What is Focusing?

Focusing is an awareness process – like mindfulness – that allows you to tap into your emotional intelligence  Its based on the idea that we have a bodily felt sense that can help us discover more of what we feel and know and the next steps we need to take in life. With Focusing, you return to an inner source of knowing, your own inner compass, where you know the right direction for your life.

What Benefits Does Focusing Offer?

Focusing has a very wide range of uses, from enhancing your creativity to improving your thinking ability. Focusing can enhance and deepen every part of your life. The uses include:

• releasing blocks
• clear decision making
• knowing what you really feel and want
• releasing emotional burdens
• transforming inner critic
• nurturing a sense of self worth
• being present to your life

Can I Use Focusing on Myself?

You can learn Focusing for yourself – as a process  of empowering yourself and understanding your issues in a non-pathologizing way. Once you have learned the Focusing process, you can use it any time you need it, in stressful times, in challenging relationships, to transform frozen patterns and beliefs, for emotional and physical healing, any time.

Is Focusing Research Based?

Focusing has been linked in over 50 research studies with positive outcomes.  Typical outcomes from Focusing include greater regulation of emotions, more satisfying relationships, and increased self-acceptance. More information about research studies is at Focusing.org.

Is Focusing a Form of Meditation?

Although Focusing can be done inwardly, sitting quietly, with eyes closed, it is not a form of meditation. Focusing is an engaged process of self-exploration that involves the deliberate inner attention to your bodily sense about situations in your life. Because Focusing is more than simple awareness of body sensations, it is not the same as “mindfulness,” although it shares elements of acceptance and being in the present moment.