As Stanton Peele has pointed out again and again, including today on his Psychology Today blog, the brain disease model of addiction defies both common sense and a reasonable interpretation of scientific research:

The chronic brain disease model doesn’t explain the most fundamental things about addiction, like how the vast majority of people overcome it without treatment, that there are no measurable biological means to determine whether and when people are addicted and when they are not, nor is there any treatment that addresses the supposed dopamine-based nature of addiction. In fact, the best science and therapy both point towards an entirely opposite, real-world way of defining “recovery.”

Meanwhile, as the idea of addiction as a brain disease is imbedded in our culture, we simply get more and more examples of brain diseases as more and more things are understood as addictions, and as we spread the idea further and thinner than any possibly scientific explanation can be spread.

This idea is not an expression of science. It is, instead, a cultural myth, one that the best and the brightest are obligated to endorse to be recognized as mainstream thinkers.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m all for learning as much as possible about the physiological and neurological aspects of addiction, and of all other realms of human experience for that matter. Of course brains (our organism/physiology in general) are absolutely foundational to all that we experience. A baseball bat to the head is all the evidence needed to establish that fact. But how, pray tell, does the plainly evident and obvious fact that all human experience is grounded and reflected in wonderfully complex and interesting ways in the brain and body lead to the notion that so many of our life problems are therefore fundamentally diseases of the brain? Imagine Nora Volkow’s perfect scenario, that after years of research we have finally and perfectly mapped all the changes that happen in the brain over the complete course of drug use and addiction. Imagine that brain scan technology could yield perfect scans and that we understood and interpreted the images perfectly. To my mind that still wouldn’t lend a shred of evidence to the notion that addiction is a brain disease.

A quick thought experiment: You are hooked up to this hypothetical machine (a super scanner) which can perfectly record all changes in your body’s and brain’s physiology, demonstrating with perfect accuracy every deviation from healthy homeostasis. You are put in room. In through the door on the far end walks a tiger. Your body and brain begin to go haywire. Hormones and neurotransmitters are sloshing around and completely transform your state of existence from one of total health and relaxation to one of total stress. The super scanner perfectly records every change and quickly prints out a recipe for a drug that will re-balance your system, with minimal side effects. While your state of stress and imbalance is clearly and dramatically grounded and reflected in your physiology, isn’t it a bit shortsighted to think of your problem solely or even primarily in those terms? If someone were to drop a cage on the tiger, your physiology would quickly and naturally move back to homeostasis without any need for a drug or any other physiological intervention. Your problem was primarily the presence of the tiger, not the changes in your brain that the presence of the tiger inspired. The solution–i.e. the appropriate intervention–to the problem was primarily social and behavioral, not physiological. In fact, the information provided by the super scanner, interesting as it might be, was completely irrelevant in terms of the practical solution to the problem.

Drug use and abuse changes what’s going on in the brain. Yes. Everything we do and everything that happens to us changes what goes on in the brain. Yes. Therefore, deviations from healthy, homeostatic brain and body states are best thought of as diseases of the brain? Not so fast Dr. Volkow. Studying objective brain changes is one of many perspectives that are worthy of consideration, focus, and scrutiny. Taken together with subjective, relational, behavioral, social, and cultural perspectives, we might yet arrive at a truly comprehensive, rational, integral approach to helping those seeking health and well-being.

My wife and I are getting settled here in Las Cruces, NM. She turns 35 today, in fact, and she’s loving her new job as assistant professor. I’ve had some trouble securing gainful employment myself and, aside from a tutoring gig that’s about to come to a close, I’ve been embracing my role as house-spouse and otherwise ruminating on the next steps in my professional and creative life. Next month I will begin (yet again!) life as a part-time graduate student in the Counseling and Guidance program at New Mexico State University. I spent fifteen years or so working as a mental health professional in bachelor’s-level positions (my master’s degree in East-West Psychology is non-clinical), and it’s been a full five years now since my last mental health job. Strangely, I’m not feeling at all nervous about going back to school. At 41, I’ve been around the block a few times, and if anything my confidence level is bordering on mild arrogance. That’s what I need to look out for, I think — the (erroneous) belief that I already know everything that’s worth knowing about counseling and mental health. I’ve become somewhat set in my ways, at least in terms of a general philosophical orientation, and I need to be sure I take in the perspectives of others with an open mind. It will be interesting to see to what degree students will be encouraged to think critically about the field, and likewise how much pressure there might be to accept the status quo as gospel.

