Alice is soooo inspiring. She radiates the energy of a well-lived life. In her interview I was touched by a couple of things she said that brought joy into her life:

• loving and being interested in other people
• music – playing and sharing it (a passion)
• laughing
• staying optimistic

Here are 4 well-researched and proven strategies that can help us process difficulties and bring our awareness into a balance:

• writing: write about your pain rather than just talking about it…apparently writing is more effective because we start to create a storyline to make sense of what has happened and this helps us work towards a solution
• recollecting what’s good: write about good things that have happened each day and your part in them – gratitude heals
• imagine a perfect future: write (realistically) about your best possible future – this increase optimism and the likelihood of achieving your goals.
• affectionate writing: write affectionately about the people in your life each day. Doing this has been shown to reduce stress and cholesterol!!

In the past few weeks I have experienced some pretty challenging times emotionally and relationally. Two major rows with my husband sent me back to my journal to try and write my through the ins and outs of my experience. What is going on for me in all of this? So after quite a number of venting pages I became clearly aware of how a deep yearning of mine was impacting on my experience.

“I want to live in a congruent world where I can trust people will speak and act honestly. I want people to be congruent.”

I know – it sounds naive. I know it sounds childlike and inside me the yearning does have a childlike quality. This part of me doesn’t want to be cynical or jaded.

So, then I took my statement and started some “Work” on it.

Is it true that people and the world are not congruent?And what follows is my journal entry…it is stream of consciousness so bear with the chaos…

YES! all the evidence points to people not being congruent.  What do I mean by being congruent? That people are real in that they are genuine, authentic; that their inner experience and outer expression match – and there is some honesty in this too.

AND NO! Hmmm…so actually, at some level, a more realistic level, the world and people are congruent in as much as they do do what they do. I may not like what they do, I may not be able to predict what they will do, I may not be able to mitigate the impact of their words/actions…

How do I react when I think this thought?  I cannot be sure that what someone says is what they think and I feel both sad and frustrated and helpless that the world isn’t congruent. As I write this I can feel my need for safety coming up. Clarity and predictability too that is more about being able to “read” the situation than knowing what will happen ahead of time. The child in me is letting me know that being able to “read” the situation makes the world feel more safe for me. I can make sense of it. It makes the difference between safety and unsafety, fear and terror, control and helplessness. I need congruence to be able to protect myself. I also need it to prevent embarrassment, humiliation or being shamed (from getting my reading wrong, saying or doing the wrong thing, making a mistake, being insensitive etc).

So…hmm…I can’t (couldn’t in the past) walk into a room or situation and just be myself because first I have to work out how it is in there…how are people feeling, what are they needing, what is going on, what’s the general atmosphere. Then, I needed not show this anxiety, nervousness or fear because that is not acceptable and will be met with negative responses. So on goes (went) a mask of confidence, competence – my persona.  I have become somewhat hyper vigilant, other-focused and incongruent. My outer expression is not the same as my inner experience.

Well, no wonder I don’t like it in other people. I have pushed my real, vulnerable self into the shadowland. I, without self-awareness, was not being congruent myself. This is my turnaround. I want to be more congruent with myself. I want to be more congruent in the world.

Ohh…I can feel a welling of compassion for all the confusion, the mixed messages, the loss of a sense of safety in the world. I can feel it for the childlike part of me and for me now, in the here and now. A big breath comes into my body and some kind of holding on is released. My body relaxes just a little. And sadness comes too…for being in the world in this way and all the lost opportunities for connection and realness. Niceness, not being selfish, being other-focused has it’s price. I disconnected with my real self which is sensitive, vulnerable, often unsure and a bit confused, needing support or understanding. And in doing so I became uncomfortable and judgemental about those qualities in others.

I can feel my heart.

I’d like to share this  response that Ann Weiser Cornell wrote recently in her Weekly Tips and Support Newsletter.

“Focusing is a simple matter of holding a kind of open, non-judging attention to something which is directly experienced but not yet in words.” –from the introduction to The Focusing Student’s and Companion’s Manual by Ann Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin.

Something which is directly experienced but not yet in words? What is that?
Well, that’s what we call a “felt sense,” and it’s really the heart of the matter.

A “felt sense” is what a problem or a situation “feels like” when you pause and get a sense of the whole thing. It’s not your usual emotions or thoughts–which can get stuck and keep you going around in circles–but rather it’s fresh, immediate, and often contains new information or a new perspective.

People are not used to pausing and getting felt senses. If more people would do this, I believe the world would be quite different!
Focusing starts with that pause…

I love this post by The Urban Monk. In particular I enjoyed his move towards self-compassion both in the present moment and with the part of us from our past that feels triggered by the present moment.

