eight

If You Can’t Find

a Felt Sense

In the preceding chapter we looked at various ways of successfully making the first focusing movement happen. Now in much the same way, we will look at ways of overcoming possible problems you may encounter in the second movement. This, you recall, is the movement I call “feeling for the whole of the problem”— the one in which you let form an overall felt sense of a problem or situation that is troubling you, the sense of all that.

As before, I will offer several suggestions for overcoming diverse difficulties. Look upon this chapter, like the last, as a selection of tools put at your disposal. Take those that seem useful.

WHERE TO LOOK FOR A FELT SENSE

You may have had trouble making contact with your felt sense of a problem or you may not have been sure you can recognize a felt sense as such when it comes. There are no ready-made words in the language for it and so it is hard to describe. Until now very few people understood it. Society, and thus also language, viewed only the resulting manifestations—thoughts, emotions, perceptions—not the felt sense. Even psychotherapists knew of it only as a mysterious something. Only our recent research makes it discussable and teachable.

So let me talk a little more about what a felt sense is.

A felt sense is made of many interwoven strands, like a carpet. But it is felt (or “seen,” if we pursue the carpet analogy) as one.

A felt sense is the many-stranded fabric of bodily awareness that (for example) guides golfers as they tee off. It would be impossible for them to think all the details of location, surrounding environment, and body movement that are woven into aiming. But the body knows the complex set of coordinated movements it must make to swing. The single felt sense of the situation incorporates the problem and the bodily known solution.

Golfers cannot think out all these details intellectually. When a golfer swings, several hundred different muscles must all work together in a precise way, each coming into action at a certain microsecond, each exerting just the right amount of pull on the right bone for the right length of time. The body feels all this as a whole.

If you observe a golfer getting ready to swing, you can see the whole body taking aim. It’s done not just with the eyes or the arms but by changing the placement of the feet, rotating and repositioning the whole body. Golfers aim with the feel of the whole body.

It may be that conscious direction is needed on one part of the process. The golfer may be thinking, “This time I must keep that left elbow straighter.” But all the other aim-taking motions occur without conscious thought as the golfer thinks about that left elbow. The preliminary movements are guided by the whole body’s feel, finding its balance, seeking the feeling that says, “Yes, now I am ready, I feel right. Now I can swing.” Golfers cannot describe that feeling of “ready,” because too many details are involved. They know the feeling when it comes, however. When the body-feel is right, they swing.

You look for a felt sense in the same place where golfers look to find whether they are ready to swing. They don’t ask the question in their heads, they feel for the answer in their bodies.

The same process of feeling within the body is familiar in any other sport. Asking questions in the head, or trying to make the head dominate the body, never works.

There is another way to get at this question of where and how to look for a felt sense—another kind of example that may be more familiar and useful to you. Suppose you have been listening to a discussion and are about to say something relevant and important. The others are still talking. You don’t have your words prepared. All you have is a felt sense of what you want to say.

Only rarely, in very formal occasions, do we prepare word for word. Usually, when we are about to say something, we have the felt sense of what we want to put across, and the right words come as we speak. The felt sense includes dozens of component parts, perhaps hundreds: the meaning you want to put across, the emotional color you want to give it, the reasons why you want to say it to those particular people, the reaction you hope to elicit from them, and so on. But there are not yet any specific words.

Now suppose that, as you wait for your chance to speak, your attention is distracted for a moment and you lose hold of what you were about to say. The others are now giving you your turn, waiting for you to say what you wanted to say, but you cannot.

You never did have words to say, so you can’t use words as a memory book to fish up your lost meaning. What do you do to regain the sense of what you were going to say? Where do you look for it?

You look within the body. You go through a process that is much like an informal kind of focusing; you grope inside yourself. There you do have a felt sense—but not the ready-to-speak open felt sense you had before. Instead, you have that feeling of what you forgot.

You might try simply becoming quiet, receptive, hoping that “it” will open and what it was will come flooding back by itself. Or you can ask yourself questions: “Was it something about . . . ?” Or you can try to trace logical connections: “They were talking about such-and-such, so it must have had to do with. . . .” Or you can try to recreate the lost meaning by surrounding it with events like a lost piece of jigsaw puzzle: “It came to me right after Carol said . . . and then, before I opened my mouth, Lou said. . . .”

