Focusing is a method developed by the philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin for paying attention to the felt sense: the body’s whole, wordless, at first vague sense of a situation, more than an emotion. Focusing is a way of tuning into the body’s wisdom that can enhance shamanic practice. This rests on what Therapeutic Shamanism teaches about the body and feelings: that healing needs us to feel, and cannot bypass the body.
What are Focusing and the felt sense? #
Focusing was developed by Eugene Gendlin, an American philosopher and psychotherapist who worked with Carl Rogers, the founder of the person-centred approach. Gendlin’s research found that the clients who benefited from therapy were those who paid attention to an unclear, bodily sense of what they were talking about. He called this the felt sense: a sense of the whole situation, held in the body, that is not yet words and is more than an emotion. Focusing is his method for meeting the felt sense, so that it can open up and shift.
Does Therapeutic Shamanism use Focusing? #
Yes. Gendlin’s Focusing is a way of tuning into the body’s wisdom, and something that can enhance shamanic practice. Gendlin’s books on Focusing appear in the bibliographies of The Shamanic Journey, Rewilding Yourself and Finding Your Deep Soul. How Focusing is taught, and brought into journeying, is part of the courses.
How can the felt sense support shamanic work? #
By knowing from the inside, through the body. In shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer, “This is not an intellectual understanding, but a deep felt-sense, a knowing from the inside out.” One exercise asks the reader to think of the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer self they met in an earlier journey: “Take a moment to get a felt sense of them. A sense of their essence.”1
Journeys themselves work below words. How real a journey is depends on how far we can let the right brain take over, and “the right-brain largely does not operate through words, but through imagery and metaphor.”2 See What state of consciousness is used in journeying, and do journeys have to be visual?
Why does the body matter here? #
Because the body tells the truth, and feelings need to be felt. “The body, however, is incapable of making up stories. It is always authentic and is always trying to tell us the truth.” “Feelings need to be felt. They need to be brought into consciousness and allowed to work their way through both the body and the psyche.” If we try to bypass them, “they do not go away, but instead become part of what Jung called the Shadow”.3
Can psychotherapy do soul retrieval? #
Very rarely, and not usually on its own. The soul retrievalSoul retrieval. Finding an exiled soul-part and inviting it home. In the modern psyche the fort-holder who sent it away must consent first, and the retrieval itself is a beginning: the real work is integration. Read the full answer itself “can generally not be done by psychotherapy alone.” Paul Francis has “occasionally seen soul retrieval happen spontaneously in a psychotherapy session. However, it is very rare”. Soul retrieval “is a specialism of shamanism.” But psychotherapy helps with the work around it, such as listening to the fort-holderFort-holder. A protective part of the self that stayed behind to ‘man the fort’ when we were wounded: the inner critic, perfectionist, pusher, pleaser: the loyal soldier still fighting a war that ended long ago. Usually the part that sent an orphan away, so no deep healing holds without its consent; befriended, never extracted. Read the full answer, and bringing the two together “works far more effectively than practising either one on its own.”4 See How does soul retrieval work?
Can soul retrieval help after childhood trauma? #
Yes, and much modern soul loss begins in childhood: “the principal cause of soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer in modern times is usually that we send part of our own soul away, to ‘fit in’.”5 The part that stayed behind, the fort-holder, needs care too: “There can be great benefit in travelling back in time in a journey to that child, and letting them know they are not alone and that you are looking out for them”.6 See What are child, orphan, fort-holder and protector parts?
Some childhood wounds come from before we had words. A wound from infancy is “an embodied and somatic one, an unconscious one, and so not one that can easily be accessed through language”, and “Shamanic journeying can also be highly effective in working with pre-verbal material, given that it is largely non-verbal, and can be very somatic, visceral and embodied.”7
Can shamanic work bypass the body? #
No. Shamanic practice is grounded in the body and in ordinary reality: “GroundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this is the bedrock of shamanic practice (and should be the bedrock of any spiritual practice really).”8 Using spiritual practice to avoid our feelings is spiritual bypassing, and amongst its costs are “Emotional numbing and repression.”9 See What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