I remember how surprised I was to discover how credulous my coworkers seemed to be (at my last job) when it came to accepting information from “the experts” in the field. For instance, I never met a single person who expressed a critical thought about how diagnostic criteria were developed for psychiatric manuals, or who questioned the validity or usefulness of the disease model of addiction. There were awkward moments, many of them, when I knew in my heart of hearts that the information being presented to patients was just plain wrong, or else it was being presented without regard to appropriate context. I’ve often wondered whether or not I’d be able to thrive in a mainstream graduate program, given some of my rather iconoclastic positions about the nature of well-being and mental health. I’m about to find out!

Hopefully, my experience of the program will inspire me to write and reflect more often. Despite my tendency to be an arrogant jackass, deep down I know I have everything to learn. Working face to face with human beings who are suffering tends to humble a would-be know-it-all pretty quickly. This will undoubtedly be a challenging and transformative couple of years as I move through the program toward my (second) master’s degree and at least one counseling license. I’m ready to rock and roll!

Mark Walsh of Integration Training tipped me off to this wonderfully lucid explanation of somatic transformation by Staci Haines of the Strozzi Institute. Haines describes three components of somatic transformation:

Somatic awareness: What are you noticing in your sensations and what do you feel in your body? Developing this awareness allows us to make contact with a store of information and intelligence that we normally have limited access to.

Somatic practices: We are what we practice. We become what we practice. And we’re always practicing. But is what you’re practicing aligned with who you want to be? Somatic practices train our nervous systems as well as provide opportunities for exploring meaning and developing insight. Our entire psychobiology is explored and developed as a form of intelligence.

Somatic opening: Being able to transform from one embodied shape to another that is more congruent and aligned with the things that you most care about. Shape is meant to imply that which is embodied in someone (i.e. people’s history and lived experience; their emotions and emotional range; their thinking and belief systems; the actions people take and don’t take). Learning and change involve a transformation of one’s entire shape. We can shift from a shape that has less choice, freedom and flexibility to one that’s more aligned with our deepest intentions and possibilities.

Embodiment is what makes the change sustainable, Haines explains, as it is that which is most deeply practiced and embodied in us is that will come forward in our daily lives. Thinking will only take us so far. The process of somatic transformation is one in which we deconstruct old patterns and then reshape our selves and our lives through somatic practices, always mindful of the social contexts which are embodied in each of us.

After listening to this fine discussion of somatic transformation, I just happened to stumble across these amazing videos of 86-year-old Johanna Quaas doing gymnastics at the 2012 Cottbus World Cup this past weekend. “I’ll have what she’s having!”

The processes that work to shape people into alignment with societal agendas, that lead to experiences of bodymind dissociation, influence people’s lives only to the extent that human beings are, by nature, functionally malleable. That is to say, human beings, like all forms of life, will continually adapt to the givens of their environmental situation — which for people includes a sociocultural environment. In contrast to the technology of alienation, which takes advantage of this malleability to undermine people’s sensual authority, Johnson (1992) describes another way of integrating techniques, one that encourages people to develop and connect to their unique store of embodied wisdom. Johnson calls this alternative “the technology of authenticity”.

The many technologies of authenticity (including person-centered therapy, experiential focusing, and somatic education) are practical strategies that: (1) facilitate the recovery of an individual’s inherent self-sensing capacities (i.e. one’s sense of embodied authority), and (2) provide an environment where authentic expression of this newly expanded awareness is supported and encouraged. As we will see, the various practices engage this process of personal transformation from different perspectives, perspectives that prove to be complimentary in supporting a multidimensional, unified vision of growth, health and embodiment.

When a physiologist or a behavioral scientist views a human being, he or she sees an organism, a “body” that is subject to the same physical and chemical forces that affect all bodies, be they plants or planets. These objectively studied human bodies are also influenced by social and cultural factors in observable, somewhat predictable ways, and are endowed with particular testable and measurable cognitive capacities. The understandings gained from this objective study of humanity are not to be minimized — they are essential and profound. Yet, a human being can also be viewed from within, and while from an externalized, third-person point of view people are objective bodies, from an internalized, first-person vantage point they are subjective beings, what Thomas Hanna (1988) refers to as “somas.”

