Focusing

post by jenn (pixx) · 2024-09-24T22:05:52.904Z · ? · GW · 0 comments

Contents

  Topic
  Prep
  Notes for the Meetup
None
No comments

Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.

Topic

It is time for another attempt to make ourselves more e m b o d i e d, so this week we'll be doing a focusing workshop.

So what is focusing?

From the LW tag [? · GW] description:

Focusing refers to a family of introspective techniques taught by CFAR [? · GW] whose aim is to access one's "gut" or "System 1 [? · GW]" feelings. Archetypically, sensations within the body are approached with a spirit of gentle curiosity, and possible verbal labels are checked against felt senses. Where successful, this can improve internal understanding and allow split off trauma or conflict between subagents [? · GW] to be processed for improved internal alignment [? · GW].

From Focusing [? · GW]:

The Focusing technique doesn’t mean focusing in the sense of “target your attention deliberately and with a lot of effort,” as in “stop daydreaming and focus!” Instead, it means something more like turning the knob on a microscope or a pair of binoculars—there’s something that you can see or sense, but only indistinctly, and the mental motion is one of gently bringing it into focus.

I haven't been to any CFAR events and to my knowledge neither has anyone else here in KW, so we'll all just muddle through together. And remember, when it comes to workshops, you get more out of them by approaching them with a sense of "let's give this a good college try" instead of one of "I need to suss out if this works for me".

Read Focusing [? · GW] before the meetup. Because it's such an important piece, the first 20-30 minutes of the meetup will also be dedicated to reading it closely and then hashing out our understanding of the technique. Then we'll do two or three rounds of the actual exercise followed by discussion.

First, we'll try it on something that makes you feel good, like your favourite book or movie. Then, we'll attempt the "everything in my life is perfect" exercise laid out in the article and try focusing on a minor issue. And then, we'll attempt to try it out on something that we genuine feel stuck on, with optional sharebacks afterwards.

For the workshop, you'll have the choice of either partnering with someone and taking turns focusing (approximately, generating babble [? · GW] and seeing how it feels in your body) and supporting (helping your partner remain at the level of sensation), or to attempt focusing by yourself while either writing or sketching.

Prep

• Read Focusing [? · GW]
• If you want, think about a few problems in your life that you feel like focusing might be a useful tool for.

Notes for the Meetup

• What's the goal here? It's to learn from your guts/nonverbal parts. Your lower brain has gathered information that hasn't made its way all the way up to consciousness. Don't drown that information out. This is a process of asking and listening and being receptive, not jumping straight to conclusions. Everything you can figure out with your higher brain, you've already got access to. This is about finding out stuff you don't already know, that might not fit with your preconceptions about whatever's-going-on. Try on possible handles/explanations, but try to actually notice if your guts are responding or not.
• Don't sweat too much over whether you're doing it right or not. If you are getting anything at all out of [whatever it is you're trying to do], then keep going.
• Don't worry about things making sense or sounding sane or being justified. You are not being held to account for the sensibility of what's happening.
• Don't worry about being legible to your partner, if you have a partner who's helping you. The point is for you to know/feel/understand things yourself, not for your partner to get it.
• Partners: your main job is to help people remember to crawl back down out of their heads and return to the level of sensation; 80% of what you say should be variations on "does that feel like anything?" and "what are you feeling in your body?" and "has the sensation shifted?" etc.
• If stuff starts getting really real/deep/heavy, you have permission to NOT throw yourself in headfirst; there is no lifeguard on duty; it's fine to cry or have Strong Feelings but know your limits and don't break yourself.

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