 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.
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