Soma, as Hanna explains, is a Greek word that means “living body”. The term is equated with neither the concept of body nor mind, but instead refers to the unbroken experience of ourselves as living, thinking, bodily beings. Whereas mind and body are traditionally conceived as things or distinct entities of some sort, the soma is conceived as a process. From Hanna (1970):

Soma is living; it is expanding and contracting, accommodating and assimilating, drawing in energy and expelling energy. Soma is pulsing, flowing, squeezing and relaxing (…), yearning, hoping, suffering, tensing, paling, cringing, doubting, despairing. (…) Somas are the kind of living, organic being which you are at this moment, in this place where you are.

From the traditional scientific viewpoint, people are observable, manipulable objects. Traditional doctors study people’s bodies; traditional psychologists study people’s minds. From the somatic viewpoint, people are more than just bodies understandable and approachable on a bio-physical level, and minds understandable and approachable on a psycho-social level. We are equally self-sensing, self-moving, self-aware, self-expressing, self-responsible subjects — we are somas. Somas who not only are shaped by their relations with the environment and other people in observable ways, but who also profoundly affect their own state of functioning through subjective beliefs, expectations, and through the power of their own self-awareness.

An inquiry into human experience that recognizes the whole person must engage and utilize both the I-it mode of knowing, characteristic of the traditional medical and psychological approaches, as well as people’s capacity to know and live situations through directly felt embodiment. The scientific method can be used to explore and understand the objective side of the coin. The somatic/experiential perspective — the foundations of which will be laid out in the following sections — is an attempt to get underneath that coin, to stand it on its edge and view it from a balanced, integrated point of view.

The word “integral” means unitary or one. It refers to a far-reaching health and well-being that addresses all of the important aspects of our lives. There are four components of an integral health. They correspond to the four central aspects of our life. The first two are highly personal — our physical and mental well-being. The second two relate to our interaction with others — our interpersonal relationships and our relationship to the larger culture and planetary community. [...] A concern for each of these [interconnected] aspects of life is essential if we are to resist and recover from disease, optimize well-being and reach towards our full human potential.

Dacher points out that conventional medical science does indeed acknowledge the fact — supported by both research and common sense — that multiple factors impact our health. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard folks who embrace some vision of holistic health crow on about how modern medicine is completely ignorant of the well-established connections between physical, psychological and cultural aspects of health and illness. One need only talk to the medical professionals in one’s local area to be disabused of this simplistic notion. Certainly in my experience at least, the vast majority of healthcare professionals are quite aware of the complexities involved in maintaining health and treating illness. The problem, as Dacher describes it, is not the lack of information supporting a multidimensional view of health, but rather “that our singular focus on biology keeps us from implementing this knowledge.”

The main point that Dacher stresses again and again in the book, and the main thing that distinguishes an integral approach to health from both conventional and CAM approaches, is that inner development is both the basis for and the driving force toward the attainment of integral health. Most CAM approaches promote alternative remedies, treatments and therapies, which is fine as far as it diversifies and optimizes the toolkit that healthcare practitioners have at their disposal. However, what characterizes a truly integral approach is:

the turn inward and reliance on our inner capacities, rather than on remedies and therapies. The reliance is on ourselves rather than on practitioners. So [the important distinction is] between a variation on biological medicine, which merely increases our medical tool kit, and an authentic vision of integral health that results from inner development.

This vision of an integral health resulting from a focus on inner development is precisely what is described in detail in both Aware, Alive, Awake and in Dacher’s previous book, Integral Health. I highly recommend both of these books. Perhaps some day soon I’ll actually finish reading Aware, Alive, Awake in its entirety so that I can write a proper review!

I’ve read many, many books about mindfulness and meditation practices, but Dacher has a way of framing and explaining things that I find to be particularly lucid and helpful. Here’s how he explains the process of becoming entangled with mental activity:

As soon as we are enmeshed in mental activity we further elaborate it by superimposing upon it old perspectives and stories stored in memory. In this way we turn simple, unadorned, and brief mental movements into complex mental events which are largely imaginary, and more old than new. What was once a momentary neurological blip appears to assume a life of its own.

I like how Dacher uses the term “mental movement” to talk generally about all aspects of automatic mental activity (thoughts, feelings, mental images, and sensory impressions). This concept fits very nicely with the general theory of Somatics that Thomas Hanna has articulated in the context of his work in neuromuscular re-education (I’ve been long interested in how somatics, psychology, and spirituality can be integrated in a single model of personal transformation). Dacher goes on to explain how enmeshment in mental activity continues to hijack our attention and cloud our minds:

Once we elaborate a mental movement we then add feelings and emotions [...]. That leads to a proliferation of further mental activity which includes fear, anxiety, anger, desire, aversion, and so on. Then, we act out this personalized and imaginary story in the outer world through our speech and actions. A small mental blip, which would naturally come and go, becomes our life, and the life that is actually happening in the moment is lost.

