The Purpose  of   HEALING - K.I.S.S. - as stated 12 years ago - was and is   to help me and my potential P E E R s  "to HEAL ourselves into WHOLEness, and - by extension - all of CREATion!"

Intro to Healing-K.i.s.s. 2001-2013 and Overview of its main libraries [If you look for a word on this page, click ctrl/F and put a word in "find"]

I focus my experiencing and awareness on being "a   pioneer of  Evolution  in  learning  to  feel": I let my Body vibrate and my Heart 'womb' pain, shame, fear, boredom, powerlessness, so feelings can >heal >guide>fulfill>evolve, and ~~~ offer ~~~"goldmines"~~~ to us all!! "I want you to feel everything, every little thing!"

perhaps 2003?

I invested over an hour to find out about Gendlin's biography.
There doesn't seem to exist one, not even on the Focusing website.

I finally discovered a few crumbs on a German site:
Born on December 25, 1926 in Vienna,
as Eugen Gendelin
he was the only child of a Jewish family,
mother from Triest, her family from Spain, father from the Ukraine.

In Sept. 1938, when he was not yet 12 years old,
the family fled the Nazis on a dangerous route through Holland
and settled in the USA in 1939.
From now on the family called itself Gendlin,
and Eugen was called Gene.
He studied under Carl Rogers at Chicago University
where in time he became Professor of Psychology and Philosophy.

The book (First edition 1978) has been sold in 400000 copies in 12 languages. Eugene Gendlin is still on the Board of Directors of The Focusing Institute Eugene Gendlin, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago

From an introduction:
"The book talks about the body's wisdom,
the steps of the focusing technique,
and how to discover the richness in others by learning to listen.

Because of the radical changes we are undergoing as a culture,
we have new, "unclear'" feelings, emotions and sensations
for which there is no common pattern.
Eugene Gendlin and his co-explorers of the focusing process
offer a tool for understanding our unclear feelings.
It befriends and listens to"the body",
a term Gendlin uses
to mean the total brain-mind environment as we sense it
(The shifts elicited by focusing, felt in the body,
involve deeper brain structures as well)"

Appendix, a Philosophical Note

p.165

Focusing is part of a wider philosophy
(Gendlin 1962, 1973).

In focusing one pays attention to a "felt sense."
This is felt in the body, yet it has meanings,
It has all the meanings one is already living with
because one lives in situations with one's body.
A felt sense is body and mind before they are split apart.
Focusing is not to drop thinking and just feel.
That would leave our feelings unchanged.
Focusing begins with that odd and little known "felt sense,"
and then we think verbally, logically, or with image forms
– but in such a way that the felt sense shifts.
When there is a body shift,
we sense
that our usual kind of thinking has come together with body-mind,
and has succeeded in letting body-mind move a step.

p.166

Truth does not lie in thought alone.
It lies in how various thoughts relate to experience,
whether they bring something into focus from experience or not.
Experience is not "undefined"
It is more organized, more finely faceted by far,
than any concepts can be.
And yet it is always again able to be lived further
in a new creation of meaning
that takes account of, and also shifts, all the earlier meanings.

p.51

The felt sense is the holistic, unclear sense of the whole thing.

It is something most people would pass by,

because it is murky, fuzzy, vague.

When you first stay with it, you might think,

"Oh , that? You want me to stay with that?
But that's just an uncomfortable nothing!"

Yes, that is just how your body senses this problem,
and at first that's quite fuzzy.

p.54

You are trying to get down to the single feeling
that encompasses "all that about quitting my job."
The feeling contains many details,
just as a piece of music contains many notes.
A symphony may last an hour
and contain thousands of separate musical tones,
sounded by many diverse instruments,
in a multitude of combinations and progressions.
But you don't need to know all these details of its structure
in order to feel it.
If it is a symphony you know well,
you only need hear its name mentioned
and feel the aura of it instantly.
That symphony: the feel of it comes to you whole, without details.

