My Focusing Journey

(Time to read: ~ 2 minutes)

I first read Eugene Gendlin’s book “Focusing” over 20 years ago.

I felt enormous relief at being encouraged to honour the body-based, non-cognitive “knowing” I had been in touch with since I was a child.

As a result, I have integrated that energy with my logical, left-brain thinking in everything I’ve done, including

• Project planning and project management
• Life coaching
• Communication training / Nonviolent Communication (NVC)

Inner Relationship Focusing

In 2004, one of our NVC students was a Focusing teacher, having been trained in Inner Relationship Focusing by Ann Weiser Cornell.

She appreciated the contribution of NVC to what Focusing had given her, and I became aware of Ann Weiser Cornell’s work to use her background in linguistics to make Focusing easier to learn, for those who do not naturally tap into body-based wisdom.**

Focusing and NVC

As I come up to my 10th year of teaching NVC, I continue to look for ways to help people get the maximum benefit from NVC in the minimum amount of training time.

I have noticed something similar to Gendlin’s discovery: People do not get the full benefit of NVC if they are only tapping into their left, linguistic, logical-thinking brain. Unless they tap into their body-based, right brain, nothing changes.

They may use different words in communicating with other people, but they generally experience the same results as without NVC.

I have already integrated a variety of approaches to help people tap into that body-based, emotional energy – and when I am present, they are successful.

And the whole goal of my approach is to help people become skilled at doing this on their own.

So I’m currently taking the basic Inner Relationship Focusing curriculum, in order to integrate the learning from this discipline – about how people can use language and other strategies to help tap into the full richness of our inner wisdom.

Because this is the foundation on which NVC enables us to build warm and powerful connections with others, to co-create mutually satisfying solutions, and help to shape the communities and the world we want.

My Page about Focusing

I’ve created a page for links to my own Focusing-related material (it also duplicates the information in this post). This Focusing page is accessible from the top menu bar.

** The practice of Focusing has its roots in Eugene Gendlin’s discovery that the best predictor of whether someone will benefit from psychotherapy is whether, at some point in their first two therapy sessions, they have a moment when they connect with something that they cannot put into words.

Having made this discovery, Gendlin became interested in teaching / supporting people who did not do this naturally to learn this skill, as well as to increase everyone’s capacity to do it more effectively.