Dacher offers several perspectives and practices that help us to undermine this habit of mental entanglement, and more generally he articulates a vision of optimal health and human flourishing that, while based in ancient wisdom teachings, is also framed in terms that make perfect sense in the context of modern healthcare. For whatever reason, I find Dacher’s vision to be particularly powerful and compelling as I continue to engage with various integral health practices. I’ll dive into all this in much more detail once I finish the book!

The old Zen saying, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the Moon,” is so true! But the finger pointing at the moon may be helpful. If the moon is in the west and we’re looking toward the east, the finger pointing toward the west may get us to turn around, and that certainly increases our chances of seeing the moon. Or we may stare at the finger……

Dr. Tart often uses the term “controlled attention practices” to describe various meditative techniques. If we ever hope to articulate our first-person, phenomenological, inner realities in ways that transcend our cultural and individual idiosyncrasies, we will need to get clear on our terms, and Dr. Tart has done as much as anyone in this regard. Check out the links below for more of Dr. Tart’s perspective on these matters:

That Word “Meditation:” What Does it Mean?
“Mindfulness 101″ with Charles Tart [audio lecture via the Institute of Noetic Sciences]

In the following two-part video, Watts talks about the importance of transforming our attitude toward the natural environment, the art of getting out of one’s own way, and the Taoist concept of wu-wei (literally, non-doing or non-striving). He also discusses the art of the “controlled accident” and how a profound trust in one’s own nature can transform our lives. Enjoy!

It is important not to mistake the distinction between alienation and authenticity as a condemnation of the particular techniques that have supported the success and progress of a scientifically and technologically driven modern world. These techniques are, in-and-of-themselves, of neutral value. It’s the ways in which we integrate various techniques into our lives (the technology) that can either lead us either toward disconnection and diminished awareness or into levels of greater conscious connection and deeper self awareness, and these ways of responding to the challenges of life are shaped very early.

Beginning with the ways parents hold and touch their children, infants are learning how “to be” physically in the world. As they learn to mimic adults’ behavior, children are further educated on how to move and how not to move. Despite the potential for differences in this early upbringing, most young children are energetic, highly mobile, flexible, and authentically expressive beings. As children enter school, however, these tendencies are actively shaped like never before. As most of us have been schooled, children are typically made to sit in rigid desks for long periods of time. They must learn to ignore their natural inclinations as to how to move their bodies physically and express themselves verbally, expressing themselves only when some authority deems it acceptable and only in ways that are deemed acceptable. A child’s experience of fatigue, hunger, and excitement are brought into alignment with the pre-determined structure of the school day. Even during set periods for “free” expression, children are taught the “right way” to do everything, from throwing a ball to drawing a picture. Since kids’ developing sense of self-esteem is so wedded to the positive reinforcement they get for doing things “right,” expressing oneself in idiosyncratic ways is often met with discouragement from authority and ridicule from peers.

While peer groups exert relentless pressure to conform to the status quo, in the classroom bad grades are meted out to those who fail to do things “correctly,” and sometimes even physical punishment awaits those who allow their restlessness and bodily tensions to sneak out into their behavior. This training prepares children for life after school, where the organic rhythms of the body are regulated to fit the needs of the typical work situation. Food is eaten during a set lunch hour, one goes to the bathroom during scheduled breaks, and the range of overall body movement conforms to the prescribed limits of the given work setting. Johnson, in his book Body, summarizes this whole pattern of body-shaping as follows:

From infancy through old age we are taught to conform our bodies to external shapes. We learn to perform physical activities in specifically prescribed ways. We are rewarded for keeping quiet and controlling our bodily impulses. The implied meaning of these recurrent nonverbal messages is consistent with the explicit teachings: our bodies, with their feelings, impulses, and perceptions, are not to be trusted, and must be subjected to external controls to keep them from leading us astray. They must be trained to support the status quo.

The technology of alienation encourages individuals to exist in a state of continual repression, a dissociated state which truncates one’s depth of awareness as well as one’s range of responsiveness. This state of disembodiment manifests not only in a diminished and deadened sense of self, but also necessarily disembodies one’s relationships to others. Since we experience all situations in our lives with, through, and as bodily beings, to be dulled to our own bodily senses and feelings is to be dulled to the feelingful aspects of any relationship or situation we find ourselves in.

