FAQs

Yes! You don't need to know anything in advance to practice Focusing. You don't need to be a meditator. All you need is a willingness to sit with and allow yourself as you are.

Everything we need to heal ourself is present in our body. (Have you read "The Body Keeps the Score"?) Our traumas and unprocessed emotions are stored in the body. The problem is most of us have never been taught how to listen to the body in a way that allows our old stuck (and painful) energies to be released. These energies are "knocking at the door" of your physical sensations, your felt sense, wanting to be heard and released. But when we haven't learned how to listen to the body, our felt sense feels vague, unclear, and difficult to discern. Have you ever woke up feeling "off"? Your mind tries to put a label on it, but it's difficult to label because it's usually more than just one thing. Focusing is the practice of tuning into these felt senses. And as we do so, what feels unclear at first, becomes clear as we focus on it. These felt senses become a portal to our inner world and growing in relationship with all our inner parts -- providing an opportunity to get to know them, heal them, and re-integrate them, and in doing so, grow into greater alignment with our highest fulfillment.

I was taught that we heal ourselves by grieving our unprocessed past experiences. Feeling your feelings. Releasing them by allowing them to flow through you. And this is healing, for sure. But grief can be intense. The pain you carry was repressed for a good reason -- because it was overwhelming. Grief is a raw experience of facing and feeling these emotions. So it's no surprise that grief is a long, wild ride. This is how I began my healing journey, and it was definitely an intense ride. As I continued to heal and grow, I found practices that focused the grieving process and held it in a lighter, more efficient way. Rather than getting caught up in the smaller self’s story and the thinking mind’s defenses, like we often do in the experience of raw grief, this technique utilizes mindfulness techniques and intuitive listening to gently and peacefully dissolve inner pain into love. This is Inner-World Focusing. This is the practice this book will guide you through. The practice of Inner-World Focusing is a combination of two prominent and powerful self healing tools I discovered along my way: Focusing and Internal Family Systems (or Parts Work). I’d like to describe these two practices, and how they come together to create Inner-World Focusing. Focusing: Eugene Gendlin is a psychotherapist who developed the practice of Focusing from a study he and some colleagues conducted on why talk therapy often fails to make a real difference in people’s lives. While looking through thousands of therapy sessions, they discovered an internal process some clients intuitively practiced that accurately predicted life-changing shifts in their lives. They distilled this practice into a step-by-step method so anyone could learn to create these transformative shifts for themselves. Essentially, Focusing is the practice of listening to our body’s inner knowing, tuning into the subconscious experience as it is sending invitations through our Felt Senses, and with focus, gaining clarity or conscious awareness of what is unclear or unconscious, doing so in a way that helps stuck experiences and emotions be released. Internal Family Systems (IFS): Richard Schwartz is a therapist who developed IFS, which understands that we are a whole Self made up of many parts. These Parts are subpersonalities, which shift out of balance as a result of trauma and repressed emotions. IFS provides a model for listening to and loving back into wholeness the Parts of us that have become out of balance (or separated from our conscious awareness) due to unprocessed pain in our life, doing so while centered in our Self, the larger loving container of all our Parts. Focusing is a powerful tool for connecting with our body’s unconscious knowing and guidance system, which naturally leads to working with our Internal Family System, a powerful model and pathway for loving our hurting and fragmented Parts back into our whole Self. But I’ve found it can be difficult to access Parts solely using the practice of Focusing. I didn't have the clarity of a larger structural framework like Internal Family Systems to support a more robust healing process. I also found it can be difficult to access our Parts without first listening to our body’s Felt Senses. When I tried to do so, I felt like I was more present in my mind instead of listening to the knowing held in my body. The mind often feels more like a maze, like a trickster, and because of that, it’s more difficult to access and trust the mind. So I combined these two complementary practices into one powerful tool. I've also implemented various mindfulness and energy work practices to support easier access into the inner world. This guide serves as a pathway for learning this powerfully synthesized practice in a simple, step-by-step way.

You can! Once you learn the practice, whether that's with a guide, with our book, or through our online course (coming soon), you can practice on your own or with a friend. Some people prefer having a guide, so they don't have to work so hard to keep track of where they are in the session. Having a guide can be very helpful. It's possible to do Focusing on your own, but it will probably take longer as it requires more mental energy and focus to keep track of your own session and discern where you are and what you next step in the process is. Having a guide can also be helpful when you have a lot of feelings come up. A guide can help you recenter when you get lost, helping you navigate through your Inner-World Focusing session. I also highly encourage everyone to learn the skill of IWF. You may not always have access to a guide. Feeling confident and comfortable guiding your own practice will rapidly accelerate your healing and growth process. Once you learn focusing, you will have the ability to help your friends and family heal as well.