Any of these processes might help lead you to “it,” but “it” must respond. When it does, when it opens and what you wanted to say comes back, the physically felt release tells you that you’ve got it. And even at that moment, when you again “know” what you wanted to put across to those other people, you still don’t have it in words.

Both when you knew what you wanted to say, and when you knew only that you had forgotten it, there was a felt sense. One can even say that it is “the same” felt sense—but when it returns, the felt sense opens and lets you discover and use what it was.

Focusing is very much like that. One must go to that place where there are not words but only feeling. At first there may be nothing there until a felt sense forms. Then when it forms, it feels pregnant. The felt sense has in it a meaning you can feel, but usually it is not immediately open. Usually you will have to stay with a felt sense for some seconds until it opens. The forming, and then the opening of a felt sense, usually takes about thirty seconds, and it may take you three or four minutes, counting distractions, to give it the thirty seconds of attention it needs.

When you look for a felt sense, you look in the place you know without words, in body-sensing.

PRACTICE IN GETTING A FELT SENSE

1. Silently, to yourself, pick something you love or think is beautiful. It could be an object, a pet, a place, or whatever. Something very special to you in some way. Take from one to two minutes.

2. Settle on one thing. Ask yourself “Why do I love ⎯⎯⎯, or why do I think it’s beautiful?”

3. Let yourself feel that whole sense of specialness or loving. See if you can find one or two words that get at what it is.

4. Let yourself feel what those words refer to, to the whole felt sense, and see if new words and feelings come up.

This exercise is to help you get experience attending to a felt sense, something large and definitely felt, but that you are not able to verbalize. Notice how little of your love-feeling the words actually say. Yet the words are somehow right in relation to the felt sense (if you succeeded in finding such words).

ONE WAY TO LET A FELT SENSE FORM

Remember my description, earlier, of how we try to tell ourselves we feel fine, and yet in the body the bad feeling talks back? We say, “It’s fine, it’s all OK! That doesn’t bother me at all,” and yet, if we check the body, what comes there feels just as bad as before.

This can be used to help get a felt sense.

Suppose you are focusing on a problem. You know, of course, that you don’t feel fine about it, since it is a problem for you. Even so, try proposing to your body, “I feel all fine about this, the problem is all solved.” If you put your attention in your body, you will quite quickly find that a very specific not-fine sense about the problem comes there.

Of course, you knew all along that you didn’t feel fine about the problem, but now you can sense the exact quality of the felt sense, how your body has the problem.

The same method can also be used at any time, during focusing, if you lose hold of the felt sense and feel lost. You just put your attention in your body, and you say, “So, this problem is now all solved . . . right?” Wait a moment—and there is your body-sense of what is still unresolved. Then sense the quality of that.

A MURAL OF THE WHOLE PROBLEM

Sometimes it helps to begin with an image and then find the felt sense. Imagine that your whole problem is a very large picture on a wide wall. You have to step back to see it all. Let such an image come, then attend in your body for what felt sense that image gives you.

WHEN WORDS GET IN THE WAY

If you have been living with a problem for a good deal of time, you have probably formed words to describe or explain the problem and you are probably stuck on those words. This happens to most people. “I know what my problem about sex is,” someone might say. “I’m scared of it. Just scared. I can feel it. What else is there to say?”

Obviously nothing will shift if those words are always in the way. They are pessimistic words, denying the possibility of change. “This is the way I am,” the words say. “I was built this way, or my life has made me this way. I’m stuck here.”

We’ve talked before about the trick of letting such words go by, ignoring what we know and sensing freshly to find what your body really feels. Take the feeling you have and let it broaden out into the felt sense of all that.

Another way to get this is to say to yourself, “What does it now feel like to me, to be a person who has this problem?” Immediately, you will feel something wider, which at first isn’t clear. Focus on that. Or it may be immediately clear what the feeling quality of it is. It may be anger at having the problem, or urgency to solve it, or a heavy hopeless feeling, or perhaps some sense of being small and tense. To ask what it feels like, now, to be a person with this problem, helps widen the scope, so that the felt sense of the whole problem can come and then give you other specific feelings. Then focus on the main feeling quality of what comes.

Another specific aid: If words keep coming into your head, explanations and ideas and accusations and so on, keep repeating an open-ended question of your own. For example, keep repeating, “What does this whole thing feel like?” That way you control the word-making part of your mind yourself, so it can’t run off with you.

But the point isn’t to fight words. It is quite all right for words to flow. The point is to feel behind and beyond them. To do this, it helps to keep repeating an open-ended question.