The dimension of consciousness that an alienated individual loses touch with is what humanistic psychologist Sidney Jourard called “somatic perception.” Jourard pointed out that people respond to all situations on a bodily-felt level, and that by perceiving subtle changes in the state of one’s bodily being, one can sense when a situation either enhances or diminishes the quality of one’s life. It’s on this embodied level that a little girl can tell which of the smiling adults in a room actually doesn’t like her; that we just “know” something is troubling a loved one, no matter how hard they try to hide it; that we simply get good or bad “vibes” about a particular situation. As a person loses the capacity to discern how situations affect him or her as an embodied being, it becomes all too easy to continue ways of living and relating that are not in one’s best interests. As Jourard put it:

When we repress the experience of our bodies, we not only reduce our experience of being alive, but, in order to protect ourselves from threatening pleasure and pain, we actually create circumstances by which we become stupid, that is, uninformed, in a peculiar, somatic way.

Thus, to the degree one lacks embodiment, one is ignorant of how to live situations in an authentic way.

As Johnson reminds us, authenticity is a word of Greek origin that originally meant “to do something oneself, to have a sense that one’s actions and feelings are one’s own.” When a person has a well-developed capacity for somatic perception, one is better suited to be one’s own authority on how to live in growth enhancing ways. This “sensual authority,” as Johnson calls it, comes directly from one’s sense of embodiment, and is precisely what is stripped away via the technology of alienation. When access to somatic perception is dulled, people progressively lose the necessary depth of awareness to possess a clear sense of how to be and what to do in life. As Johnson describes it:

The technology of alienation accustoms us to sense a void between ‘I’ and my flesh, and between ‘I’ and ‘you’. Because we are led to feel that we are not in immediate contact with the palpable world, we sense that we need experts who understand that world enough to tell us what to do.

Alienated from our embodied experience of self and world, we give doctors authority over our bodies, psychologists authority over our minds, outside mediators authority over our interpersonal disputes, governments authority over our environmental policies and actions, and religious leaders authority over our spirits. The shift from alienation to authenticity requires that individuals develop their impoverished self-sensing capacities and that they learn to check the dictates of outside authorities against this growing base of awareness.

bringing gentle, mindful awareness to a subtle level of bodily experiencing known as the “felt sense.” Felt senses, which lie somewhere between physical sensations and emotional feelings, represent a distinct kind of experience.

A long-time meditator, Rome describes how Focusing can be a complimentary contemplative practice. Whereas meditation cultivates an awareness and acceptance of experience “as it is” in any given moment, Focusing involves directly engaging specific issues and problems in life and discovering uniquely appropriate solutions. Although I myself have practiced both meditation and Focusing, I haven’t thought much about how the two methods relate to one another, and I found Rome’s perspective on this to be fascinating. For those interested in more about Focusing, below are some notes of my own:

Eugene Gendlin developed the Focusing technique at the University of Chicago, where he and his colleagues conducted research in which they found that the single most important factor in psychotherapy affecting positive outcome was the client’s ability to contact and work with his or her bodily-felt sense. It was not enough, argued Gendlin, to have a rational understanding of one’s psychological issues. Many clients with exquisite theoretical and conceptual psychological understandings often continue to remain stuck in the same stultifying patterns. According to this line of research, the key to healing lies in developing one’s awareness of the bodily-felt dimensions of experience.

Gendlin was a colleague of Carl Rogers, one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology. Rogers had long suggested that an attentiveness toward bodily-felt dimensions of experiencing was a key element of successful psychotherapy. What Gendlin did was develop this suggestion into a concrete methodology that has since been successfully taught to many people, both in and outside of a therapy setting. Gendlin’s perspective is founded on the notion that, in all situations and at any given time, there is an ongoing psychophysiological flow of experiencing that can be attended to in such a way as to concretely transform the way we live a particular situation. Not simply sensations of the “body”, this felt-sense is holistic, in that it implicitly contains one’s sense of the “whole thing” of a particular situation, including what one has learned conceptually. As Gendlin puts it (in his book Focusing):

The felt-sense is 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.

