Your Body Knows the Answer

You know there’s more to life, but you don’t know how to find it.

You have trouble getting in touch with your feelings.

You experience intense emotions that are painful to you and sometimes get you in trouble with other people.

Your work is not fulfilling.

You’re in too many fights with your partner, or with a family member, work colleague, or friend.

You know what you have to do but can’t get yourself started.

You experience sudden, critical thoughts about your own intelligence, appearance, or ability.

You have a decision to make and keep going through the pluses and minuses, but still aren’t sure what to do.

Something feels off, but you can’t identify what it is.

You’ve made a good start on a creative project, but now you’re stuck and nothing you do feels right.

There are things about yourself you’d like to change, but you don’t know how.

It is easy enough to recognize that all these situations involve some kind of personal challenge. Some of them are clearly problems; others are more like opportunities. Or, as is so often the case, they are problems that also provide opportunities, or opportunities that also present problems. Their common denominator is that all of them require change. Further, the change they require is not straightforward and simple like changing the tires on your car when they wear out, nor is it even a big, complicated kind of change like moving to a different part of the country for a new job or school.

The kind of change all of these situations call for, be they large or small, is an inner change. They require a kind of change whose steps are not at all obvious at first and that, although other people may give you helpful advice and information, ultimately no one can take but you. Inner change of the kind I’m talking about calls upon you to do something you don’t know how to do.

Mindful Focusing is a learnable inner skill involving mind, body, and heart that will show you a different way of working with precisely those problems that seem to have no answers.

The Neuroscience of a Balanced Life

As the new field of cognitive neuroscience illuminates more and more about the complex workings of the human brain, we are coming to appreciate the brain as the supreme organ of coordination, integration, and balancing of life processes. Recent research has focused on differences in the function of the brain’s right and left hemispheres. Whereas the left brain specializes in language, logic, repetitive patterns, and control mechanisms, the right brain oversees body awareness, emotions, creativity, and resilience in the face of novel situations. Modern culture has increasingly emphasized the left-brain functions and neglected right-brain capacities. (The disappearance of art and music from many public-school curricula is one disturbing example.)

We have reached a point in our evolution as a species where this accelerating overspecialization in language and logical thought, and the immensely powerful technologies and ecological turbulence that it has spawned, endanger our survival. There is a loss of balance and wholeness in individual lives and in our shared life as a society. Not only our mental health but our sense of meaning, identity, and purpose—not to mention happiness—depends on bringing the diverse life-enhancing functions of our brains back into balance. This book presents Mindful Focusing, a unique synthesis of two mind-body disciplines, one ancient and one modern, that is a highly effective means for cultivating balance, good health, enjoyment, accomplishment, and wisdom in our lives.

The ancient practice of mindfulness cultivates calmness, clarity, and emotional balance through sustained attention to present-moment experience. Cognitive neuroscience, by means of powerful new technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), is validating the multiple physiological as well as psychological benefits of mindfulness techniques, including stress reduction, cardiovascular health, improved mood, and increased emotional intelligence. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche described mindfulness practice simply as a way of making friends with yourself.

Focusing is a modern mind-body awareness method whose efficacy in reducing stress, improving resilience, and fostering personal growth is also demonstrated by a growing body of research. In recent years, Focusing has expanded from its origins in psychotherapy to numerous practical applications in fields ranging from education to medicine to business. Chapters 10 and 11 give more background about both mindfulness and Focusing. Right now I want to focus on the breakthrough discovery that lies at the heart of Mindful Focusing.

Finding the Felt Sense

In the 1950s, Eugene Gendlin, a young graduate student at the University of Chicago working with the great American psychologist Carl Rogers, set out to discover why some people in therapy have successful outcomes and others don’t. Through carefully controlled analysis of scores of audiotaped psychotherapy sessions, Gendlin and his team were able to demonstrate that the crucial variable was not the kind of therapy practiced or even the skill of the therapist but rather a capacity that the successful clients manifested from the very first session that the unsuccessful clients lacked. This was the ability to connect with and speak from a nonconceptual, bodily felt experience of the issues that were troubling them.

Instead of speaking in fully formed, logically consistent sentences, the successful clients expressed themselves in a more tentative, uncertain, groping manner. They might tell the therapist, “I’m not sure how to say this.” Or they might say one thing, then stop and say it differently: “I have this kind of heavy feeling in my chest; well, not exactly heavy, it’s more like oppressive . . .” By analyzing the speech patterns of the successful clients—those who were able to get fresh insights into their problems and actually make positive steps of change—Gendlin demonstrated that these individuals were in touch with some kind of unclear inner sensation, a bodily felt meaning that couldn’t be fully expressed in words. Gendlin called this nonverbal inner source of knowing the bodily felt sense, or simply the felt sense.