It is important not to stay stuck with the same old thoughts and feelings, but to widen the scope so that a different process can begin from the body’s wider sense of the trouble.

WHEN THERE IS NO FEELING APART FROM THE WORDS

If you haven’t been able to experience any feeling or felt sense that is clearly different from words, if your feeling always comes along with words that fit the feeling perfectly, so that they are always all one, try this:

Go through the first focusing movements as usual: clear a space, stack all your troubles to one side, sit quietly and receptively. Then repeat the most feeling-filled words you have, slowly, a dozen times or so: “I’m scared of it . . . scared of it. . . .” And all the time, keep some questions hovering around the words: “What is this ‘scared’? What does it feel like, inside? Where do I feel it?”

At first the words and feeling may be exactly all one, but after a while you will find the feeling growing somewhat larger, sticking out around the edges of the words, so to speak. You will find that, yes, the words are right but they get only the center of the feeling. Actually there is more to the feeling.

As one of our best focusing teachers in Chicago told me:

“At first, when I tried to focus, I could never get a felt sense. All I had were words that I could feel, but there never was any feeling except right in the words. My words were like definitions and I had my feelings defined so they seemed as if they were exactly the same as the words. I was only looking at the center of each feeling, and in the center the feeling was what the words said. It took me three months till one day I noticed that there was more to the feeling. It had, sort of, fuzzy edges. They were beyond what the words got. That was the breakthrough for me. The feeling as having fuzzy edges, that’s the felt sense. I teach it that way now.”

To find the fuzzier edge of the feeling, or to get the feeling separate from the words, it can help to repeat the most meaningful phrase or sentence you can find, trying to sense where and what it makes you feel.

In a way, you are now going through the focusing movements backward. This works well for some people. The most common procedure is to make contact first with the felt sense of the problem as a whole (second movement). But as I have said before, focusing is not a mechanical procedure. If you find that it is more effective for you sometimes to start with words and work backward to the felt sense of all that, by all means do it that way.

But if you do, be sure that your inner attitude is one of asking, not telling. It won’t do any good simply to repeat what you have been telling yourself for years. Repeat the words, yes, but in the spirit of asking how your body experiences them, and let your body-feeling answer.

RELAXING YOUR BODY

It may help to stretch and relax all the parts of your body for a few minutes, before you begin focusing. Tense your arms, hands, forearms; let them feel tight, hard, tense. Feel the tension . . . slowly relax. Feel the difference. Let them feel loose, soft, relaxed. Do that with your legs, stomach, jaw, all over. Check to see if you are “holding on” anywhere, and let yourself relax.

WHEN NOTHING FEELS BODILY

“Before I could learn to focus,” someone said to me, “I had first to discover how the ordinary emotions were really in my body. I used to feel fear and anxiety and excitement, of course, but I used to feel them all around me. Like they were in the air, sort of. It took me some time to realize that they were in my body, like my heart pounding, or a sinking feeling in my gut. I had to learn this first about the ordinary things everybody feels, that they were inside. Only then could I look for a felt sense inside.”

If this report fits you, give yourself a week or so in which to catch yourself whenever you feel any ordinary emotion strongly. Notice what your body feels like. You will find that your body feels the emotion inside.

Test yourself now. Can you put your attention inside your stomach? If you can, you sense a distinct feeling there, perhaps warm and fuzzy, perhaps tight and tense. If you cannot get such a sensation in your stomach, then you need to work on this. Put your attention in your left big toe; wiggle it if necessary. Press it down. Now you feel the sensation in it. Now come up to your knee. This time don’t move your knee, just see if you can find it from inside. Then move to your groin, and from there move up into your stomach. There you are.

This is quite new to many people, but it does not take long to learn. Most people can put their attention in their stomach or chest, and if you work at it a little, so can you.

IF YOU FIND YOUR MIND WANDERING

If you find yourself drifting off on some irrelevant train of thought when focusing, bring yourself back gently. Say: “What was I focusing on? . . . Oh, yeah, that . . . . And what was I trying to do with it? Oh, yeah, feel the whole thing. What does that whole thing feel like?”

To bring yourself back, you need to be gentle, something like dealing with a small child, whose attention is wandering. You put your arms around the child to attract its attention, and you gently guide it to whatever lesson you want to teach.

So when your mind wanders, gently put your arm around yourself, to so speak, and guide yourself back. It doesn’t matter how many times you have to do that.