In other words, the felt-sense is of the integrated bodymind. It is experienced as both sensual and meaningful. To get a flavor of the felt-sense, let’s look at the familiar “tip of the tongue” experience. You know the name of that movie starring your favorite actor, but you just can’t access that knowledge at the moment. There’s absolutely no doubt that the knowledge is within you somewhere — it’s right on the tip of your tongue. Although you can’t name the movie, you can sense what the name is in an unclear way. This hazy place that feels meaningful yet not fully known is a felt-sense. It is sensed in the body as a vital, sensual flow of experiencing that contains meanings in an implicit way. When the implicit meaning is revealed, there is an unmistakable shift in the way we relate to the given concern, a shift that is experienced as a feeling or inner bodily movement that releases the sought after knowledge. This can also be described as an “a-ha” experience.

This felt-shift or sense of a-ha is also an experience on the level of the integrated bodymind — not just a sensation in our “bodies” nor merely an idea or concept popping up in our “minds”. Other familiar examples of the shifting felt-sense include having someone else successfully complete a sentence for us while we struggle to find the right word, and the “I know I forgot something but I just can’t figure out what it is” scenario. In each of these situations, meaningful knowledge is arrived at only when there is the right “fit” between a particular concept and one’s bodily-felt experience of the situation. If you are experiencing the felt-sense that you forgot to bring something (which turns out to be your camera) to the airport, then only a conceptual scheme having to do with your camera comes with the release of the felt-shift. Even if, while rifling through your memory, you realize that you also forgot your tooth-brush, you can “just tell” that your sense of concern had to do with something else, since the tooth-brush revelation brought no shift in the felt-sense. These familiar examples of the felt-sense are illustrative, in a very basic way, of the level of inquiry that characterizes Gendlin’s technique of experiential Focusing.

Focusing can be looked at as a process of being with one’s felt experience as it unfolds in relation to an issue, problem, or a situation. Most situations, of course, are not nearly as clear-cut as the above, everyday scenarios. When something is on the tip of our tongues, we already know a lot about the particular type of knowledge we’re looking for — perhaps a movie title or someone’s name. When the concern, issue, or situation is more complex, the associated felt-sense is experienced as much more unclear, fuzzy, and unrecognizable. However, while the felt-sense is always initially experienced as unclear and unknown, it is also always distinct, in that it feels ripe with potential meanings in relation to a particular situation or concern. I can choose to focus on any aspect of my experiencing — my mother, my job, this blog post, my physical health — that is potentially meaningful for me, and each associated felt-sense will feel uniquely unclear initially.

In the context of personal transformation, where one’s intent is to change the way one lives in relation to some aspect of experience, the first step of the focusing process is to bring attention to the bodily-felt experience of a particular concern, identifying the felt-sense as the somewhat hazy, hard to discern global sense that surrounds it. As one stays focused on this unclear sense, one can become more and more clear about what it is they’re feeling, allowing various shades of meaning to emerge by the skillful use of open ended questions. (David Rome summarizes some specific steps to Focusing HERE.)

In Focusing, intellectual analysis of feelings and immediate mental answers to questions are identified and gently turned away in favor of responses which are experienced as emerging from the felt-sense itself. For instance, I can ask myself “is there anything keeping me from being happy and full of life right now?”, and then immediately try to mentally answer the question with things that I rationally already identify as problem areas of my life. I might say to myself, “I hate my boss, I’m not getting enough sex, and I’m fighting a cold”. This question-answer session, however, is not Focusing. This manner of questioning is, in a way, rhetorical — the response consisting of things I already know. Nothing new is discovered, there is no felt-shift to indicate a movement or change on the level of bodymind. In Focusing, one asks a question of themselves and then attends to the unclear yet distinct bodily-felt sense that feels meaningful in relation to that question. One asks and then waits for a response to bubble up from the felt-sense, focusing on it until some aspect of it becomes clear. To my question as to what might be blocking full-living, images having to do with my mother might unexpectedly come up. As I say the words “it may have something to do with Mom”, a unmistakable shift in the felt sense — the sense of a-ha — would indicate that I might benefit from focusing further on whatever issues might be related to my mother. Further open-ended questions, such as “What is it about my Mom that feels unresolved?”, or “Exactly what am I am feeling, right now, in relation to Mom?”, might allow the feeling of stuckness or blockedness to loosen its grip on me and rest at a place of greater resolution.

The bodily felt shift in response to an open ended question is the concrete experience of bodymind connection that is the hallmark of experientially-oriented approaches to psychotherapy. Thoughts and concepts are continually checked against the felt sense in the process of Focusing, giving the focuser access to a wider store of wisdom than the thinking mind alone.