Felt senses can be found in a subtle, mostly unrecognized zone of experiencing inside us, a kind of border zone between our conscious and unconscious. This level of experience lies below our everyday awareness of objects, thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. It is an embryonic form of awareness in which “body” and “mind” are not separate. Felt senses are both bodily experienced and meaning ful. They embody the unique reality of our individual lives in ways that can’t yet be put into words.

Felt senses are unclear somatic sensations that for the most part go unnoticed, yet they are not wholly unconscious. They can be “found” by bringing a special quality of gentle mindfulness to the zone of subtle bodily experiencing in which they form. When attended to with friendly but dispassionate attention, felt senses that start out vague and indescribable can show up with greater clarity and presence. A felt sense can come alive and offer what it already knows about life situations that you—the conscious, conceptualizing you—don’t yet know. Entering into a process of inquiry with the felt sense invites spontaneous flashes of intuitive insight that generate novel perceptions and understandings, leading to fresh solutions to life’s challenges.

When the conceptual mind loses its moment-to-moment connection to direct bodily experience, it begins to take on a life of its own. Conceptual mind is very good at identifying parts and putting different parts together in new combinations, but it is not good at holding a sense of the whole. It can lose touch with the reality of our lives, creating alternative realities, both pleasant and unpleasant, that are inaccurate or incomplete.

Of course, there are times when this ability of the human conceptual mind to think abstractly—that is, abstracted from bodily experiencing—is highly useful. We can feel that 2 + 2 = 4 is true and 2 + 2 = 5 is false, but most of us can’t “feel” that 2365 + 3472 = 5837 without going through the logical steps of checking the addition. Modern science and technology and much else depends on such abstract thinking, but in our daily lives far too often our conceptual minds create constructs—ideas built with words—that are disconnected from our lived reality. This is a source of great frustration and suffering.

Accessing the body’s more holistic knowing can bring us back into accurate relationship with our life situations. This often involves acknowledging aspects of our lives that are not as we would like them to be, or as we would like others to see us. But knowing ourselves as we really are, and seeing things as they really are, provides the only basis for a wholesome, genuine, and truly productive life. “Know thyself,” the ancient Greeks taught. Gendlin’s mentor Carl Rogers said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I can change.”¹

Finding the felt sense is a powerful way of knowing yourself deeply, accepting yourself as you truly are in the present moment, and also changing yourself in directions that are genuinely life enhancing.

How Will Finding Your Felt Sense Benefit You?

The felt sense is a place of hidden treasures that each of us carries inside ourselves. The purpose of this book is to give you some tools with which you can begin to unearth that treasure. Finding the felt sense allows us to bring a deeper kind of knowing to life situations, problems, decisions, and creative challenges. This deeper knowing can then lead to insights and action steps to shift aspects of our life that feel stuck, releasing fresh energy and bringing welcome forward movement to our lives.

If you have trouble accessing your feelings, Mindful Focusing can provide a key to open the lockers in which they are hidden. That is exactly what first brought me to the practice of finding the felt sense. On the other hand, if you are dealing with too much emotion, Mindful Focusing can show you how not to become overwhelmed or paralyzed by powerful feelings. It is a gradual process of developing a trusting relationship with all the different parts of yourself, including aspects of your experience that it hasn’t been safe to bring into consciousness. Felt-sensing gives us a way to acknowledge and change things that have been holding us back rather than falling victim to them.

Finding the felt sense also brings profound benefits to our relationships with others. Instead of reacting from momentary thoughts and emotions, we develop the mental, psychological, and emotional space to respond from a deeper and wiser place in ourselves. Drawing on the felt sense changes how we listen and speak, how we learn and think, how we decide and create. It has the power to make us more resilient, more insightful, and more productive, as well as both more autonomous in ourselves and better partners with others. It also makes a wonderful complement to other methods for personal growth and healthy living, including exercise and bodywork, psychotherapy, meditation, and spiritual practices.

You may be wondering, if finding the felt sense is so versatile and effective, why is this technique not more widely known? There are several answers. Finding and working with the felt sense is not flashy and is not a quick fix; it takes time and commitment to learn; it can and will bring you up against uncomfortable places in yourself; last, but not least, it goes against the grain of our contemporary culture with its emphasis on speed and instant gratification and its information overload, digital social networking, obsession with appearances, materialism, and endless varieties of egoism.