1. Clear a space
How are you? What's between you and feeling fine?
Don't answer;
let what comes in your body do the answering.
Don't go into anything.
Greet each concern that comes.
Put each aside for a while, next to you.
Except for that, are you fine?

2. Felt sense
Pick one problem to focus on
Don't go into the problem.
What do you sense in your body
when you recall the whole of that problem?
Sense all of that, the sense of the whole thing,
the murky discomfort or the unclear body-sense of it.

3. Get a handle
What is the quality of the felt sense?
What one word, phrase, or image comes out of this felt sense?
What quality-word would fit it best?

4. Resonate
Go back and forth between word (or image) and the felt sense.
Is that right?
If they match, have the sensation of matching several times.
If the felt sense changes, follow it with your attention.

When you get a perfect match,
the words (images) being just right for this feeling,
let yourself feel that for a minute.

5. Ask
"What is it, about the whole problem, that makes me so______?"

When stuck, ask questions:
What is the worst of this feeling?
What's really so bad about this?
What does it need?
What should happen?
Don't answer; wait for the feeling to stir and give you an answer.

What would it feel like if it was all OK?
Let the body answer:
What is in the way of that?

6. Receive
Welcome what came. Be glad it spoke.
Now that you know where it is,
you can leave it and come back to it later.
Protect it from critical voices that interrupt.

Does your body want another round of focusing,
or is this a good stopping place?

p.10

Chapter two: Change

A felt sense is the body's sense of a particular problem or situation
[Rachel: But also of JOY and of GOD].

p.12

I could sense that her agitated feelings were running off again.
She was obsessed with painful emotions
instead of trying to find that deeper place, the felt sense.

p.13

She knew what to do. She had focused before.
It can help to have another person present,
"All right, let's just sit and be quiet for a while…"
A friend can interrupt an emotional spiral
when you feel powerless to interrupt it yourself.
She was asking herself or me for an intellectual analysis.
I didn't offer one.
Focusing avoids analyzing.

p.14

Asking is the fifth movement of focusing.
She asked the felt sense, directly, what the anger was about.
I heard her sigh as this happened.
I knew something had shifted inside.
To the focuser, a shift is a definite, physical feeling
of something changing or moving within,
a tight place loosening.

[Rachel: Why not do more than sighing?
Emotions have to not only be felt in the body and accepted,
but m o v e d physically, through and with and in the body?]

p.15

"I feel better now. What a load to get rid of!"
Get rid of?
To a rational observer, she had rid herself of nothing.
The problems that had driven her close to suicide, still existed.
What had she really Accomplished by focusing?
She had changed inside.
It had seemed a problem of loneliness.
With the first shift it was her anger at herself.
And with the next shift it was her calling herself bad.
Then the heavy discouragement came up,
and with a bodily release [???]
it turned out to be a conviction
that she would never again have sexual feelings.
Even as she sensed this last, it changed in her body.
At such a time one cannot yet know just how much change has happened.
Many more cycles of focusing would be needed later.
But a change happens in a body shift.
Some change happens even in the mere bodily relief
of sensing and touching the trouble in just one definite deep place.

Shabbat, October 28, 2006, exactly a year ago!

Micha, my youngest son, heard in the news,
that there would be rain and flooding close to the Dead Sea.
Spontaneously he organized his friends with their families,
drove south for an hour and a half,
fetched me from Arad
and drove east towards Massada,
to "Birket Tzfirah" and Nakhal Tze'elim.

Great disappointment!
No rain in sight,
at least not when we arrived at the Pool of Tzfirah,
which during rain turns into a huge waterfall.
Usually some water stays in the pool all through summer,
but not in the year 2006, after a rather dry winter.

But we saw the glorious Khatzavim - flowers,
which indicate, that the rainy season is near.

p.16

The man who felt inappropriate

p.17

"I made myself shut up inside,
turned off (or at least turned down) all the lecturing and intellectualizing,
I let my attention go down, not just to the argument with my boss
but to get a feeling of all the thousands of details that surround it,
all my concerns about my job and my future
and what I am doing with my life."
This large, vague feeling is what I call a felt sense.

p.18

He stayed with the vague discomfort.
"I asked myself what was the worst of it? Where did it hurt the most?
Then I got it, got my word. It was "inappropriate"!
That was my word.
And I did feel my knot, my tight place inside coming loose.
And right away, I knew.
. The body shift and release came along with the word."

