What is “Focusing”?

Focusing is the name of a process for invoking direct access to bodily knowing. It’s been an enormous help to me in finding my own way. It’s focusing in the sense of paying attention to, not creating some kind of laser awareness; in fact Focusing pays attention to something inside that is new and fresh and isn’t formed yet – how it actually is for us inside at the moment.

I’ve been working with Focusing off and on, making it my own, going off and coming back since the late 1980s. Nothing else I’ve done has brought me back so radically and consistently to myself. I’ve been a Focusing trainer since 1995.

There’s no dogma or belief system, just a way of paying attention to yourself. Rather than relying on concepts or notions, you connect with what’s actually, bodily true for you inside.

Here’s Focusing’s originator, Gene Gendlin, doing a short intro. This won’t be enough to start you Focusing on your own, but I’ll put more stuff on how to do that here, and you can learn a pile more at www.focusing.org.

Focusing is supported by a long series of operational research studies conducted first at the University of Chicago and now internationally.

If you’re in Ottawa, be sure to get in touch with me. My hope is to have an ongoing community of Focusers here, with ongoing support opportunities.

Co-creation

We don’t really create our own way by ourselves. We need the other to do it right. What is is relational. We’re embedded in it, not independent actors who write it and it stays writ. We push and the world pushes back. Or our partners or projects or deadlines do. They have a life of their own.

Even though we don’t selfauthor in an independent way, selfauthoring still requires our full participation, our maximal alertness and presence to happen. My friend is here with me, and what I’m doing includes her (and I would have “more freedom” – less constraints – to create without her), I’d just get less creating and living done. The relational calls something out of me.

It’s like my friend B. who is an amazing performer. He says that without the other around to provide a context for his speaking, a presence to speak into (my words), he doesn’t have access to what he wants to say. Maybe he’s lonely.

Then there’s collective intelligence, wherein a group has access to greater smarts than the members would individually. It’s so clear that this happens, and I often feel that the collective intelligence is just what’s needed now, to get us through this transition.

Making choices when even change is changing

Things are changing fast and and even change isn’t what it used to be!

Consider these factoids from a youtube video called Did you know? 2008.

• China will soon be the country with the most English speakers.
• The 25% with the highest IQs are greater than the number of North Americans
• The top 10 in demand jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004
• New technical info doubles every two years. By the end of year three of a four year technical course, half of what you learned in year one  isirrelevant
• Kids in school are looking at a job that doesn’t yet exist, that will use technologies that don’t yet exist to solve problems no one recognizes yet as problems
• Nintendo invested over $140 million in Research and Innovation in 2002; the US Dept of Education spent less than half that
• A weeks worth of the NY Times contains more information than a person in the 18th century would have been exposed to in a lifetime
• If MySpace was a country it would be the world’s 11th largest, between Japan and Mexico
• The average myspace page is visited 30 times a day
• There are 2.7 billion google searches monthly
• More text messages are sent daily than there are people on the planet
• Three thousand new books are published daily
• More unique new info will be produced this year than was in last five thousand years
• Radio took 38 years to reach a market audience of 50 million; Facebook took only two

But the biggest change isn’t one they mentioned and it’s this one: while the cyber world is exploding, the physical world is depleting.

This one stands out for me like a streaking meteor in a night sky. In the opinion of the best minds we have and the best studies, our current way of life is not unsustainable. We’re using resources more quickly than they’re being replaced. Unsustainable means that they will fail on the present track.

How do we become masters of our future, or at least responsible to it, under these conditions?

Do we try and make the old way work (after all it’s worked before), or do we prepare for radical change and our part in it?

I’m all for the change myself, as best as I can.

Here are some general tendencies that the choice for change when even change is changing – subject to revision of course!

• Stay small and local. A community of friends will do you better than a fortress. 30 friends will do you better than 30 guns.
• Don’t spend your time creating things that people can steal; rather share things and have less that others want.
• Make your life be more about flow than about grow.
• Don’t flaunt wealth or live for it.
• Have a useful skill or two or three. Know how to make local power, pickles, wine or beer, grow something, or sharpen saws. Have a value in the new economy. Realize that education doesn’t necessarily come in university but in new and unknown ways.

And the big one behind all that: do what you can in the form of personal practice to to step up to this challenge, to enjoy it and make it work for you.

We’re living in one of the most dynamic changes in history; it’s  already an amazing ride!

Everyone’s an original

What I notice about my own inner life is it seems to have an ornery streak in it. I’ve studied many religious traditions and means, but some part of me doesn’t feel satisfied with them. Is this the “prince with the pea under the mattresses” syndrome, the never happy guy?

Maybe partly. But this inside person, who I’ll shorthand as “the little  guy,” is often happy. Super sensitive, yes, but happy often. He knows what he likes and he definitely likes it.

The little guy is an original. He thinks, “I am me and no one else can ever see it or know it in the same way.  I’m unique. “

One of his thoughts is that everyone is an original. Aren’t they? Deep down below the conditioning and the pretending and the . . . oh, I don’t know, down there, one of a kind. “Me dammit, “  they’re saying. “This is so important here. What William Carlos Williams called ‘the importance of a red wheelbarrow,’ which is to say, everything.”

I (as opposed to the little guy) am often not original but that’s because I’m often trying to cover up the little guy and pretend that I’m normal. I’m trying to pass. No, I ‘m pretty sure everyone’s an original. I know that many have no interest in it the way that I do, and that they will likely stay covered over (tho I know people’s timing is original too and they may get naked when I least expect it, or when they do).

So I’m claiming the little guy’s way, his vision and perception, as good and valuable and beautiful, as smart and savvy and cool. I like him. I’m with him all the way. He can make up his own religion if he wants.

I think he’s an original. An ordinary original like everyone.

I’m not going to let him go.

Post-position politics, there’s the ticket!

I really think that the perspective contained in the article below is just the way that real progress could be made. Relatively painlessly too. If we don’t do something similar, move in some way past bluster and my interests over yours, rather than finding a way for both of our interests to be met, we’re likely to pull the house down on ourselves. A great sorrow could befall us.

Anyway have a peek. Your comments welcome!

http://co-intelligence.org/CIPol_beyondpositions.html