Focusing, the method developed by the philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, attends to the felt senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer: the body’s wordless sense of a whole situation. Shamanism shares its trust in bodily, non-verbal knowing, and offers Focusing a wider world to know: real realms and beings beyond the human psyche, soul partsSoul-part. A small-s, middle-world part of the self that can be lost (sent away) and can be retrieved. Not the capital-S Soul. Read the full answer that have left and can be brought back, and a body understood as part of the living Earth.
What is Focusing? #
Focusing is a way of paying attention to what Gendlin called the felt sense. As two Focusing therapists summarise Gendlin’s description, it is a bodily sense that is “not a merely physical sensation, like a tickle or a pain, but a sense of a whole situation, or problem, or concern”.1 Focusing is a method for staying with this vague, bodily knowing until it comes into focus. It is practised on its own and as the basis of Focusing-oriented therapy. How Focusing can support shamanic work is the subject of a separate answer: What are Focusing and the felt sense, and how can they support shamanic work? This answer looks the other way round.
What do Focusing and shamanic journeying have in common? #
Both work below words. “Journeys themselves are about right-brain, largely non-verbal knowledge.”2 Journeying is “a deliberate act of moving away from left-brain thinking, and instead moving into creative right-brain allowing.”3
Both also trust the body. “Our head is constantly making things up, telling stories, rationalising, explaining, and justifying. The body, however, is incapable of making up stories.” And neither depends on pictures. Most shamanic journeys are not visual: in Paul Francis’s experience of teaching, “it is more a sixth sense; a sense of just knowing what is there.” See What state of consciousness is used in journeying, and do journeys have to be visual?
What can a shamanic journey reach that Focusing does not? #
A world beyond our own psyche. The felt sense is the body’s sense of a situation in our life. A shamanic journey travels to the shamanic realms, and meets beings who are not parts of us. A journey is “not just a figment of our imagination, like a guided visualisation, but an experience of something that exists independent of us”.4 Psychotherapy often sees spirits as parts of the psyche, but “The unconscious (the under-worldUnder-world. The realm of our repressed and disowned psychic energies, personal and collective: Jung’s Shadow and the unconscious, mapped shamanically. A part of the middle-world, created by the Fall, not the Lower-World, and psychotherapy’s proper territory rather than shamanism’s. Read the full answer) and the shamanic Upper and Lower Worlds, are not the same thing.”5 So a Focuser who learns to journey can meet a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer and GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this who know things they do not.
Shamanism can also reach parts of us that are no longer there to be felt. Sometimes a part is not just repressed but actually leaves altogether, and this is when shamanism comes into its own, because it can find the parts that are no longer in the room. “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 is a specialism of shamanism.”6 See What is soul retrieval?
What does an animist view add to Gendlin’s idea of the body? #
It carries his idea further, into the living world. Gendlin did not see the body as sealed off from its surroundings. He wrote that “The skin-line is not the great divide”, and that “The body is an environment in which body-process goes on further.”7 Animism takes this further still: the body is not just in interaction with an environment, but kin with the Animal, Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer around it. Original animists understood that the body is sacred and full of its own profound intelligence and wisdom.
The Jungian psychologist James Hillman put the cost of leaving this out in a single line: “We cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet”.8 Writers on Gendlin’s philosophy have asked the same kind of question. In a book of essays on his thought, Greg Walkerden writes that “‘How are we experienced by kangaroos?’ is a question that is unasked”, and sets this against “the understanding and respect with which hunter gatherer communities relate to the animals they interact with”.9 In shamanic practice it is asked of every Animal, Plant and Stone met in a journey. See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
Do Focusing writers make room for the shaman? #
Some do. The person-centred therapist Campbell Purton, writing about spirituality in his book on the Focusing-oriented approach, discusses the theologian Rudolf Otto’s two sides of the holy: one leads to the saintly person, and “if we emphasise the other we come to the shaman, the person who is in touch with the spirits.” Otto, he says, saw both sides as essential.10 Elsewhere in the same book, Purton says that he shares the view of the person-centred counsellor Brian Thorne that there is “a greater spiritual truth” behind counselling and psychotherapy.
Two writers who combine Focusing with Hakomi and Internal Family Systems, J. David Cole and Carol Ladas-Gaskin, describe the unburdening step of their work as a ritual space that is “a vestige of more than thirty-thousand years of human traditions”, “often described under the rubric of shamanism or the shamanic journey and soul retrieval.”11 Shamanism is one of those traditions, and it brings with it a map of the realms and the help of the Guides.
Does a Focuser need to choose between the two? #
No. This is in no way to say that shamanism is better than psychotherapy. Each “can also do things the other cannot do well”.12 Shamanic work needs the feeling that Focusing cultivates: “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.”13 What shamanism adds is not a replacement for that skill, but the realms, the beings and the living Earth for it to meet. See What can psychotherapy and shamanism offer each other, and where should they remain different?
