An essay by Payal Porwal, India, on what she has learned in my Levels 1 & 2 Focusing Course 2025.
The course Payal attended was part of Just Being Center’s 2-year Training for the Presence Oriented Psychotherapy. In this context, she also considers the application of Focusing in the therapeutic space.
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“Focusing is like waiting at the side of a river until the water becomes still, and you can see what’s underneath clearly.”
Learning the art of Focusing has been one of the richest experiences for me in the field of psychology. In learning Focusing, I learnt not only to go beyond telling stories, but also beyond feeling the emotions. I learnt to come in contact with “feeling-sensations” in the body. I was familiar with such work from previous learning in somatic experiencing, gestalt psychology, and IFS; but the course with Amona was particularly valuable as it provided a very coherent and step-by-step “toolkit” that I could practice by myself and with peers.
How the embodied approach is helpful
Having a more embodied approach to therapy and self-work has been nothing short of a game changer for me. On the cognitive level, issues carry complexity and nuance. This can be very difficult to understand, especially because issues keep changing form and do not stay static. Moreover, interventions on the cognitive level are incredibly effortful and not fully adequate. For instance, replacing Automatic Negative Thoughts (as in CBT) with positive or realistic ones take conscious effort and don’t resonate as easily.
In contract, in Focusing, we are getting in touch with “something” that carries the incredible complexity of experience without it needing to be broken down and “understood.” This “something” holds within it what is present now, imprints of something past, and change steps for the future. It carries the vast complexity in a moment-to-moment way – hence making it more manageable to work with. Finally, the change steps coming from the “something” are more relevant, and hence, more likely to be followed through than top-down cognitive approaches.
Skills I learnt from Focusing that are particularly helpful
A key skill that was important for me was to learn how to pause, to wait, sense, and resonate. Waiting at edges can be uncomfortable, and sensing subtle sensations and shifts requires slowing down. The cognitive mind would like to continue its never-ending task of sense-making, and the simple cognitive capacity for attention can also be hard to develop. As I learnt how to slow down, these were the two major challenges I faced. The tendency to slip into rumination would lead to sinking deeper into a problem story, and the body sense would be that of helplessness and tiredness. When staying attentive was hard, I also found my mind playing a subtle trick on me – it would manufacture images and other facets that would be vivid and engaging but very divorced from the subtlety of the felt-sense.
Recognising these challenges was crucial. Some ways that I addressed them are as follows:
Focusing in the therapy room
“Exactly to what, in the client, should the therapist respond?
… We want to respond to that in the client from which change steps come. Let me therefore ask instead: What is that, in the client, from which change-steps come? That is not exactly “feeling”, certainly not the familiar and identifiable feelings. Changesteps come rather from an unclear “edge,” a “sense” of more than one says and knows. We now call such an unclear edge a “felt sense.” Since it is felt, we need to be precise about how does it differ from the usual, clear and recognizable feelings.”
The above is a quote from Eugene Gendlin’s paper, The Client’s Client: The Edge of Awareness. The question of what therapists should respond to in a client is very pertinent – clients come with a lot of things, said and unsaid. A therapist has to practice “intentional non-attention,” i.e. to notice a lot of things but filter them out so they can respond to the thing that needs responding to. Learning about the felt-sense has been crucial in “cutting through the noise” and trusting that change steps will only come from this edge of knowing.
In sum, Focusing has been exceptionally helpful in my self-work and learning about the felt-sense has added to the other tools that give direction to my client work. At this stage, this feels enough to me. In the future, I would be curious to read more of Gendlin’s work and include more of Focusing in my client work.
You can contact Payal at: www.payalporwal.in
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