Comments (1)

By Kathy McGuire, May 30, 2009 4:12 pm

Toddlers, before learning words, can be so transparent, their whole body beaming out their emotions and needs.

First trips to the park, 16-months old, my steadily-walking toddler grandson simply sits down, in shock and awe, many times as he sees other people his size, all kinds of dogs, people stretched out on the grass. He simply cannot stand up and take in all this new information at the same time.

Almost choking on a piece of orange, as soon as recovered from the emotional upset, he “asks” (by pointing) for another piece of orange. He tastes it, chews it carefully, a quizzical look on his face. He simply MUST determine what went wrong, master this scary and unexpected experience.

First day in day care, he carries his jacket with him all day long, beaming out “I am reminding myself of home, I am holding on to home, I will be going home.”

Uneasy about leaving his home with Dad and Great-Grandparents to spend the day with me, he insists upon taking Great-Grandpa’s hats, and wearing them for hours.

As we develop more cognitively, our capacity to “symbolize” intervenes between our sheer emotional experiences and what we “choose” to express.

But, still, at age seven, I could read my son’s inner experience from outer symbols. Adopted at birth, having just received his first letter and photo of his birthmom, showing her with her “new” family, husband and child, he runs from the room angrily. I find him in his room a little later, where he has unravelled several hundred feet of fishing line from the spool, creating a huge tangle all around him (this image brings tears to me now, 15 years later). Using Roger’s Empathic Listening, I can reflect him to himself: “Seems like you are feeling all tangled up inside.”

As we get older and older, and through painful life experiences saying “Don’t show yourself here. Don’t cry. Don’t show fear. Don’t even show awe and joy,” we lose “touch” with ourselves, with that transparency, so that we cannot even name our own experience to ourselves, much less authentically express it to others.

Gendlin’s Focusing (www.focusing.org ) and McGuire’s Intuitive Focusing can help you refind and reclaim your inner experiencing, allowing you to find the clarity needed to move forward in life situations

Using Intuitive Focusing and Empathic, Reflective, Focused Listening with children can help them stay in tune with themselves and be able to express their inner experience, their emotions, wants, needs, creative ideas. See The Children’s Corner at The Focusing Institute.

Read a book review of Stapert and Verleifde’s Focusing With Children: The Art of Communication with Children At School and Home , UK: PCCS Books, 2008 and order the book from The Focusing Institute bookstore or from Amazon.

Also see Edwin M. McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance for stories of taking a Focusing attitude with children, and McMahon’s The Little Bird Who Found Herself, a colorful and simple story book for children (and adults) about “sitting with” instead of “running away from” feelings and other felt-sensing in the body.

CREATIVE EDGE FOCUSING(tm):  SELF-HELP SKILLS FOR HOME AND WORK

Free Downloads:

Complete Focusing Instructions Manual (17 pages)

“Ajas” Instantaneos Mini-Manual

Creative Edge Focusing (www.cefocusing.com ) teaches two basic self-help skills, Intuitive Focusing and Focused Listening, which can be applied at home and at work through The Creative Edge Focusing Pyramid.

Based upon Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing (www.focusing.org ) and Rogers’ Empathic Listening, our website is packed with Free Resources and instructions in these basic self-help skills. Learn how to build Support Groups, Conscious Relationships, and Creative Edge Organizations based upon these basic skills of emotional intelligence.

You can try out    “Focusing: Find Out What Is Bothering You.”

Click here to subscribe to Creative Edge Focusing(TM)’s  Instant “Ahah!” e-newsletter and get the latest exercises first!!! 

Click here for a free Intuitive Focusing Mini-Course

Click here for a free Focused Listening Mini-Course

 See  Core Concept: Conflict Resolution to find a complete mini-course on Interpersonal Focusing and Conflict Resolution, including Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Blanchard’s “One Minute Apology,” Patricia Evan’s books on Verbally Abuse and Controlling Relationships, McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance, and much more.

See  Core Concept: Intimate Relationship to find a complete mini-course on increasing intimacy and sexuality, including the “Sharing Your Day” exercise, Listening/Focusing Partnerships for The Way of Relationship, untangling and equalizing desire, tantric sexuality, and much more.

Download complete Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual, in English and Spanish, from CEF Website, or download from links at top of this blog.

Find links to free articles, personality tests, multi-media Self-Help training, Classes and workshops

Dr. Kathy McGuire, Director

Creative Edge Focusing (TM)

www.cefocusing.com

Comments (0)

By Kathy McGuire, November 7, 2008 12:50 pm

Free Downloads from this blog:

Complete Focusing Instructions Manual (17 pages)

Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual

“Ajas” Instantaneos Mini-Manual

Pre-Focusing Practice B. Getting A Felt Sense #2: “From The Bottom Up”
(from Complete Focusing Instructions)

Remember, especially at the beginning, time those “1 minute” pauses. You will be amazed at how long a minute is, how seldom we ever pause for a whole minute!!! And it is exactly in the PAUSE that the Creative Edge comes.

