Datapoint: I also feel like Conor’s description captures the essential core of Focusing: the thing he described clicks rather perfectly with the thing I do when I do something Focusing-ish, whereas I’ve forgotten what the other steps in Gendlin’s process were. (Though IIRC Gendlin himself said that the whole thing about breaking it down into steps is just a “set of training wheels” for getting people learn to it, and that the steps meld into each other for people with more experience, so I also always figured that forgetting the exact sequence of steps is what’s supposed to happen after you “get it”.)
Something that I’d like to emphasize is that, one might get the impression from this post that Focusing involves consciously analyzing various alternatives. And it’s very important to emphasize that it’s very much not about doing an intellectual analysis. In fact, a loose heuristic I might use is that if you don’t arrive at an end result which seems at least a little surprising, and which you couldn’t have figured out using your intellectual reasoning, then you might not have done the technique right.
There’s a distinct mental sense to what doing an intellectual, logic analysis feels like, and this is very different. As the post says, the sense you should get is this:
This is the equivalent of saying “no, not a smiley face, a serious face.” And you get that reaction by holding up the hypothesis/potential handle against the feeling and comparing them.
There’s a vague, hard-to-verbalize feeling in your mind. You keep the feeling active in your mind, and try different handles against the “shape” of the thing, moving around in the vicinity of the correct one, until you hit upon the handle that fits the mental shape. And then you get a—possibly subtle—shift in the shape of the thing, that tells you’ve found the right handle and that the two have fit together.
Though like the post says, you may get feelings like “no, that’s not quite it, it has more to do with something like X”; this is fine, and a part of the process. When I say it’s not logical analysis, I mean that you shouldn’t start constructing stories of why you’re feeling this way and why that might be. Rather you just listen to the subtle sensations of what this might be related to, and what it feels like, and what kinds of associations come to mind.
Datapoint: I also feel like Conor’s description captures the essential core of Focusing: the thing he described clicks rather perfectly with the thing I do when I do something Focusing-ish, whereas I’ve forgotten what the other steps in Gendlin’s process were. (Though IIRC Gendlin himself said that the whole thing about breaking it down into steps is just a “set of training wheels” for getting people learn to it, and that the steps meld into each other for people with more experience, so I also always figured that forgetting the exact sequence of steps is what’s supposed to happen after you “get it”.)
Something that I’d like to emphasize is that, one might get the impression from this post that Focusing involves consciously analyzing various alternatives. And it’s very important to emphasize that it’s very much not about doing an intellectual analysis. In fact, a loose heuristic I might use is that if you don’t arrive at an end result which seems at least a little surprising, and which you couldn’t have figured out using your intellectual reasoning, then you might not have done the technique right.
There’s a distinct mental sense to what doing an intellectual, logic analysis feels like, and this is very different. As the post says, the sense you should get is this:
There’s a vague, hard-to-verbalize feeling in your mind. You keep the feeling active in your mind, and try different handles against the “shape” of the thing, moving around in the vicinity of the correct one, until you hit upon the handle that fits the mental shape. And then you get a—possibly subtle—shift in the shape of the thing, that tells you’ve found the right handle and that the two have fit together.
Though like the post says, you may get feelings like “no, that’s not quite it, it has more to do with something like X”; this is fine, and a part of the process. When I say it’s not logical analysis, I mean that you shouldn’t start constructing stories of why you’re feeling this way and why that might be. Rather you just listen to the subtle sensations of what this might be related to, and what it feels like, and what kinds of associations come to mind.