BALLETIC FOCUSING

by Stanley

The first edition of ‘Focusing’ by Eugene Gendlin came out in 1978. Since then a great deal of work has been done expanding its basic idea[1], which is really very simple. It places the emphasis on the person’s own experiencing. But here ‘experience’ means something very specific. ‘It is the process in which the person gives attention to the ‘feel’ of a problem or situation as a whole and then attempts to articulate this ‘feel’. On encountering a problem or situation we bring our attention, not to the thoughts or emotions that arise from the situation, but to the sense, often physically felt, of ‘all that’’[2] It’s a process that can’t be hurried. At first, the sense of it can be quite vague, but as attention is given to the feel of it in the moment, the problem begins to open up, revealing new perspectives. And it is this opening up that moves living forward in places where it may have been stuck.

This appeal to the body’s ‘felt-sense’ is perhaps the most singular and original idea in focusing. The body can be the source of quite intricate intelligence, not merely in the management of its own homeostasis, but also in having an insight into the broader aspects of living. This goes against the current notion of what the body is. But it has never been given the chance. No one has really granted it that sort of intelligence. So that when we first look in the direction of the ‘felt-sense’ it does feel unknown and vague, largely because we are out of touch with our physical being. We have drawn such a wide demarcation between our ‘physical’ and our ‘thinking’ selves that we have cut ourselves off from perhaps the greater part of our being.

It seems as though the body can serve as the first barrier, the first line of defense, against a hostile world. Numb the body and you numb the effects of an unhelpful environment – it is to ‘toughen up’ as they say. The ability to feel pain or physical discomfort is no indication that one is in touch with the body. Beyond such primitive perceptions lay the full spectrum of our wholebody and with it the possibility of a much enlarged sense of self and wellbeing.

The working model of focusing has assumed that the most precise avenue of expression for the felt-sense is language. And this has proved remarkably useful. There is no doubt that when we know what we really feel and speak from the heart we are truly ourselves. This is what invigorates and gives our life movement.

But there are other forms of bodily expression that do not involve language and that are just as passionate and meaningful as words, and sometimes even more so. There’s the whole area of music and dancing. If you have ever watched a couple of Latinos dancing a tango or a stunning Spanish Flamenco dancer you will know what I mean – that wonderful combination of burning vibrancy fueled by controlled passion.

When the waltz was first introduced into Victorian society it was thought to be scandalously outrageous, vulgar and immoral. The wild, whirlwind of the music and the sight of a man holding a woman so close to his body in public was denounced as offensive by the church and all right thinking people. Naturally this was just what appealed to the young of the time whose spirit was busting to get out. Popular ballroom dance-forms in the west have evolved a lot since then. The Rock and Roll era seemed to end the tradition of couples dancing together, replacing this, as today, with individuals doing their own separate thing, although perhaps vaguely connected with someone else somewhere on the floor. And it’s interesting to note that today the dancing movements are free-form; one simply expresses oneself as it comes.

Now someone has developed a therapeutic form of dancing and called it ‘wholebody focusing’. It involves using the felt-sense to discover the style of dance that one’s body wants to express. It is only a little way-out to call it Balletic Focusing; and with it we are back to the pas de deux, only this time the couple are more like a focusing partnership where one person is the ‘listener’ while the other performs; but instead of listening to words, she ‘listens’ to your dance; and she does this with the same unconditional positive regard that you would find in a good person-centred therapy session – without interfering or joining in, she is with you in whatever way you tango.

What is amazing is how strong the guiding felt-sense becomes in this process. It begins to take over; and the more you trust it the stronger it becomes; and the stronger it becomes the more you trust it. Your movements morph into a work of art in which your body seems to work through long held tensions, moving though timeless psycho-physical blockages. It becomes a trance-like state and you only know dimly what you are doing and why. It all takes place below the level of consciousness, but you can feel something deeply cavernous is happening. Consciously, you are only aware that someone inside, some hidden self, is being satisfied and is smiling. Maybe because, for the first time in ages, one realises that one’s being is profoundly physical and, like a child, is delighted at being seen – a healthy exhibitionism.

It must have been at least ten years ago I had a bright idea. I had just come out of my morning meditation and I found myself yawning and stretching. ‘Now there’s a funny thing’, I thought, ‘why was I allowed to yawn and stretch only when I stopped meditating? I must have been sitting still ! That’s what you are supposed to do in meditation, isn’t it? I wonder what would happen if I paid attention to what my body wanted while I was meditating.

I began by giving up the rather up-tight yoga posture and, reclining back in a comfortable chair that gave my body room to move, I began to discover exactly what I have been describing above. I had no idea what to call it. It wasn’t meditation proper and it wasn’t focusing proper either. I decided to call my little private practice bodyminding. I thought this appropriate because it seemed as though I was the body’s minder.

When, a year or so ago, some people at the Focusing Institute in the States came out with Wholebody Focusing I was quite startled. And when I attended Karen’s workshop here in New Zealand last year I found that they had not gone exactly the route I had and there were certain philosophical differences. But they were on the same page as me – a case of simultaneous discovery. Quite encouraging.

And I’m pleased to tell you that Karen will be coming again to New Zealand in March of next year to conduct another weekend workshop of Wholebody Focusing and a five day retreat at Mokihinui Westport – a beautiful spot I’m told.

More information on this at a later date.