In Focusing we might turn towards ourselves, as a first step, and say hello to what is there holding the space with a quality of empathic curiosity.

In NVC we might sense for the unmet needs which are our values that are not being met in this situation.

I also relish that he has drawn my attention to how much of my present moment emotional experience is part of an ongoing stream from my past.

Mindful observation of the present experience can help me “not add more to my story” and saying hello and empathically connecting with the nature of my energy stream from the past can help me heal and move forward from a needs met energy.

Please enjoy and then go check out his blog. It’s worth subscribing to.

These are qualities of practice that I alluded to in my last blog. Most spiritual or personal development practices imply “improvement” or at least some kind of movement towards something.

I know that I have swung from trying to “repress” or “avoid” particular negative emotions or actions I have labelled as harmful to myself and others, or problematic at the very least, to indulging in the emotions or actions.

When I repress I tell myself a particular kind of story – how “bad” or “weak” I am, how lost I am or how I just can’t get my act together. I wallow in a critic-fest.

When I indulge I tell myself a different kind of story. I make enemy images of the people I am affecting – how they deserve it, how they brought it upon themselves, how I am acting righteously or justly to bring them to some new awareness. I criticise them.

Both ways are just stories I make up to justify my responses.

Now, however,  I am trying a middle way, one that has 3 processes.

Acknowledging

Now, I try and notice when I am moving towards repression or indulgence. I say hello to this movement, holding myself with a kind of friendliness that one feels with an old, dear friend.

“Oh, hello my dear friend anger. I can sense you arising in my body – I can feel the tension and tightening across the front of my chest and the shortening of my breath. I acknowledge you there just as you are.”

Accompanying

When I say hello to whatever is arising – what comes is a relationship between me and it. For example a relationship between me and anger. I am not anger and it is not me but we are here, in this moment, together. I can sense how it moves through me. I can accompany its arising, its response to my acknowledgement and I, now, can accompany it as it tells me what is up for it. I can listen to it and listen for its deeper needs or the values it thinks it will protect by doing what it is doing. I can accompany it a little way down the road.

Accepting

I can accept that this is how I feel just now and as I journey with it I can notice moment by moment shifts and changes. Accepting doesn’t mean agreeing – it just means –yep, this is how it seems for me just now in this moment. I can accept that I might be experiencing suffering or discomfort. I can accept that it feels strong or overwhelming.

It may seem like accepting will be buying into the story (whichever one is being told) – yet that has not been my experience. I have found that once I accept whatever I am experiencing – no matter how subjective – a new possibility opens up for me. There comes a softening, a letting go, a relaxing of sorts.

And there, in that space I can invite something more.  I might invite some questions:

“Is this true, really true? Can I be absolutely sure that what I am telling myself  is true?”

“What needs or values are needing care in all of this?”

“Is there any other part of me that needs attention too? Is there something more that also needs to tell its story?”

“Is there something happening here that brings up old, unresolved material from my childhood? How can I best take care of myself if this is happening?”

“Can I get a felt sense of this – an image, a metaphor, a word that best captures all of it? Can I stay with this and explore my inner landscape and what it knows, in my body, about the best way forward?”

This process of acknowledging, accompanying and accepting is so helping me to connect more compassionately with myself. I am better able to stay with my present moment experiences and find such richness in them.  I sense they are the first step on a journey to a delightful self-acceptance.

Swiss psychologist Alice Miller wrote:

“Ultimately the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, cigarettes or medicine, it usually has the last word because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality.”

This is a very powerful statement. Our true sense of self is rooted, not in ideas or thoughts, but in a “feeling of what happens” that is experienced at a bodily level.

Because this statement is so powerful, I also want to be careful to point out what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t negate the value of ideas and rational thinking. This would be absurd. It’s just that, if we were to only pay attention to logical thinking, we’d be cutting ourselves off from a major portion of our resources. Our goal is to combine both.

This is the power of Focusing. We can take an issue that we are thinking about, a feeling or an emotion, a situation and sense inwardly all about how our body holds this too. We come into balance in the considering of all the data that is entering our field of awareness. If we just “think” and use logic then we become top-heavy. All of our energy stays in our head. If we just follow feelings we can become blown about by emotions which come and go, we can start to believe we are our feelings and we lose our stability. If we combine all 3 ways we are designed to process information we become stable. It is like the process of “triangulation”. The term triangulation originated in cartography where two or more reference points are used to locate an exact position.

Most of us spend so much time thinking about our problems and some of us spend time overwhelmed by the our feelings about our problems  that almost forget to be in touch with how our body is carrying the issue. Sometimes thinking and feeling don’t even connect to each other. have you ever been dissuaded from feeling a certain way through the power of logical arguments – or does that just leave you feeling unheard, invalidated or labelled as emotional.

