Inner Listening - "Something in me"

So what do you do when you have a jittery feeling or a tightness or a choking sensation in your throat? If you’re like most of us, you try to get rid of it. Maybe you curse it a little: “Why does this stupid feeling have to come now, just when I need to be my best?” Or maybe you put yourself down: “If I were a better person, I wouldn’t freeze up this way.” Maybe you do deep breathing exercises, or have a drink or a cigarette.

What doesn’t occur to you, unless you know Focusing, is to listen to the feeling, to let it speak to you.

And yet, when you let the feeling speak to you, you are allowing yourself to be open to the depth and richness of your whole self. Furthermore, when you listen to the feeling, it is much more likely to relax, release, and let you go on with what you’re doing in a clear and centered way. You might even move forward in this area of your life in ways that surprise and delight you

Focusing is the process of listening to your body in a gentle, accepting way and hearing the messages that your inner self is sending you. It’s a process of honoring the wisdom that you have inside you, becoming aware of the subtle level of knowing that speaks to you through your body.

Being a good listener to yourself

Do you remember a time when someone listened to you, really listened? Do you remember how good it felt to be heard? Perhaps you began to understand yourself better, and you clarified what you were thinking and feeling, simply because someone was listening.

Perhaps you also remember a time when you wanted to express yourself and be heard, but the other person didn't hear you. Instead, perhaps they criticized, or told you about their own experience, or offered well-meaning advice. Advice isn't listening. If you wanted to be heard and you got criticism or advice instead, you probably became more confused or frustrated or upset instead of more clear. And you probably felt you wouldn't come back to that person again when you needed to be heard.

Focusing is being a good listener to your inner self. There are parts of you that want to be heard, without judgment, without criticism, without advice. In Focusing, you can give yourself that non-judgmental listening that feels good and brings greater clarity.

The qualities of good listening are:

A welcoming presence
Holding the space
Hearing the essence
Staying in present time.

A welcoming presence means you are interested in everything you become aware of inside. Each feeling you become aware of, no matter how ugly or negative it appears at first, has a good reason for being the way it is. A welcoming presence gives it the space to be and breathe, evolve and transform.

Holding the space means bringing your awareness to your inner world and holding it there. It's as if you're saying to your inner self, "I'm here and I'm staying with you."

Hearing the essence means listening for what is longing to be heard. When something first comes forward, its message may be difficult to understand. If you keep listening for what "it" wants you to hear, the message will become clearer and clearer.

Staying in present time means not being distracted by dwelling on what happened in the past, or on fantasies or fears about the future. It means staying in touch with how you're feeling in your body right now, even when what you are focusing on is related to the past or the future. Whenever you find you have drifted away from the present, ask yourself, "How am I feeling in my body right now? What am I aware of right now?"

Being a friend to your felt sense

Focusing is like being a friend to your own inner experience. The qualities of true friendship include acknowledging, allowing, patience, curiosity, respect, warmth, welcome, empathy, compassion, and love. If you don't feel you can be that much of a friend to yourself immediately, don't worry - you'll be able to build up to it, step by step. And the first step is as simple as saying hello.

When you notice you're having a feeling, say to the feeling, "Hello. I know you're there." This might seem ridiculously simple, but it's actually such a powerfully helpful move that you'll probably feel relief just from doing this alone. It's amazing how often we don't do this. We ignore how we feel, we try to get rid of how we feel, we argue with how we feel - but we're not actually acknowledging how we feel. We treat our felt senses like unwelcome party guests, to be talked about but never directly spoken to.

If your felt senses are at all scary or intense, saying hello becomes even more important. "I feel this constriction in my chest, and it's getting tighter and tighter!" said Rebecca. "You might just say hello to it," I suggested. "Oh! Now it's easing up quite a bit!" she reported, amazed that simply acknowledging could make such a difference.

The reason that acknowledging is so powerful is that your felt senses are here to communicate with you. Excuse me for talking about felt senses as if they were people, but the truth is, they want you to listen. They want to be heard. That constriction was probably getting tighter and tighter because it was panicked about whether it would be heard. As soon as Rebecca acknowledged it, it was able to relax a little, because it knew that she knew it was there, and that she would listen to its story.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to say hello to what you find in your body. I've seen over and over how people skip over this step and find themselves in trouble. For example, Catherine had a tightness in her shoulders that she had been feeling for weeks. She wanted to focus on it. The people in the workshop watched as she rolled her neck impatiently and said, "I want to ask this what it's all about, but it won't talk to me. I feel stuck." Then she looked down at the card she had received at the beginning of the workshop and saw the sentence, I'm saying hello to what's here. "Oh," she said, "I haven't said hello to it yet."

Then the other workshop participants saw a remarkable transformation. Catherine's face flushed, her head stopped rolling, and tears sprang to her eyes. "I've never said hello to it!" she exclaimed. "I've called it bad, I've tried to get rid of it, I've shamed it, I've tried to fix it - but I've never actually said hello." From that moment on the tightness in her shoulders began to release and by the end of the session, after it had given its message, Catherine experienced her body quite differently.

Focusing is about having a positive and supportive relationship with yourself. Every relationship begins with hello. It isn't respectful to start a conversation without first saying hello. So give your felt sense a hello first of all, and the rest of your friendship with it will naturally follow.

(c) 1996 Ann Weiser Cornell The Power of Focusing