Brigitte Domas

What is Focusing?

Focusing is a kind of back and forth between rational thought and intuition. Globally it consists in listening to oneself through one’s body, more precisely listening to a body sensation which is rather blurred at the beginning, but which one feels in a very concrete way. This sensation (called ” body sense “) (felt sense) will give us precise information about what we are experiencing. (See Body Sense below).

What I propose you to do in my company is this work of awareness between the body and the mind. The process takes place by focusing your attention on the middle of the body when you think about a certain situation.
Everything in front of you has a certain feeling associated with it. Looking at yourself in this way allows you to go beyond intellectualisation, to go beyond familiar thoughts or emotions. Thinking endlessly, thinking about something over and over again will no longer be relevant because your way of questioning yourself will no longer be the same.

Focusing deepens everything we think and do. It comes from within, it fits into everything. A kind of implicit internal knowledge whose doorway is the exploration of “body meaning” and language.

It is an essentially “experiential” approach coming from the implicit philosophy of Eugène Gendlin, an American philosopher and psychotherapist. After a long research on how people evolved or did not evolve during psychotherapy sessions, Gendlin came to the conclusion that most people who were satisfied with their therapy, unlike those who did not progress, relied on something special. Indeed, the success of some was due not to the therapist’s technique, his orientation, or the nature of the problems addressed, but more in what the person was doing inside himself. Gendlin put this inner process into words in his book “Focusing at the centre of oneself”.