What he knew was this:
"the reason I got so upset about the reorganization plan was
that I was hoping for the plan to fix my life.
And of course, that made me act stupid.
What my life needs is too big for that plan to fix,
I was reacting with this enormous emotional intensity
which doesn't fit the plan.
My intensity was inappropriate to the plan,
and I was acting inappropriately on the job".

Fred hadn't known what he had invested in the plan, but his body knew.
And all he needed to do was "ask" it.
Fred could not have figured this out analytically
because his mind had been occupied
with thoughts about details and people on the job.

p.20

Previously if he had been asked to apply a descriptive label to the job,
he would have called it
"this desperately important job that ties my stomach in knots."
Now he could call it "this job that is only a small part of me."
Same job. Same man,
but a man with an entirely new outlook on his goals in life.

 

 

 

Having seen such fantastic sculptures in nature,
I have a hard time going to a museum of wo/men...

A gorgeous abyss

The Girl who was scared of college

p.21

But focusing moves into the inside of a person.
It discovers a richness there.
Focusing will show you this in yourself and in others.
Once you see it, nobody will seem hopeless.
Nobody will seem to be "a type", either,
for these are only superficial and temporary aspects of people.

.. that being anxious about having no feelings was itself a feeling.

p.23

She knows she is just talking around the problem…
She starts to cry.
"to believe I could take that part of me seriously –
I mean the thinking part, the brain part, the creative".
She has achieved her first shift.
Some tight place within her has come unstuck,
and her crying is a tangible symptom of that release.

[Again, dear Eugene!
Crying is not only a symptom,
crying is the healing itself,
the physical vibration!]

There is another pause, and then a second shift.
it is a change in direction, an adding-on of a new dimension.
Verbally it can contradict what was said before.

p23

My thinking part had to stay hidden away because nobody wanted it.
It was like I shouldn't come  o u t .

Instead she focuses on the whole sense of discomfort,
the new murky body-sense of what still feels unresolved.
In this way she is not imprisoned within the thoughts and feelings of the problem as just stated.

p.24

if I come out I'll see it. No, people will see it, and I will see it.
So I have to not see anything or hear anything.

p.25

This was the way school always was.
And of course, that was true, but only part of a larger truth.
The old felt sense would not have let her go to college and "come out",
would not have let her bring out that "thinking part"
in a forceful cheerful, confident way.
But the old felt sense had changed.
The changed sense not only let her go to college with hope and anticipation
but enabled her to become interested
in what she was doing once she was there.
She had to work harder than other students
because the coming-out issue was not resolved in one step.

This could happen only through changes in the way her whole organism felt.
An important characteristic of focusing:
You feel better, oddly,
even when what emerges doesn't sound encouraging.

To bring hidden bits of personal knowledge up
to the level of conscious awareness
isn't the most important effect.
The body shift, the change in a felt sense, is the heart of the process.
The whole body is alive in a less constricted way.
You have localized

p.26

...a problem that had previously made your whole body feel bad.
It is the body having moved toward a solution.
[See pp9 BODY, the Master Healer of Creation]
No matter how frightening or intractable a problem looks
when it first comes to light,
a focuser becomes used to the fact
that at the very next shift it may be quite different.
Nothing that feels bad is ever the last step.

She made contact with a feeling
that "some terrible thing" had always been wrong with her. ..
.
When you are focusing well,
you are glad about the coming of any feeling.
You might hear an inner feeling say, "You're doomed!"
You would consider this gently and understandingly.
You would say, "Oh that's interesting. A feeling of doom.
No wonder I felt locked.
Glad it came up. Let's find out where that feeling comes from!"
Many times before, you have experienced feelings like that changing
and resolving themselves physically
in a very few minutes.

p.27
When people change,
they show it physically. .. in the face, the carriage, the whole body.
Later on, E. traced the feeling of something wrong with her.
Her mother's basic attitude
"Something's wrong with E. - She isn't like anyone else!"
and the big "felt block" shifted.
(her mother discovered,
that E. had been a very gifted child, this was what was so odd about her)

Will it rain after all?


