nine

If You Can’t Make

Anything Shift

The body shift most often happens in the third, fourth, or fifth focusting movement. The third movement, you’ll recall, is the one in which you get a handle for the quality of the felt sense, and the fourth is resonating back and forth between felt sense and handle. The fifth is the one in which you ask the felt sense what it is. (What about the whole problem makes this?) (In many people, as I’ve said, the three movements take place simultaneously or in such quick succession that there is no way—and of course, no need—to separate them.) If you get stuck in those movements, or can’t seem to get into them at all, this chapter will offer some help.

DELIBERATE LETTING-GO

In the spectrum of people’s attitudes toward their feelings, there are two opposite extremes that don’t often produce useful results. One is the attitude of strict control: trying to make the head dominate the body, insisting that you won’t give in to this or be stopped by that. The other extreme is that of never wanting to direct or control feelings, as if anything seems artificial except floating, letting images roam, letting feelings come and go.

Either extreme can prevent you from getting a body shift. Focusing is a deliberate, controlled process up to a certain point, and then there is an equally deliberate relaxation of control, a letting go, a dropping of the reins.

The very word “focusing” suggests that you are trying to make sharp what is at first vague. You grope down into a felt sense and you control the process to prevent yourself from drifting. “I want to know about this feeling, not any others right now,” you tell yourself. “What’s this feeling about? What’s in it, what’s underneath it?” If you do find yourself drifting, rein yourself back in: “Where was I just then? Ah . . . yes. I was at that stuff about guilt, or whatever it is. What is all that about? . . .”

Once you have made contact with a felt sense clearly and strongly, you drop the reins. Don’t try to control what comes from it. Let what comes from the felt sense come: words, pictures, physical sensations, as long as it is from this felt sense.

The process might be called “deliberate letting-go.”

LETTING THE BODY REALLY SHIFT

When you first learn focusing, the bodily responses can be very slight. There is a barely noticeable “unhuh” in your body, when something comes that is just right. Learn to let your body take more of a shift. Try exhaling a deep long breath (like the many examples in this book where I have written “whew . . .”). Try nodding with your head. Try relaxing your whole body as if you had been sitting stiffly. This shift allows you to melt. If you do this purposely a few times, your body will learn to express itself more freely. Then don’t do it on purpose any more, see what more expressive body moves come of their own accord.

As an example, think of a little girl that is very scared. She stands petrified, only her eyes moving. You walk up and say, “Honey, are you scared?” There is the barest little bit of a nod.

Now in this example, you know this little girl hasn’t yet changed in her body. What you want is to say again to her: “Scared, honey? It’s OK to feel whatever you feel, we’ll see what we can do. Has it been scary?” The little girl might then practically melt in your arms, by way of saying “Yes, it sure has been scary.”

Of course, there isn’t always a major felt shift; sometimes a small step has only a slight bodily effect. But at times a major effect comes, if you don’t settle too quickly for the barely noticeable “yes” in your body and keep asking it.

When something comes that feels correct in your body, check back a few times, not so much because it might be wrong but to let this more major bodily change happen.

SOME TRIGGERING QUESTIONS

When you have made contact with a felt sense but can’t make it move, the problem may be only that you haven’t yet asked yourself the right open-ended question. Sometimes feelings will respond to a question that is phrased in a certain way, but not to virtually the same question phrased another way. A question that makes things shift inside me one time might have no effect at another time. Thus it may help you to experiment with various phrasings until you find one or a few that work for you.

Listed below are the questions that seem to work most often in most people.

“What is this, really?” That is basically what you are trying to get at, but the question as phrased may be too general, too vague. These questions are more specific.

“What is the crux of this?”

“What is the worst of it?” Or “What are the two or three things about it that trouble me the most?”

“What is at the center of it?”

“What is under this? What is doing it?”

“What needs to happen for me with this?”

“What would it take to feel better?”

Notice that there are two basic kinds of questions: the kind that asks what’s wrong, and the kind that asks what would be right. Another way to say it: we can ask into what the problem has been, or we can ask about what needs to happen and hasn’t yet.

It is very important to ask the forward type of question sometimes.

For example, suppose you often feel lonely and isolated. When you focus, that feeling often comes. It is quite right to focus on what the whole felt sense is that goes with “isolated.” You may find in what way you isolate yourself, or what quite different things this is really about. But it will be important at some point also to ask the felt sense: “What would it take not to feel this way?” or some question of that type.

Look for the life-steps forward, and not only at what the trouble has been.

WHEN THE HANDLE FITS BUT THEN YOU ARE STUCK

You have made contact with the global felt sense of a problem and you have asked what the quality of it is. A handle has come: “I’m afraid.” Seeking to go another step, you have asked what is under that fear, what is doing it. But nothing comes. All you can feel is “I’m scared,” over and over again. You are stuck. What can you do?

Your problem may be that you have become stuck with a unit-label, which I mentioned in the last chapter. You are looking at the word—”scared,” or whatever it may be—as though it says everything that needs to be said. Or you are locked onto “scared” as only that emotion. Let it broaden into a felt sense. What wider feeling does this “scared” come out of? There are a vast number of ways of feeling that can come along with “scared.” Get a feel of this mass of feelings that go with this scared.

Or try a fresh start. Stand way back from the problem. It will remain there, don’t worry. Take a break, take a breath. Then consider the problem as wider and deeper than just “scared.” Bring home to yourself that it probably goes with much else in your life, your past, your future, other people, and so on. It is a whole slice of your life, a whole context. What is the whole sense in your body when you think of all that?