Human beings are like icebergs: much of who we really are and what motivates our behavior lies below the level of ordinary consciousness. By learning how to access our innate but neglected capacity for bodily knowing, we can bring to light lost or alienated parts of ourselves and discover how to meet the unmet needs that they embody. Then these parts can reintegrate and contribute to positive change, growth, and fulfillment.

How to Use This Book

Once you are proficient in finding the felt sense, you’ll be able to do it almost anywhere and anytime—in the elevator before an important meeting, during the meeting itself, while walking, while driving. But to learn and then deepen your felt-sensing skills, you will need to devote some deliberate time and energy.

Each person’s learning journey is unique. Some are able to locate felt senses quickly, while for many it will take repeated attempts. If you find you are in the latter category, don’t be discouraged. Even if you find nothing at first, the basic practice described in chapter 1 of bringing open, friendly awareness to what’s going on inside your body will stimulate felt senses to show up after a while. Think of it like spring seeds planted in the earth—for a while you don’t see anything coming up, but you have to keep watering!

It is also important to know in advance that the process of finding the felt sense can be uncomfortable. You will be entering unfamiliar inner territory, and you are likely to encounter places that are strange, scary, painful, or disorienting. Your reward for staying on the path even when it’s uncomfortable will be arriving at new places that have a wonderful feeling of rightness, insight, and freedom.

This book is divided into two parts. Part 1 focuses on the theme of making friends with yourself or, as the section title says, making friends in yourself. It presents a step-by-step introduction to the practice of Mindful Focusing. Each chapter includes one or more exercises designed to elicit specific inner skills that, taken together, constitute a toolkit or repertoire you can draw on as you deepen your practice and start to apply it to many different kinds of challenges.

Part 2, “Living Life Forward,” goes into greater detail on applying Mindful Focusing in specific contexts. It begins with the challenge of converting insights into actions, then looks at how to draw on felt senses to meet challenges in relationships, communication, conflict situations, and decision making. After that it considers how Mindful Focusing deepens intellectual understanding and aesthetic discernment, its role in creative process, and how it increases awareness and appreciation of nature and the environment. The concluding chapter explores the vital role of felt-sensing in the spiritual dimension of our lives. As in part 1, each chapter contains one or more exercises you can do on your own or, in some cases, with others.

Between parts 1 and 2, there is a two-chapter interlude that goes into greater depth about the two principal traditions that come together in Mindful Focusing: ancient Buddhist mindfulness-awareness meditation practices and Eugene Gendlin’s contemporary Philosophy of the Implicit, a radically new understanding of the nature of living things and life process that underlies his discovery and development of Focusing. If sources and theory are important in your way of learning, you’re welcome to read the interlude at any point. If theory isn’t your cup of tea, you can skip it altogether.

The exercises are the heart of the book. You can get some insight from just reading the text, but finding the felt sense is fundamentally about getting in touch with our preconceptual nature, and it is through doing the exercises that you will discover your own unique way of doing that. The exercises in part 1 are foundational. I recommend reading a chapter at a time and repeating the exercises several times before going on to the next chapter. You will progress most rapidly if you set aside time every day to work on these practices. As with any new skill, repetition will lead to mastery.

If a particular exercise doesn’t seem to be working for you after several repetitions, give it a break and move on to the next. You can return to the problem exercise later on and see if it is more fruitful. In fact, it will be helpful to repeat earlier exercises at any point. As your felt-sensing ability improves with practice, you will continue to make new discoveries.

One of my favorite records when I was growing up was Bert and I, a collection of Down East New England humor. In one story, a motorist stops to ask a local for directions to Millinocket, a remote town in northern Maine. The local scratches his head and then says, “Now, if you stay on this road another three blocks, then turn right at the filling station and get on the big highway, and stay on that all the way to . . .” and then he trails off. “Well, no,” he continues, “you better keep going on this road for another seven miles till you see the general store on your left, then . . .” and again he trails off. He tries a third time, “Actually, the thing to do is get on the coastal route all the tourists take and follow that right along until . . .” Finally, after a long pause, he announces, “Come to think of it—you can’t get there from here!”

This book is about the kinds of challenges that feel like “you can’t get there from here.” It is about a whole different way of meeting challenges and making change. I have experienced in my own life, and seen over and over in the lives of others, how truly life changing these practices can be. I hope you will experience similar insight and transformation as you explore the hidden riches of your own felt sense.