IF YOU HAVE FEW FEELINGS

Some people find it difficult to make contact with their feelings. Nearly everybody has this difficulty at least sometimes. A friend might show you a favorite painting, for example. You look at the painting, aware that the friend expects a meaningful comment from you. But the painting arouses no response in you—or, if it does, you can’t quite get in touch with those feelings. You stare at the painting and finally you have to say, “Well, it’s—uh—nice.”

It may seem to you that you are simply not very complicated inside, that you don’t have that complexity of feeling strands that I am describing in this book. But you do have it. You are human. It is there.

We are so accustomed to the simple patterns—if someone cheats us we are mad, if someone ignores us we are hurt—that many people don’t look beneath these simple patterns to their own unique complexity. But it is there. When at first I might ask how you feel about being ignored, you might say, “Bad . . . how would you feel?” This would indicate that all people would feel “bad” or “hurt” when they are ignored, and indeed that is true. But just how and where it gets me is not the same as just how and where it gets you. This “just how and where” is beneath the simple feeling that is patterned and universal. To make touch with that could take a little time.

You have to say to yourself, “Yes . . . that’s right . . . I feel hurt, and that’s natural, yes, of course I know why. They ignored me. Sure, that’s it, but . . . let me sense all that which is involved for me in this. It has to do with all-about-that person and all-about-me-with-that person, and all-about-what-it-means-to-me-to-get-ignored-anyway.” Soon you will feel that mass of things not yet clearly known. Then you can focus on that felt sense and then on its crux.

If you find it hard to get in touch with your more complex feelings, there are several things you can do. It may be just a question of practice. Some people check their own feelings regularly, day by day, hour by hour, but perhaps you have never done this. Try it for the next few days. Identify feelings as they go by. As you interact with others and go through your daily life, stop inwardly once in a while and ask in a friendly way, “How am I now? What am I feeling now?” Don’t tell yourself the answer. Wait. See what comes.

It feels good to do this, as long as you receive what you find inside. Don’t say bad things to yourself and insult yourself over what you find. Just be pleased that you have found it, that it is clearly felt. Come to know your inside space.

If someone is often with you, it may help you make contact with your feelings if you ask that person to tell you when you clearly display a specific feeling. “You look angry,” the person might say. Or, “I can see you’re happy now.” Other people will often be right in guessing that you have a feeling—though they are not likely to be right in guessing what that feeling really is. When your friend says you have a feeling look, be grateful, but don’t take the friend’s word as to what the feeling might be. Check inside. Your friend’s assessment, “You look angry,” may be quite wrong. You may find, instead, that you feel upset, worried, annoyed, impatient, disappointed, apprehensive, or perhaps some odd way that has no name. Go further into sensing what is in it.

If it has no name, that may be the best result of all. When you casually apply one of those well-worn unit-labels to a feeling—angry, scared, bored—the tendency is to think you now know everything there is to know about that feeling. You have given it its unit-label, you have identified it, and that’s that. But there is always much, much more to know, for there is an infinity of possible ways to feel any labeled feeling such as anger. My “angry” right now sticks up from a different mass of things from another “angry” I will feel in a different situation tomorrow or next week. That is why you need not stop with feelings that seem to come with readymade labels. Welcome especially those that come without names. When a feeling has no name, pause, listen, and let fresh words flow from it: “I feel . . . like I ought to be able to do something about this, but . . . I’m walled in, or something.”

IF YOU FEEL BLANK, OR STUCK, OR EMPTY

For focusing, just about anything will turn out to be a feeling. The absence of feeling is also a feeling, as I’ve said before.

“I am empty.” “OK. What does this ‘empty’ feel like? What is the feel of all of this empty?”

“I’m stuck.” “OK, what does this ‘stuckness’ feel like?” Find out if it is a tense stuckness, or heavy, like a boulder lying on top of you, or a not-knowing-what-to-do sort of stuckness. Or does it feel trapped? Give it time, and it will open up.

IF YOU ARE ANGRY AT YOURSELF, OR TRYING TOO HARD, OR TOO RESTLESS OR AFRAID TO FOCUS

Whatever gets in the way, you can focus on that for the moment, instead of the problem or difficulty you wanted to focus on. It may be that your body needs this obstacle to be removed first.

The obstacle is anger, let’s say. Ask yourself, “OK, what is all-about-this-anger?” Let that feeling broaden out into its felt sense.

