Focusing: How to Open Up Your Deeper Feelings and Intuition

They believe they must feel every bad feeling to the fullest at all times.

Once your body is allowed to be itself, uncramped, it has the wisdom to deal with your problems.

Your body is not a machine, rather a wonderfully intricate interaction with everything around you, which is why it “knows” so much just in being.

Nothing that feels bad is ever the last step.

Focusing, by contrast, is optimistic. It is based on the very positive expectation of change. It doesn’t envision a human being as a fixed structure whose shape can be analyzed once and for

In the first movement you clear a space for yourself to live in while the rest of the focusing process is going on.

It is very much like a place, a spot in your inner landscape. Once you know where it is and how to find it, you can leave it and come back tomorrow.

You welcome anything that comes with a body shift, but you stay a little distance from it. You are not in it, but next to it. This space, in which you can be next to it, forms in a few moments, as your body eases. “I can’t solve this all in one day,” you say to yourself. “I know it’s there. I can find it again. I can leave it for a while.”

“How do I feel? Why don’t I feel wonderful right now? What is bugging me on this particular day?”