I think I’ve already been doing something sort of like Focusing, except more like Duncan’s post—relying a lot more on trying on words and phrasings than on bodily felt senses. In particular I’ve noticed that I can do a useful kind of processing by thinking aloud while walking (or, as I recently discovered, kayaking) and noticing which things I say do or don’t feel right, and if something doesn’t feel right, trying various other things and seeing what does.
I hadn’t tried the focusing-on-bodily-senses thing before, though, so I tried that today. The check described here doesn’t work very well for me because there’s just too much. So instead I tried to hone in on specific types of feelings (emotional, bodily, or both, hard to tell the difference honestly) and see what they were like and what they related to.
I didn’t get as far as I wanted on my first try, partly because the feeling in question included a strong desire to hide from it, partly because my roommate walked in and I no longer felt able to really freely introspect and feel stuff. So then I decided to try focusing on the effect that having another person in the room has on me. This was really interesting—I found that I could feel this in the left side of my body (my roommate is sitting to the left of me) as a heightened alertness and a directional pull to the left—my left ear is paying extra attention, there’s a pull at the corner of my left eye to pay attention to what my roommate is doing; I think I also have more tension in general on the left side of my torso than my right. If I turn my head to the right, then the back of my head feels the alertness. I might be breathing a little less freely than when I was alone in the room? Not sure about that, though.
(soooo this is a large part of why I tend to want a lot of alone time I guess.)
I’m not sure I know yet how to use bodily sensations to get insights about something other than bodily sensations. I do expect to try this more. (though this is for sure the scariest of the techniques in this sequence so far.)
I think I’ve already been doing something sort of like Focusing, except more like Duncan’s post—relying a lot more on trying on words and phrasings than on bodily felt senses. In particular I’ve noticed that I can do a useful kind of processing by thinking aloud while walking (or, as I recently discovered, kayaking) and noticing which things I say do or don’t feel right, and if something doesn’t feel right, trying various other things and seeing what does.
I hadn’t tried the focusing-on-bodily-senses thing before, though, so I tried that today. The check described here doesn’t work very well for me because there’s just too much. So instead I tried to hone in on specific types of feelings (emotional, bodily, or both, hard to tell the difference honestly) and see what they were like and what they related to.
I didn’t get as far as I wanted on my first try, partly because the feeling in question included a strong desire to hide from it, partly because my roommate walked in and I no longer felt able to really freely introspect and feel stuff. So then I decided to try focusing on the effect that having another person in the room has on me. This was really interesting—I found that I could feel this in the left side of my body (my roommate is sitting to the left of me) as a heightened alertness and a directional pull to the left—my left ear is paying extra attention, there’s a pull at the corner of my left eye to pay attention to what my roommate is doing; I think I also have more tension in general on the left side of my torso than my right. If I turn my head to the right, then the back of my head feels the alertness. I might be breathing a little less freely than when I was alone in the room? Not sure about that, though.
(soooo this is a large part of why I tend to want a lot of alone time I guess.)
I’m not sure I know yet how to use bodily sensations to get insights about something other than bodily sensations. I do expect to try this more. (though this is for sure the scariest of the techniques in this sequence so far.)