring semi-conscious and unconscious impulses into awareness 
• Freeing up core beliefs that cause stuckness and block creativity 
• Ways to tune into our ‘inner compass’ within a hectic working day 
• Applications of Focusing to sleep and our dream life 
• Focusing partnership work, to sustain future development and learning

Our Courses and Coaching – Our Approaches
Our approach combines the insights of focusing with Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction. Focusing and NVC are rooted in the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers (1902–1987). Focusing (www.focusing.org) was developed in the 1960s and 70s by Eugene T. Gendlin Ph.d, still a leading figure in philosophy, psychology and psychotherapy.This process gives us access to our more instinctive and creative impulses, and allows us to tap into wider perspectives, gut-responses, intuitions and informed hunches – innate wisdom that we naturally hold about the situations we find ourselves within. Nonviolent Communication (www.cnvc.org) has developed world-wide since the 1970s through the work of Marshall B. Rosenberg Ph.d, and its approach is perfectly suited to negotiation with others and to resolving inner conflicts. supporting and sustaining the insights of these two processes, we bring over twenty-five years of practice and teaching of mindfulness meditations (among others) – approaches now clincally proven to assist in reducing stress and clarifying internal confusion (www.umassmed.edu/cfm). All these approaches can have a dramatic and immediate effect, and radically increase the quality of our lives, both at work and at home.

Suggested Reading:
Gendlin, eugene t. 2007. Focusing, New York, Bantam Books (1st edn 1978, everest House).
Gendlin, eugene t. 1986. Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams, Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron Publications.
Gendlin, e.t. 1990. ‘The small steps of the therapy process: How they come and how to help them come.’ in G. Lietaer, J. Rombauts & R. van Balen (eds.), Client-centered and experiential psychotherapy in the nineties, pp. 205-224. Leuven: Leuven University Press. from http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/ gol_2110.html
Weiser Cornell, Ann, 1996. The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing, Oakland Ca: new Harbinger Publications.
Weiser Cornell, Ann, 2005. The Radical Acceptance of Everything: Living a Focusing Life, Berkerley Ca: Calluna Press.






* All three quotes cited above  are from: Gendlin, eugene t. 2007. Focusing, New York, Bantam Books (1st edn 1978, everest House).