I believe that the Focusing attitude allows us experience ourselves as holistic beings. Focusing enables us to know the body as the great healer and Presence that it is.

Focusing also has gifts for people in pain, whether acute or chronic.

If you are enduring symptoms of any kind of illness or condition, Focusing is not a cure, but it can help you tap into your inner resources for healing & relief.

You may be wondering how this can be?

When we Focus we come into a relationship with our pain. We acknowledge the parts of us that do not want to be in pain; the parts of us that are exhausted by pain, the parts of us that want us to stop fighting the pain and , last but not least, the pain itself. What it knows of its experience in your body and your relationship with it. What it knows about living with pain; what can be changed, transformed and what needs acceptance.

Excerpted from A Healing Library by Dr. Diane Morrow speaks to the power of language believing people heal best when they feel that they have good options--and when they feel that they can choose among these options. And, that way we speak & think about pain helps form our range of options.

Virgina Woolf laments the poverty of our illness language:

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language.  English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.  It has all grown one way.  The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.  There is nothing ready made for him.  He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. 

I think she is onto something.

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.

Headache is such a bland generic word.
Depression.
Pain.
Chronic pain.

All such poor words so much of the time.  Useful only up to a point.

But what about the black dog?
The beast?
The dragon?

Perhaps not a new word altogether?  But a familiar word used in a new way?

It has been my own observation that when a person finds a new word for an illness or problem something electric happens.  Some kind of new energy is released.  The word becomes, in almost every case, a catalyst for healing.  New language itself becomes a catalyst for healing.  Pain and suffering become more visible, more tangible.  And somehow it is easier to deal with the visible than with the invisible.  As if pain has been required to show its face.  And in the wake of this, something different happens.

I wonder if this is the kind of new language that Virginia Woolf was beginning to imagine nearly a hundred years ago.

Stress:

THE FIRST STEP OF FOCUSING PROVIDES A

SUPERIOR STRESS-REDUCTION METHOD

In relaxation and meditation a physical residue of tension often remains in the body in spite of the fact that one is deeply relaxed. Sometimes this is noticed as a grey climate or unpleasant atmosphere. Most often nothing of that sort is noticed, but the body continues to carry tension outside of awareness.

People who know Focusing rarely employ only the usual methods of stress reduction, because they know a superior way of dealing with stress, which they employ before the usual methods. Deep relaxation would be moved to after this procedure. The procedure itself does also bring a degree of relaxation, but not to the usual degree, not deeper than the entry level to altered states.

We find a much greater stress reduction if we first institute the bodily release attained by the first movement of Focusing. The stress most people carry in their bodies almost always consists of several life issues, not just one. It is typical to find that our body is carrying one or two major long-term stresses along with several minor and acute stresses from events of the day. All the stresses are what we call crossed in the body. Rather than being next to each other, each gets into the others so that they add weight to each other. A large overall stress weight results.

The usual methods of stress reduction deal only with the overall stress weight as a whole. In the first step of focusing the stresses are "sorted out". In our procedure a single stress comes up, and separates itself from the rest of the overall weight. We have a way in which this is put down (placed outside the body).

Now there is a way to attend so as to check whether that particular stress has indeed gone out of the body so that the body feels somewhat released. If not, there are more specific ways to insure that it will. Then our procedure lets another stress come up, again single and separate. It is put down, and so on, until one has put down the stresses that were being carried just then. A much greater degree of stress reduction is attained and directly experienced in this way, than with the usual methods. We find that each stress is far lighter when released from crossing with the others. Even when working on them is the aim, rather than stress reduction, sorting them out makes them much more bearable than they were before. They do not reconstitute the same degree of weightiness as when they were crossed.

The first movement of focusing can be taught to people who don't know focusing, although it will be natural to continue into some focusing instruction from it. Some people can find this procedure immediately upon being given our series of instructions. Others must first learn to sense their bodies from inside, then a certain kind of inward bodily attention characteristic of focusing. Average training time is about four or five one hour sessions.

The process of Focusing supports healing.

You can integrate Focusing with your own preferred healing therapies.

Focusing supports you in developing a sense of trust in yourself

& into a new relationship with your body.