Or:

“There I go again, trying so hard I get all tense. OK, what is this trying so hard? I know all about it, of course, it’s . . . yes, wait, I know all that. Let’s just feel what is all that about trying so hard. All that. What does all that feel like?”

Or:

“I feel too restless to focus. I’m too jumpy. I wish I weren’t so jumpy, so I could let my attention down inside. OK, let’s take the jumpy. What is the whole feel of this jumpy?”

In this way you respect your body’s sense of what has to be taken up next. Usually that turns out to be a new and better way into the problem.

WHEN YOU ARE AFRAID TO FOCUS

“I don’t want to look inside myself. I’m scared of what I might find down there.”

This is a common worry. But in focusing, you can treat yourself gently. Take yourself by the hand and say, “It’s all right, we will not force you to go where you don’t want to go. If you’re afraid of that place, we’ll keep our distance. We’ll stay right here and see what the fear is. All right? What does this ‘fear’ feel like from here? . . .”

Or you might say to yourself, “I feel scared to focus on that. Probably something unpleasant in there I don’t want to look at. All right . . . wait . . . if I don’t want to go into it I am not going to. But I won’t back off either. I’ll just stay right here, where I don’t want to focus, and I’ll see: what is this feeling of not wanting to? Scared. OK, let’s just stay right here, with this ‘scared.’ What is this ‘scared’? What kind of ‘scared’ is it? What is the whole feel of it?”

The procedure of focusing feels good. The moment it doesn’t, back up a little bit and see what it is that doesn’t feel good.

Don’t push yourself across barriers. Instead, focus on the immediate felt barrier. What is the whole feel of that?

There may be bad or scary feelings to focus on, but the focusing itself always feels good and makes the feeling less bad or scary. When it opens, your body releases and again that feels better. Your guide in focusing is toward these ways of feeling better, localizing and opening, releasing, fresh air. You will feel better, whatever you find down inside yourself, when you let it name itself and be localized.

IF YOU AVOID YOUR FEELINGS

Some people, including psychologists, think that there are scary things inside themselves. This is fallacious.

Nameless horrors and weird states are not lying there “inside” you, like poisonous snakes locked in a cage. Many people talk of themselves this way. “I don’t want to open the lid,” they say. “I don’t want to let all that bad stuff come out.”

The truth is that you are not a cage full of snakes. You are not any kind of container in which feelings writhe around with lives of their own. You are a process, and your feelings are a part of that process.

For example, there is the way I felt with my father when he wouldn’t listen to me, a feeling of helpless anger. Isn’t that the same feeling I had then, have now, and can have whenever I bring it back to myself? Yes, but I am never just this feeling. I am a whole body. Therefore this feeling that I call “helpless anger” comes along with a thousand other things. Each time this feeling comes back to me it has a different totality with it.

When, in focusing, I ask my body to let me have more of what’s in that whole feeling, the very way I approach myself changes the totality. The good-feeling focusing process itself changes much of the surroundings in which this feeling is now produced. My memory of my boyhood feeling won’t change, but the way my whole body produces the feeling will be different. And that is one way to understand why focusing allows the body to change what has long been stuck and unchanging in us.

This means that we need not be scared of what is in us—for there are no things in us. Rather, our feelings are newly produced each moment.

IF TOO MANY FEELINGS COME TOO FAST

Some people find focusing difficult because their feelings come too fast and there are too many. Focusing is a slowing down for these people. “Take any one, and stop it, and stay with it,” I tell them.

Sometimes it helps when I say, “All right, there’s that whole welter of feelings, now let it all be, and just let yourself quietly down under it, as if there is just one feeling under them all. See if you can get that feeling under them all.” (Silence . . . then . . . “Oh, yes, I feel (say) hurt.”) “OK, there you are,” I say. “See what that hurt really is, that whole sense of hurt.”

“Take charge,” I say. “Throw them all out, and then let them come in one at a time. First, get them all off of you. Just sit up, look around the room, and push them all off. Take a break. Then let one feeling come— just one.”

IF YOUR CRITIC MAKES YOU FEEL BAD

Everyone has a “critic,” a nasty voice that comes and says something like “Anything you do won’t work,” or “You’re no good. You’re worthless, nobody would want you around” or “You messed up again, you always do. This is another one in that long string” or “You’re just a wishy-washy, no courage, that’s you.”

Sometimes this voice will use true information, but even so, its tone of voice is so nasty, you can tell it is the destructive critic attacking you.