Arnon builds a pyramid on the abyss

Ayelet, Arnon's sister, helps

The Man who couldn't work

p.28

"Well, no, that isn't it after all."
The problem, when you finish,
is not the same as you thought when you began.
The felt sense of the problem changes.
George sat for a while, focusing.
"There's something else here. It's crazy, paradoxical.
Taking care of things, teaching, earning my salary –
that isn't the main thing for me.

p.29

I always arrange it so I can get it out of the way,
get back to writing my book.
It doesn't make sense, does it?
Writing is contemptible because it's all in my head,
but it's still the main thing, the thing I most want to do."

"What is the whole unclear body-sense when you say,
'this thing I most want to do?'"

"It feels like I have to do this writing. It dominates my life.
It would be awful if I didn't do it,
even though I have this contempt feeling about it."

"Go back to it and say, 'it would be awful…'
Then ask what the whole sense of 'awful' is."

G. often goes past a feeling without letting a whole felt sense form.
That is where I help.
To accept every feeling that comes,
not argue with it,
not challenge it with peremptory demands that it explain itself.
You don't talk back to the feeling like an angry parent demanding
that the feeling justify itself.
Instead you approach the feeling in an accepting way.

George accepts his feelings, but this is not enough,
just the same feeling over and over.
One must let a larger, wider, unclear felt sense form.

... "awful"... to find out and to let it shift,
the whole vague body sense of all that goes with "awful" had to form for him.
"I would feel a parasite – no a playboy!"
"A playboy. Now ask what that is."
"This is a very evil path .. immoral not to do this serious work, writing."
Breathed a huge sigh ….a feeling of blankness.
For a blank is also a feeling.
Instead of backing away from it in fear,
you walk right up to it, and find out what is there.

"Be with the odd sense of that blank. What is its quality?"
G. sat quietly, feeling around the emptiness.
"It feels like there are things I want to do,
but – I'm not allowed to see them."

He asked into this sense of "not allowed".
After a while he drew a deep breath and let it out noisily,
and I knew something else had shifted inside.
"Yah , of course.
I'm an adult now, right?
I can look at anything I want to look at.
Things are coming to me.
One thing if I didn't have to work on this book – I'd jog.
I've been wanting to go jogging
but whenever I feel like it, I have to go and sit at my desk instead,
and I'd write a book about birth control.
I've been wanting to do that for a long time.
There's a point about birth control
that nobody has ever brought out before,
This book I'm stuck on now, it isn't anything I'm really excited about.
But I can finish it too, I bet, if I let myself write what I want.
This birth-control book – ah, that would be great!"

"Wow, now this finishing this book is OK too.
The point wasn't to finish the book, it was not to h a v e to finish it.
Under that have-to-but-can't feeling
was all my good energy, all locked up.
My whole life was under there.
Letting myself have forbidden urges.
To be free to stop, that's like being free to follow urges,
and that's like being free to do what I want, which is to write.
But free to write from out of my direct urge and energy..."
George was analyzing now –
in effect creating an intellectual rationalization to explain
what his body had already solved.
The analysis wasn't necessary.
But intellectuals like to figure things out,
and, done in r e trospect, that's all right.
What was important was that his body took its own steps first
Before these steps, his analysis wasn't effective.

