We are all prone to living in our heads, analysing what’s going on in our lives, trying to make sense of ourselves and the world. We rarely listen sufficiently to the messages of our body.

About two years ago my colleague Adrian asked whether I had heard of the practice of Focusing. I hadn’t then, but today it’s become an integral part of my life coaching work, which enhances my listening skills and enables me to make a powerful connection with my clients. It also helps me personally to stay aware of my own experiencing and needs.

It’s a challenging concept to explain, but in a nutshell, it’s about tuning into yourself and listening to the inner wisdom of your body, a practice which can reveal clues to how life is going.

Focusing offers a radical new way of listening to yourself and to others. It is based on a natural ability, which you were born with, to get in touch with your deep inner experiencing. By practising Focusing, you can develop this ability into an invaluable resource which helps you to live your life much more fully. It is a refreshing way of being with life’s challenges, and it enables positive change to emerge naturally and spontaneously. The British Focusing Teachers Association

It can be difficult to express what we experience within our bodies; often it’s beyond words, language. Focusing enables us to direct our attention to precisely what needs our awareness in our lives. It’s a wonderful healing practice, offering tools and techniques for tuning into our internal body cues, helping us to listen and learn from the inner wisdom of our body. Through this special process, natural steps of change arise spontaneously, marked by physical relief and profound release of tension. The practice was developed by Eugene Gendlin, PhD. at the University of Chicago.

We are all prone to living in our heads, analysing what’s going on in our lives, trying to make sense of ourselves and the world. We rarely listen sufficiently to the messages of our body.

Focusing can be practiced on your own or in partnership with another person. I’m now half way through my training and have found it not only benefits me personally but it also benefits my coaching work as the two practices complement each other in a beautiful and powerful way. I use focusing techniques to help clients tune into how they are feeling – helping them to move and release the unwanted feelings by bringing awareness to these feelings and listening to them. I also help them unlock the potential source of fresh energy and inspiration these feelings can bring.

A Focusing session often leaves me feeling much more grounded and at peace with the world.

After a Focusing session, after tuning into my body, listening to its tender, achy, tense, scary, wounded, shy, content parts…I always feel more open and alive. By looking inside myself, by allowing myself to pay attention to whatever needs to be seen or heard within myself, a shift happens towards something new, a new direction, a new insight, about myself.

Very recently I have hugely benefited from Focusing to help me find my way back into a healthy sleep pattern. I had started waking up around 3am in the night with a racing mind and very awake body. Struggling to get back to sleep, the frustration woke me further and I become more restless and desperate wondering how I will cope with the day ahead. Some of you will be familiar with this vicious circle of sleeplessness.

When I use Focusing in the night, I roll onto my back and lift  my legs so that they are raised towards the ceiling. I then listen to my body and tune into the part of me that is awake, that clearly wants to be awake and wants to be listened to. I ask myself questions such as: What is being ‘awake’ like right now? Where is ‘awake’ in my body? If I don’t pay attention to that part of me it will keep me awake. When I acknowledge and give attention to the ‘awake’ part of me I can create some space inside of me for sleep to come naturally again.

This is not an easy practice as we generally don’t want to do anything in the middle of the night but sleep. It’s a powerful practice though as it can help us get back to sleep rather than staying awake and feel groggy the next day.

Be in touch if you have any questions or want to exchange some experiences. I’ll leave you with the insightful words of Rob Preece, a Buddhist and psycho-therapist which for me depict what’s at the very heart of Focusing.

“I know that for myself the central theme of my wounding does not go away, rather as I understand and go more deeply into its nature, I discover a quality that is, so to speak, the wisdom within the wound. I’m reminded of the Leonard Cohen line: “There is a crack in everything; it’s where the light gets in..”, so too with our wounds.

As we circulate around them in therapy or our spiritual journey, they gradually reveal the innate potential that is constellated through the particular nature of the wound. The pearl emerges as the grit aggravates the oyster. The pearl reflects the oyster’s capacity to live with the aggravation and create something beautiful from it. Perhaps just as the oyster doesn’t see it as beautiful, it is often hard for us to recognise the beauty and quality that is emerging as we circulate around the wound.”

There are Focusing practitioners and teachers all over the world. More information can be found at the The British Focusing Teachers Association or please email me – I would be happy to share more of my experience with you.

Warm wishes,

Karen