Introduction to
Focusing
In GTFU Chapter 11 (“Trust Your GUT”), I recommend a self-awareness and emotional healing technique called Focusing as an excellent tool for unpacking your “GUT Gastrointestinal Uplink Transducer — an imaginary “instrument” that is linked to your True Self, from which it downloads important messages and converts them into sensations you can feel in your gut or other regions of your body. feelings” and intuition.
What is Focusing?
When you have a GUT feeling or an unclear sense that “something in me is trying to tell me something,” Focusing helps you transform that fuzzy “felt sense” into clear understanding. This makes it an excellent technique for enhancing your skill at receiving Inner Guidance and aligning your perceptions and actions with your True Self.
Focusing is a formal way to do something that actually comes naturally to all human beings, but it’s largely trained out of us by a culture that tends to devalue the emotional and intuitive aspects of our humanity, substituting the wisdom in our GUTs with rules, roles, and “shoulds.” Learning the Focusing technique begins with a more structured format and, over time, evolves into a general way of being, as an ongoing background process — a form of mindfulness that reduces stress and elevates your emotional intelligence.
Focusing can be done with a partner, where one person is the focuser and the other plays the role of “guide” or “companion.” You can also do solo Focusing — either as a regular practice or “on the fly”: whenever some emotionally charged issue or a need for clarity arises.
Learning Focusing
The formal Focusing technique was first devised by the philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin back in the 1960s and ’70s. His classic text on the subject is called, aptly, Focusing. This relatively short book includes step-by-step instructions for Focusing, as well as a section on active listening skills that enhance Focusing with a partner (and communication in general). The Focusing Institute, has a website with resources for learning both traditional and alternative Focusing techniques. (See below.)
Ann Weiser Cornell, who was a student of Gendlin and is now one of the leading authorities on Focusing has developed an approach called “Inner Relationship Focusing,” which is simpler and more intuitive than traditional Focusing, in my opinion.
Focusing Links
If you want to learn focusing from a book, I recommend Ann’s primer:
Ann also has some excellent articles online. If you only have time to read one more article about Focusing it should be this one:
Karyn Greenstreet’s excellent interview about Focusing:
Ann’s website has much more:
And here’s a link to the Focusing Institute’s concise description of Gendlin’s original technique:
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