It is very important to sense that the critic is different from your own inward source. The critic is not your own felt sense speaking from within you. Rather, it is like a voice coming at you from outside, or above your head. It waves its finger at you, like an angry parent or a mean teacher.

Naturally it generates feelings in you, but these are not feelings to focus on. They are only constrictions and tight-closed tensions the critic makes in you. Do not respect your critic. The critic is not your conscience. Conscience is a “still small voice” inside. You can evaluate any information much better yourself, if you first send the critic out into the hall, to wait. Your own sense comes from within you and always feels like an opening, an unconstricting. You may find the same facts, or you may not. Either way it is an entirely different kind of body-experience to focus.

The best way to deal with the critic (everyone has one!) is to wave it away with some disrespectful comment. Mine usually says the same things, over and over. So I say to it, “Go away and come back when you have something new to say.”

Or I say, “I don’t have to listen to anybody who talks to me in that tone.”

All psychologists have found this destructive part of every person and given it various names (super-ego, bad parent, animus, critic). Whatever you call it, don’t fall for it. In focusing one must push it out of the way when it interrupts. Wave it off with your hand, and put your attention in your body. Let the constriction the critic has made there ebb away. Wait till you are again sensing your own inward source, where the felt sense of the whole problem forms.

One person put it quite well: “It used to give me a thud, a thump in the middle. It was a signal to feel terrible. Now it’s a signal to get mad. It’s like somebody kicked me. ‘You stop that!’ (She puts her fists up.)

Don’t just believe your critic and focus on how bad it makes you feel. Instead, find out, underneath, what you really feel and perceive, and need. Work down where you feel and need things, and not just with your critic.

“I GO RIGHT TO MY BAD FEELING, AND FEEL BAD AS ALWAYS”

Some people, despite the careful and precise focusing instructions, skip them all and go directly to their usual bad feelings. Some people are used to turning to a single bad feeling inside, whenever they turn inside. So they begin to focus and there it is.

After I give focusing instructions in a group, I often ask each person to write me a note about whatever difficulty was encountered in trying to focus. One woman wrote: “When I came in here I felt fine, I focused on my bad feeling, and now I feel bad. Is this what focusing is for?”

Clearly, if that’s focusing, who needs it? This is not focusing. Focusing involves letting a felt sense form something wider than and different from your old familiar bad feeling. Stay out of the old familiar sinkhole, stand back and take in a wider sense of the whole problem area that the bad feeling is part of.

For example, don’t just remember your hurt at the love relationships that just broke up. Instead, stand back and ask for a felt sense to form—a sense of the whole area: you and loving. Yes, yes, there’s the hurt, but what else is there? What is the whole feel around and under it?

Sure, you know your particular depressed place. There might even be a suction drawing you into it, but don’t sink. Ask yourself what that whole area of your life feels like, and you will find yourself out of the emotion, and a felt sense under it will come.

Strange as it sounds, focusing is lighter than heavy emotions. Sometimes heavy emotions do come in focusing, but a felt sense is always easier on the body than emotions.

Great passions, insane jealousy, tearing resentments, grand sufferings—these are sometimes patterns set off by little feelings you hardly noticed. Focus on the “little” feeling that set it off, especially if the strong passion is one you have many times felt and pursued already.

When people first hear of focusing, they sometimes assume that they would need a free afternoon for it in order to have overwhelming feelings and privately go to pieces for a while. Focusing is not like that. The felt sense of the whole thing feels lighter than what you are feeling already. You can focus while you are waiting for a bus. Just see what’s between you and feeling fine. Don’t go into these, just say “yes, that’s there . . .” and feel the relief that comes from making the space. Then, if one problem needs working on, get the whole felt sense of it! “What is it like to have that there, now?” By the time you get on the bus you’ll feel much better. The few minutes between things are good for focusing. Why carry your tensions around all day?

Focusing takes a few minutes, ten, fifteen, let’s say even half an hour. But not more. Then it’s time to talk, rest, do something else. Do not grind away at things. You will return later. Meanwhile, the body will process it.

EMOTION VERSUS FELT SENSE: THIS DISTINCTION IS VITAL

As you focus on a felt sense you may get further emotions coming out of it. But a felt sense is not an emotion like anger, fear, hate, joy, or anxiety. It is a sense of your total emotional situation, a feel of many things together, in which an emotion can be embedded or from which an emotion is produced.