[1] To get an idea of the number of published books on focusing go to:

http://www.focusing.org/eShop/10Browse.asp?category=Focusing%20Books

[2] Purton, Cambell. Introduction to the Special Issue on Focusing Oriented Therapy . In Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies. Special Edition. Volume 9. Number 2. June 2010

INCREMENTAL INNOVATION part 2

Creative Change in Small steps

by Stanley

...We not only do not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen! Stuart Kauffman

Whenever you take action there is always the risk that you will get more than you bargained for; that ‘more’ may be welcome or not. But there’s a fair certainty that there will some surprises. It’s the nature of engagement with the world. Some surprises can alter the course of your whole life. Being the unadventurous type, it’s what makes people like me careful. Besides what is right theoretically, I have to take into account all my personal complexes, whether the consequences of my action will clash with all the curious things that are important to me. In any kind of future, what I can accept and make use of is constrained by what is possible for me by the facts of my psychology; I’m limited not just by situations, but by who I am and what I have become.

Let’s say I’m dealing with a difficult situation and I don’t know which way to go. I’m looking for a new way, a new idea. But I can’t know in advance what is possible until I begin to move forward. Gingerly, pessimistically perhaps, I try a new tack. I can guess, but I don’t know what will happen. But I do know that if I try something different it will lead to new developments, all of which I cannot foresee. Such consequences, some anticipated, some quite unforeseen, are what we could call adjacent possibilities.^[1] Some we are not aware of until they happen. Not only do we ‘not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen!’ In order to grasp this notion of ‘adjacent possibility’ let’s look at what it means in biology. My examples here may seem a bit way out – but bear with me.

Swimming fish evolved from spineless bottom feeders, segmented worms, sponges, and corals. They evolved into the first vertebrates. 400 hundred million years ago they began to probe the water’s edge and wiggle their way onto land. What they had developed as fins, they began to use as the first ‘legs’. Of all the thousand ways evolution could have gone, this was only one. It was a possible next step: an adjacent possibility. Before the development of backbones there was not even the remotest chance of moving out of the water. It was physiologically impossible. But having developed vertebrae and fins no one could have predicted what that would lead to – in fact, it led to us! Among other things.

The closest fossil relatives of birds were two-legged dinosaurs called theropods. They sported feathers but could not fly. Its common ancestor didn’t develop feathers in order to fly, but to keep warm. Having done so, some bright theropod found that using feathers he could glide. Gliding was an adjacent possibility which then evolved into flying – to birds, in fact. Until the development of feathers to keep warm, flight could not have evolved – feathers, as we say, was a serendipitous window of opportunity. Evolution is full of examples where a function that had evolved for one purpose revealed the possibility of a completely different use, opening up new and unforeseeable realms of creative development.

Evolution by natural selection is extremely slow, but incremental change, where adjacent possibilities are seized upon, is much faster. It is as though the main work has already been done. It’s only a question of seeing a novel way of using what is already there. It’s the same in our personal development and the same in the cultural sphere. Advances in technology are built upon platforms that are already established. ‘Alicia Juarrero, a philosopher, asks, ‘Could you cash a check 50,000 years ago? Think of the cultural inventions that have occurred to allow us to cash checks.’

In our lifetime we have seen computer technology race ahead, literally in leaps and bounds. Each step creates the adjacent possibilities necessary for the next step. When they were creating the first computer program in 1997, you couldn’t have said to Bill Gates and Paul Allen: “Hey, lets create the World Wide Web, then we can have Internet Banking and Twitter.” Even if you could have explained your far sighted vision of the future it would have been just hot air – interesting maybe, but useless. At that time it was not yet an adjacent possibility – but the first Microsoft operating system for an IBM was.

In a similar way, as we go through life we build platform upon platform. It’s called personal development. What is possible at later stage is not possible early on. We cannot ask a child to read philosophy; it is not an adjacent possibility. It may be one day – it may not. It may never be. What step can come next depends on what steps have gone before. For each step makes certain developments possible and others out of the question. And since we all have different experiences in life we build different platforms – gradually housing our unique personalities.

Now think of the therapist who suggests a new way of thinking or feeling to the client or makes helpful proposals. In all likelihood he will be advancing a notion for which there is no precise platform in the person’s psyche. It is possible to impose a change, but this is more like head-training than real growth. It is unintegrated and therefore does not provide a further platform from which to move forward.

Advice to a friend or client might be great. But if there is no platform already there from which it can take off, if it does not awaken an adjacent possibility, then forget it. But always remember, there is no right path forward. Looking back one might get the feeling that a certain development was inevitable – but that’s only hindsight.

The kind of development we are talking about is indeterminate, unpredictable, asymmetric and nonlinear, but nevertheless quite real. In sensing your way forward what comes next, the adjacent possible, may not be an ‘action’ in the literal sense; it may be an imagining, a dream, an idea, an emotion, a fantasy. We have to get out of our literal habit of putting everything in neat little boxes. An event is an event.

As for the good meaning friends who advise on a personal difficulty, it’s a good bet that anything they may suggest will not feel exactly right. It is almost impossible to guess a person’s adjacent possibilities in any situation. Therapeutic time is much better spent feeling for the adjacent possibilities that present themselves right now. No one can know the exact nature of those possibilities but the person themselves. It must come from them, from their felt-sense.

In Gendlin’s focusing language, the adjacent possibility, he would call ‘the implicit’. Both terms simply mean the ‘next possible step’. It also means that as you feel your way into a new possibility it may have completely unknown applications. Imagine the first fish saying to another fish:

‘Good God, I never realized these fins would be useful for walking’

‘For what ?

‘For walking.

‘Oh Yeah – what the hell’s that !!!

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[1] Stuart Kauffman, who coined the term Adjacent Possibility, is a biologist with a background in philosophy.