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By Kathy McGuire, February 4, 2008 1:07 pm

HEALING YOUR ALONENESS THROUGH INNER NURTURING

Caring Feeling Presence Inside

This four weeks, while practicing a Complete Focusing Session, we are learning about turning a Caring Feeling Presence, the Focusing Attitude of friendly, curious, non-judgmental, gentle attention to whatever arises inside. We practiced finding Inner Nurturers and Inner Woundedness (Week 1), Reestablishing Trust With Exiled, “Unpleasant” Inner Aspects (Week 2),  Dealing With Critical Voices and Conflicts (Week 3), and now, Healing Your Aloneness Through Inner Nurturing (Week 4).

Developing Strong Images-With-Felt-Senses of Your “Inner Nurturer” Self

As I said in Week 4 Healing Your Aloneness e-newsletter above, almost everyone can find their own Inner Nurturing Self, the part of them that knows how to reach out to someone else who is scared or in pain or hurting or ashamed or embarassed….all the things our Inner Woundedness might be experiencing. The trick to practice is recognizing and turning this Inner Nurturing Awareness, this Caring Feeling Presence, toward whatever we find inside.Try the Complete Focusing Session below again, with special attention to the actual bodily-feel, the felt sense, that goes with turning caring inner attention toward whatever comes inside, as you would in embracing that abandoned child of the hospital steps and communicating, “You are totally OK. You are wanted in this world. You are deserving of loving attention. I will help to make you safe.”

COMPLETE FOCUSING SESSION: “HOW AM I TODAY?”

In Intuitive Focusing, first, you relax and find a felt sense, an “intuitive feel” that is before words and more than words. Then, you go back and forth between open-ended questions (“Why is this hard for me?”, “What’s the meaning for me?”, “How is this related to that other decision?”) and the “intuitive feel,” looking for words or images that exactly capture “the feel of the whole thing,” until you find a sense of resolution, of knowing the meaning.

www.cefocusing.com

The site of new insights and creative solutions is at the edge of what is already known. This edge, The Creative Edge, holds implicit within it all past and future knowing about the problem, more than could ever be put into words in a linear way 

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By Kathy McGuire, February 1, 2008 6:26 pm

“I Can’t Fix Myself! It’s too late! My parents should have done it! I don’t have an Inner Nurturer!”

For this four weeks, we are working on perhaps the most essential aspect for successful Intuitive Focusing, creating a positive attitude, inside of yourself, for whatever might arise during a Focusing turn.This is The Focusing Attitude.

In Week One, I talked about turning a Caring Feeling Presence toward your inner experiencing, finding an Inner Nurturer and an Inner Woundedness.

In Week Two, I talked about establishing an inner, trusting relationship between “parts” of the Self that had perhaps been at war for years and didn’t really like each other.

In Week Three, I talked about dealing with the Inner Abuser, Inner Critics, and Inner Conflicts.

Now, we take on a common “Inner Child Focusing” problem. As Focused Listener or Focusing-Oriented Therapist, I might say, when a Focuser is sobbing with shame, emptiness, being unlovable, having a hole inside of themselves, “Can you find a way that your Inner Nurturer can comfort, can put her arms around that unloved part and let her know she is okay, she is loveable?” 

And the Focuser might say, “I don’t have an Inner Nurturer!!!” or “I can’t fix that! It’s too late. It needed to happen when I was a child, come from my parents.” Or “I don’t have a lover or a spouse, someone who can hold me so I can feel better.”

Everyone Has An Inner Nurturer, and Healing Can Begin NOW

If this were true, then people really would be trapped. There would be no way they could heal their own aloneness, their own emptiness. However, this really isn’t true. Almost all of us (and those who really can’t need the help of an external Nurturing Therapist until they can incorporate this outer presence inside of themselves) can find a “part” of ourself that knows how to love someone else, knows how to be a friend, would know what to do if confronted by an actual sobbing child or wounded animal, for many of us, a part that is a wonderful counselor/therapist/guide for many other people!!!

And it is perfectly possible, once you find images for these nurturing parts of yourself and “sense into” the whole bodily-felt sense, the “intuitive feel” of how these parts of yourself offer Caring Feeling Presence to others, then you CAN turn this inner nurturing attention toward the wounded, empty, hurting parts of yourself and heal them NOW, hold them NOW, tell them NOW that they are perfectly loveable and acceptable and wanted and deserving.

And this is a most hopeful possibility, a way of healing your own inner aloneness, your own emptiness, your own “unworthiness” without a desperate and, usually unsuccesful, search for some “outer lover” to do this for you. Try The Caring Feeling Exercise Again With Special Attention To Believing That You Can Heal Your Own Inner Aloneness, To Finding Some Representation of Your Own Inner Nurturer

BOOKS AIDING HEALING YOUR INNER ALONENESS, INNER CHILD

 When using exercises from any of these books, be sure to take the extra step of “sitting with” the “felt sense,” the “intuitive feel” that comes with images, and using Focusing to go deeper in a non-linear way. Going from image to image, in a linear way, is not the same as letting the “intuitive feel” of an image arise, and using Focusing to find the something new, the something “more than words” that can come from the “felt sense”: Healing Your Aloneness: Finding Love and Wholeness Through Your Inner Child by Margaret Paul and Erika J. Chopich  Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (Paperback)by John Bradshaw 
  
BioSpirituality: Focusing As a Way to Grow by Peter A. Campbell and Edwin M. McMahon

www.cefocusing.com

The site of new insights and creative solutions is at the edge of what is already known. This edge, The Creative Edge, holds implicit within it all past and future knowing about the problem, more than could ever be put into words in a linear way