Or try, “Why am I scared?” Again don’t answer. Keep saying the question and while you say it, try to get the whole feel of what goes along with this particular “scared.” What are its unique qualities? Feel it inside you, and see what fresh words come from it. “I’m afraid . . . and there’s a kind of loneliness with it, like I’m—Yes! That’s what it feels like! it’s like I’ve been left stranded alone on a high scary place and everybody has gone away, and there’s never going to be anybody to help me. . . .”

USING IMAGERY

Another way to get a body shift when you are stuck is to let an image form. Many people have vivid imagery and many don’t. But anyone can form an everyday image, even with open eyes. Try it: Imagine now the room where you sleep, and where your bed is. How do you get to the door from the bed? You can conjure a visual image of that even as you are reading.

In that same inner space, you can ask for an image of a feeling to form. Wait till it pops in. The image will express a felt sense. You might see a forest, for instance, a figure, a storm, a wall, yourself runing.

When you have the image, then see how this image makes you feel. Often just having the image will shift something. Whether it does or not, ask yourself, “What does this image now make me feel?” It will probably give you a step.

LOOKING UP THE ANSWER IN THE BACK OF THE BOOK

If you cannot get a body shift, there is a different method, which lets your body experience what it would be like if the problem were resolved. Ask your body, “What would it feel like, in my body, if this difficulty somehow got completely resolved?” If you wait a few seconds you will feel the shift in your body.

It helps also, when you do this, to let your body shift outwardly, if it wants to. Perhaps your body will want to sit up with your head high, or perhaps it will want to relax and exhale, or move in some other way of its own accord.

By going through this process, you let your body give you a taste of what it will be like to feel right. When you reach that good feeling, keep it. See what you learn from it. After a while, tell yourself, “I can feel this way all the time.” Then wait. If something new inside comes to you and says, “No. Sorry. You can’t feel this way all the time.” ask that “something” what it is.

This is much like prematurely looking up the answer to a math problem in the back of the book. You know what the answer looks like but not how to do the steps. But knowledge of the answer helps you to work backward. It lets you ask what is in the way, what you must change to get this answer. Working from the answer backward gives you steps you couldn’t find from the problem.

Thus it is with this way of focusing. You let your body feel its answer. Not only does this feel good at the time you are doing it, but it lets you ask: “OK, what’s in the way of feeling this way?”

That “what’s in the way” can be a new opening. But to use it, you must pretend to yourself for a moment (knowing better, of course) that the problem really is all solved and you will remain in this good frame of mind-body.

Some people, when they ask what’s in the way, go right back to where they were, the way they left the problem. Don’t do that. Stay and pretend it’s all solved until a new “what says no?” comes. You can do that by holding onto the good feeling, just as you would hold onto an answer from the back of the book while trying to make steps from it backwards.

Note an example from the later stages of someone’s focusing:

“I sit with this bad feeling a while but it doesn’t change. I know what it is, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is I can’t get it to shift. So I did this. ‘What would your body feel like if it were all solved?’ And I got ‘Wow! I’d be free!’ And my body sort of sat forward and my blood circulated more and I felt like moving my shoulders, like I was marching out into the world. It was a neat feeling! Then I said, ‘OK, can I stay this way?’ And it came and said ‘No.’ And I said, ‘OK, why not?’ and right away I got this special kind of being scared.

“It felt really good to focus on that special kind of scared, instead of the stuck bad feeling from before.

“That special scared, it turned out to be very odd. I wasn’t scared of anything that’s usual. I was scared of living, like I’d break something if I just came out, like living in a china store, sort of, that’s the way I’ve been. . . .”

CHECKING IN

Make it a “place” you can leave and come back to. A painful place may not shift immediately. You may have to check in with its felt edge, a number of times during the rest of the day, and perhaps for several days. Do it briefly and gently: “Can I still feel that whole thing?. . . Ah, there it is. Anything new? . . . Ah, still the same. OK.” This takes only a minute. Eventually you will find a step or shift there.

DON’T SAY, “IT MUST BE . . .”

I want to warn you once more against analyzing, inferring, “figuring out.” This can prevent anything from shifting. We all think we know much about our problems. We push our bodies around a great deal, try to force ourselves in this direction and that, guided by a Sunday school list of admired traits or by various social groups’ lists of what are accepted as worthy goals. We don’t listen to our bodies enough, and this failing can crop up even in the midst of focusing.

You might form a global felt sense of a problem, then grope for its crux and find it and feel good for a second or two. But then the old analyzing habit can take over. “Oh, sure, I know what this is about,” you hear yourself say. “It must be. . .”

Whenever you hear phrases like “it must be,” turn them off. You are only doing what most people do throughout their lives: trying to tell yourself what is wrong. Remember the importance of an “asking” rather than a “telling” internal attitude. Tell yourself nothing. Ask, wait, and let your body reply.

Your effectiveness in focusing, and the rewards it gives you, will improve with practice. In time, you won’t need to think consciously about any of these trouble-shooting rules. Nor, as I’ve said, will you need to think of the focusing process as a six-step exercise. It will become an easy and natural act, like walking.

And it will become a part of your everyday life, if you let it. You will find yourself using it not only in times of stress but as a help in solving all life’s problems. Learn to trust your body’s guidance.