 

 

 

Grandma on the abyss

 

 

 

 

More artistic rocks

below: Closeup

 

 

p.32

Chapter three: what the Body knows

p.33
A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one.
Physical.
A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event.
An internal aura
that encompasses everything you feel and know
about the given subject at a given time –
encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once
rather than detail by detail.
Think of it as a great musical chord
that makes you feel a powerful impact,
a big round unclear feeling

p.34

The dominant emotion right now, let's say, is anger.
You and she quarreled bitterly last night,
and now the first word that comes to mind when you think of her is "anger"
Yet that emotion is not the felt sense – is not "all about Helen."

p.35

An emotion is often sharp and clearly felt,
and often comes with a handy label by which you can describe it:
"anger" , "fear", love"

The reaction bypasses your thinking mind almost entirely.
But when you let the felt sense form
then you can work with more than you can understand.
If you attend to the felt sense through certan steps, it will shift.
to approach our felt senses by an entirely different route
– that special through-the-body route –
focusing.
By approaching them that way,
we can let a felt sense form and change.

On our way back from Birket Tzfirah we change a route,
and there - a rivulet!

Children and parents enjoy water in the desert

Belittling the problem
Analyzing

p. 37

Lecturing yourself
Drowning in the feeling.
These approaches cannot work
because they don't touch and change the place
out of which the discomfort arises,
it exists in the body.
It is physical.
If you want to change it,
you must introduce a process of change that is also physical.

A felt sense, when you focus on it well, has the power to change.
You can actually feel this change happening in your body.
It is a well-defined physical sensation of something moving or shifting.
It is a pleasant sensation:
a feeling of something. coming unstuck or uncramped.

p.39

It feels like exhaling after holding your breath.
Not always in the belly.
A loosening in the chest or a relaxation of a tight throat.
a long audible sigh of relief.
A sudden loosening of some tight facial grimace,
a quick, comfortable relaxing in the posture.

 

 

 

A small water-fall

 

p.43

Chapter Four: The Focusing Manual

1. Clearing a Space
p.44

Relax.. pay attention inwardly, in your body, stomach-chest.
Now see what comes t h e r e when you ask,
"How is my life going? What is the main thing for me right now?"
Sense within your body.
Let the answers come slowly from this sensing.
When some concern comes, DO NOT GO INSIDE IT.
Stand back, say "Yes, that's there, I can feel that , there."
Let there be a little space between you and that.
Then ask what else you feel. Wait again, and sense.
Usually there are several things.

2. Felt sense
From among what came, select one personal problem to focus on
DO NOT GO INSIDE IT.
Stand back from it.
Of course, there are many parts to that one thing you are thinking about
– too many to think of each one alone.
But you can feel all of these things together,
Pay attention there where you usually feel things,
and in there you can get a sense of what all of the problem feels like.
Let yourself feel the unclear sense of all of that..

3. Handle
What is the quality of this unclear felt sense?
Let a word, a phrase, or an image come up from the felt sense itself.
It might be a quality-word,
like tight, sticky, scary, stuck, heavy, jumpy,
or a phrase or an image.
Stay with the quality of the felt sense till something fits it just right.

4. Resonating
Go back and forth between the felt sense and the word , phrase or image.
Check how they resonate with each other.
See if there is a little bodily signal that lets you know there is a fit.
To do it, you have to have the felt sense there again, as well as the word.
Let the felt sense change, if it does,
and also the word or picture,
until they feel just right in capturing the quality of the felt sense.

p.45

5. Asking
Now ask: What is it , about this whole problem, that makes this quality
( which you have just named or pictured)?
Make sure the quality is sensed again, freshly, vividly
(not just remembered from before).
When it is here again,
tap it, touch it, be with it,
asking, "What makes the whole problem so ____?!"
Or you ask, "What is in this sense?"
If you get a quick answer without a shift in the felt sense,
just let that kind of answer go by.
Return your attention to your body
and freshly find the felt sense again.
Then ask it again.
Be with the felt sense
till something comes along with a shift, a slight "give" or release.

6. Receiving
Receive whatever comes with a shift in a friendly way.
Stay with it a while, even if it is only a slight release.
Whatever comes, this is only one shift; there will be others.
You will probably continue after a little while,
but stay here for a few moments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can't divert my eyes

 

 

 

 

Ever new compositions
of rocks and river,
stones and waves