We present interactive seminars and
demonstration-rich workshops on systemic coaching, nonverbal
communication, unconscious communication and relationship bonds. Email
us if you are interested in organizing a workshop.
Coaching & Unconscious Communication
Clinical explanations of why you are upset are
unlikely to help you, and cognitive problem solving rarely resolves
emotional states. Endlessly pondering a trauma or unpleasant
relationship experience is unlikely to help you
and may worsen the consequences.
Focusing provides an effective way by which you can communicate
with your unconscious mind (body-mind) through your feelings. A life
coach can use focusing during coaching sessions to find, stabilize and
communicate with inner experiences.
Eugene Gendlin wrote a popular book about this approach
to inner communication titled Focusing. Basic focusing
can be sorted into six steps:
- Find your concerns
- Feel (a felt sense)
- Handle
- Resonate
- Ask
- Experience a felt shift of the
felt sense
Focusing is one way to improve inner
communication, and many more ways are taught in Soulwork Systemic
Coaching. You can add focusing to other methods that you find
useful. Let your results guide you about what works best for you.
If any step feels wrong in your body, stop and back up
until you sense what is wrong. This keeps you safe. Focusing may not
work for you exactly as we describe, but it is not likely to hurt you.
If you sense something that does not feel right, stay with it until the
information unfolds into consciousness.
Yoga of Relationships .
Meaning of Life . Mentorship & Integrity
Are you Damaged?
If nothing happens at all during focusing - it may be
that your unconscious body-mind will simply not communicate with you. This may
be a symptom of trauma or PTSD, or
it may follow therapist abuse or
toxic training. Your own mind
may have good reason to distrust you and your decisions.
If you trusted and opened yourself to
someone, for example a therapist, a cult leader or a trainer, and later you felt badly hurt or abused by that person or
philosophy, your body-mind may not allow you deep access until you remedy
that harm to your sense of life.
Worse, you may become unable to recognize
healthy mentorship and your body may be unwilling to communicate feelings
about "What makes sense in life?" If so,
systemic coaching includes solutions for the consequences of trauma, therapist abuse, cult membership,
trainer damage and toxic mentorship.
Focusing
The goal of focusing is to experience a "felt sense" -
an internal awareness. It is a physical experience, not mental nor
emotional. Examples are the vague, general senses you may have about
some situations, events or people.
Gendlin wrote that these deep, unconscious, felt
senses can indicate psychological and emotional problems, and
allow them to be corrected. A change towards awareness or a solution, is
accompanied by a detectable "felt shift ". Your body seems to
know what makes sense and offer an easing or loosening up.
Focusing Steps
Focusing can be described as six general steps,
although if
you practice focusing, you may experience a smooth transition
from a question to an experience of revelation. If you want to try focusing, take each step slowly and
gently. If you find difficulty, don't push, just gently wait
and then move on.
0. Reality check
Is this moment an appropriate time to do this? Are you
likely to be distracted or disturbed?
1. Find your concerns
Be silent, relax ... and pay attention inwardly, in
your body, especially in your chest and abdomen. Ask inside, "How is
my life generally? What makes sense right now?" and feel whatever
comes. Just focus on feelings within your body. Let
answers come slowly from your sensing.
When some feeling comes, mentally
give it space. Say "Yes, that’s there. I can feel that, there."
Then ask yourself what else you feel. Wait again, and sense. You may
find several things.
2. Feel
From among whatever came, select one feeling. Just
notice which part of the body. If there are many parts to
the one thing you have chosen – and you can feel all of these parts
together. Pay attention there where you usually feel things,
and in there you can get a sense of what all of this feels like. Let
yourself feel the unclear sense of all of that - the felt sense.
3. Handle
What word might describe the quality of this unclear
felt sense? Let a
word, a phrase, or an image come up from the felt sense. It might
be a quality-word, like sticky, scary, stuck, heavy, or a
phrase, or a mental image. Stay with the experience describing the
felt sense till
something fits it just right.
4. Resonate
Go back and forth between the felt sense and the word
(or phrase, or image). Check how they resonate with each other. Check if
there is a body signal that indicates resonance. To do
it, feel the felt sense again, and remember the signal.
Allow the felt sense and the word or picture to change, if they do,
until they feel just right in symbolizing the quality of the felt sense.
5. Ask
Ask inside: what is it, about this whole situation, that
makes this quality (which you have named or pictured)? Find
the felt sense again, fresh and vivid (not just remembered).
When you sense it again, feel it and ask inside,
"What makes this problem so ___?" or, "What is
within this sense?"
If you get a quick answer without a shift in the felt
sense, just let that kind of answer go. Return your attention to your
body and freshly feel the felt sense again. Then ask again.
Stay with the felt sense until something happens with
a small shift or a slight release.
6. Receive
Receive whatever comes and stay with
it. If you accept whatever comes, more will come.
Coaching & Focusing
If you experience a felt sense, then you have
focused. The felt sense and shift may provide important
information about your sense of life and what impedes
it. The location of the feelings in your body
may offer information about the relationship type to which
the feeling is relevant. See
Yoga of Relationships.
Recovering Lost Resources
Freud first used hypnosis to uncover unconscious conflicts, and
switched to free association. For nearly 100 years,
psychoanalysts asked people to lie on a couch and talk about
anything that came into their mind. As psychoanalysis may take 300 -
500 hours at over $100 per hour, few people want to pay therapists
to listen to their free association. Soulwork systemic coaching
provides more elegant solutions. |
|