GETTING A FELT SENSE: FINDING THE “INTUITIVE FEEL,” THE CREATIVE EDGE

Here you are learning the difference between thinking up an answer in your head and Intuitive Focusing: waiting for a subtle “feel” of the whole thing, an “intuition,” to form in the center of your body, and then creating words or images that are just right to capture it. You are looking for the “intuitive feel,” the Creative Edge, the right-brain information that is more than you can put into words. Eugene Gendlin, creator of the self-help process called Focusing (Bantam, 1981, 1984) calls it “the felt sense” of the whole thing.

Gendlin also created this exercise. He came up with it to help people who were having a lot of trouble with the idea of a “felt sense” or “intuitive feel” inside of the body. Perhaps they didn’t even know what “inside your body” meant. Perhaps they could only pay attention to their concrete bones and muscles, not the more murky, blurry, “something-more-than words” that is the Creative Edge from which new ideas and solutions can come.

The “Felt Sense” is not the same as bones or muscle

In these exercises, you are learning to pay attention to your body “from the inside” in preparation for doing Gendlin’s Intuitive Focusing. But this “inside view,” the “felt sense” or “intuitive feel” of an issue or problem, is not the same as the sore muscles knotted in your back, or the pain in your tightened jaw muscles. While tightened muscles or sore bones might be the first “cue” that there is “something-more-than-words” going on in your body, the “intuitive feel” of “that whole tightness or pain” comes more fully as an “energy accumulation” or fuzzy, unclear, “sense of the whole thing.”

So, if I have a headache, for instance, first, I might put my attention into the painful area of my head, as we do in this exercise, feeling the toe “from the inside.” But, then, I would ask a more general Focusing question, like “What is this tightness in my head all about?” and then wait, for as long as a minute, for the “feel of that whole thing” to form in the center of my body, in an “energy space” in the inside of my heart/lung/chest area.

It is from this broader “intuitive feel of the whole thing” that new words, images, and, eventually, solutions will come as I use the Focusing process to go back and forth between the “intuitive feel” and words or images until I find symbols that “fit,” and experience an “Ahah!” of “That’s it!” as well as release from the headache.

DEVELOPING THE HABIT OF “FELT SENSING”

Getting A “Felt Sense” #2 : From The Bottom Up

One more time let’s try this
method for finding the “intuitive feel” of the inside of your body(Eugene Gendlin invented this). You are developing “the habit of felt-sensing,” an all-day long capacity to check with the “bodily-felt sense,” the “intuitive feel” of implicit information that is “more than words”:

Allow 5-10 minutes

—Close your eyes and get comfortable—loosen any clothing that is too tight—
1 minute
—Follow your breathing for a few moments, just noticing the breath, going in—and out-
1 minute
—Now, turn your attention to your right big toe—Can you feel your toe?—10 seconds

—Now, turn your attention to your knee—and feel your knee from the inside—10 sec

—Now, pay attention to your body where it touches the chair or floor—Feel everywhere that your body makes contact with the supporting surface—30 seconds

—Now, the inside of your chest, where your heart, lungs, diaphragm are — this is where the felt sense, the “intuitive feel” comes–feel in there, inside—10 seconds

—Ask yourself, in there, “How am I today?” and wait and see what comes—If you wait for at least a minute, a “felt sense” will arise, a subtle “intuitive feel” of yourself, that is not in words—
1 minute
—Just be with the “intuitive feel” for a moment, feeling it and trying to find a short, feeling or “quality” word (like “scared,” “sad,” “tense,” “silly,” “joyful” “red,” “jumpy,” “elastic”) that captures the quality of the “intuitive feel”—Or you might find an image that is just right—or perhaps your body wants to move into a certain posture or gesture.
1 minute
—You can use this quality word or image or posture as a “handle” to hold on to an “intuitive feel” so that you can come back to it later for a Complete Focusing Turn —
10 sec
—When you are ready, come slowly back into the room

Tell me what you think at cefocusing@gmail.com or comment on this blog below !

Click here to subscribe to our Instant “Ahah!” e-newsletter and get the latest exercises first!!!

Click here for a free Intuitive Focusing Mini-E-course

 See Core Concept: Conflict Resolution to find a complete mini-course on Interpersonal Focusing and Conflict Resolution, including Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Blanchard’s “One Minute Apology,” Patricia Evan’s books on Verbally Abuse and Controlling Relationships, McMahon’s Beyond The Myth Of Dominance, and much more.

See Core Concept: Intimate Relationship to find a complete mini-course on increasing intimacy and sexuality, including the “Sharing Your Day” exercise, Listening/Focusing Partnerships for The Way of Relationship, untangling and equalizing desire, tantric sexuality, and much more.

Download complete Instant “Ahah!” Mini-Manual, in English and Spanish, from CEF Website, or download from links at top of this blog.

Find links to free articles, personality tests, multi-media Self-Help training, Classes and workshops

Dr. Kathy McGuire, Director

Creative Edge Focusing (TM)

www.cefocusing.com