My Personal Focusing Experience

Focusing and the felt sense show how an organism needs to unfold and evolve, living forward to the next step. It is directional, although in more than a logical direction. It is an orientation that is already known but not yet lived. How does one comprehend this, not using the rational mind, but through Focusing and the felt sense?

Here’s what unfolded and evolved for me:

When I Focused with a companion on the word direction, my felt sense of the word was something like force. It was a sense that someone else knows what is better for me – from a negative standpoint – shaping me into what I am not, forceful and explicit in what is not me. The phrase that emerged from a deeper Wisdom was all is not lost. It was a phrase given to me from the Divine to hold onto, a handle to let me know there is more.

I don't believe in age.
All old people carry in their eyes,
a child…

- Pablo Neruda

Earlier that day I had visited the Pablo Neruda House in Isla Negra. Pablo was a famous sea captain, author, poet, and dignitary who had lived in Chile. This particular museum was his favorite home on the sea and was designed to cherish his childlike aliveness. It contained all the things he loved, cherished, and desired from his boyhood on. I was touched in a profound way. I admired and even envied how he found all the objects that meant something to him from his childhood. It also pointed to a deep sadness in me, aware that I had nothing to claim from my childhood, not one possession or photo that I had deemed worthy to hold onto. I carried both the joyfulness of the childlike whimsical collection of Pablo’s life, and deep sadness and grief for what I had lost and did not have from my childhood.

The experience at the Pablo Neruda House pointed to a stopped process in my evolution as a child. Playfulness, being whimsical and silly, were not encouraged or cherished by my parents, so I had adopted their mindset that childlike things were irrelevant to life.

While Focusing the next day with another companion on my visit to the Pablo Neruda House, I could feel the aliveness of a child. The felt sense that came was an image of a beautiful alpine meadow – open, expansive, full of flowers, green grass, and sunshine. A child is playing, dancing to the hum of the universe; the flowers, the breeze, the birds, the bees are all singing in a harmony that celebrates life and being alive.

The child is a little girl. She is free to be as she is and one with all that is there. All is good, pure, peaceful, and beautiful.

The little girl is me.

The handle all is not lost, a promise that had been whispered to me, was fulfilled. The felt sense of it all unfolded into a beautiful image. The experience was palpable and lived – the Divine gift given to me was precise and exact to my circumstance – knowing that the little girl in me is alive and not lost.

Focusing opens the way to transcendence, resurrection, and flow. It is a gift. It is holy. It is sacred.

- Leslie Savage