The felt meaning your body carries enables you to listen to the story within that, at the same time, needs to be told and heard, by you. This is your own story. This is the key to Focusing and is what Gene Gendlin found was an important clue that unlocks the mystery of how change happens in people.

He discovered that:

Our bodies hold the key to transformation

when we can allow

the felt meaning to unfold

and tell its story.

Emotions such as fear, anger, confusions are just the easily-recognised tip of how our bodies carry felt meaning. Your issue speaks like a story by moving forward in the changing body feeling of it.

Connecting with care and curiosity to our own story as it is known by our living body connects us to our own inner wisdom. We become both the author, the reader and the listener to our experience. And it is through the felt meaning held in our body that we are able to move beyond (yet still include) our minds (ego, will, pre-written story lines, and inner critics) and our emotions (moveable and reactive) to a more stable place within that can lead us to an undivided life of self-trust, self-respect and self-connection.

Ooohh…today I was asked to contribute ideas to a workshop on “difficult conversations” and my first thought was, “Well, I’d really rather not have any of them thank you very much!”

What I really meant was:

“I’d rather not deal with the difficult feelings that come up in me when I have to face situations that I am not comfortable with.”

Hmmm. In the Focusing world they have a phrase for this.

Process Skipping.

It is a long standing pattern we have of relating to the more negative part of ourselves (remember the Jell-O parts). The difficult part is realising that these old and difficult feelings we treat as enemies are, in fact both friends and teachers! No, its true! And it is possible to come into a new, kinder relationship with ourselves instead of making war inside – holding chronic kinds of tension around relationships, situations, issues, self-judgments and circumstances.

Each of us usually develops a pattern of numbing our difficult feelings. We might exercise, we might drink, watch TV, work long hours, play computer games, talk on the telephone. This, actually, takes us away from ourselves, which seems like a good thing if we are feeling guilty, scared, angry, annoyed, confused etc. Or we might go outside of ourselves to find the solution. We might talk to someone, defer to advice of elders, counsellors, meditate into deeply relaxed states and so on.

We don’t process-skip deliberately. It’s kind of automatic. But you can ask yourself:

How, precisely, do I avoid, numb, or run away from my difficult feelings?

What to do?

However, Gene Gendlin, who developed Focusing says that while the “mind” looks for a “solution” to a problem, our body actually looks for a ‘resolution”. We can find the resolution by spending time with how our body carries this issue in a Focusing kind of way. So, “difficult or uncomfortable” feelings hold the key to resolving the recurring issues in our lives. They hold the key.

The possibility for change and growth  lies not with emotion reactions, but in your body’s  more connected sense of meaning, its Felt Sense, to any given situation or part of yourself. We stay with the Felt Sense of the situation which may show itself to us as a metaphor, an image, a feeling, a shape, a sound, a colour. A felt sense is not just an emotion. Anger, happiness, sadness, fear – these are emotions. But what is under those emotions? What more lies there?

Have you ever tried to talk yourself out of the something that lies under the emotion and found it answering back – like it has a life of its own? We can, by attending to it, let it reveal itself to us. We let it show us what it knows all about this situation and how to resolve this issue. We hold a new kind of conversation with our body.

Our body can only know something is wrong by feeling uncomfortable because it instinctively knows what is perfectly right for us. Our job is to learn how to listen, listen again and trust in its embodied wisdom.

Warp drive…

I made a Star Trek move recently. I went into warp drive creating a heated and extended argument with my husband this week in which, I am not proud to admit, I found myself diagnosing, blaming, judging and advising over something that really had nothing to do with me. Now why would I do that? Why did I go into warp drive with nary a thought?

At first I was convinced it was all about him (during the argument of course). Then later a nagging feeling started to grow in the pit of my stomach -this appears to be where my conscience lives – down deep where it is is all churned up, messy and in process!  No, not for me a conscience which lives in the clear air, with a 360 degree view, where angelic wings can flutter. Damn it.

I began to get curious and wonder if the very qualities of character, his responses to the event, the interpretations he was making and which I was bridling against so strongly were actually parts of me I have never listened to fully. After all, the events meant very little to me. It was how he was responding the events that triggered me.

So here I was making judgements about character. Hmmm. What is acceptable character and what is not. More hmmm. Now I am curious. What makes some stuff send me into warp drive and some stuff barely registers on my radar? And why doesn’t all the intellectualising about “people all having different ways of being in the world” stop the triggering? Well, I think part of the answer lies with Jell-O and part of the resolution lies with the seeming simple act of being heard.

Exploding Jell-O

Now, here, dear reader, I ask you to bear with me for a moment. We have all heard about projecting our shadow parts on to other people. That is where we least accept in others what we least accept in ourselves. These are the parts of ourselves our parents, caregivers, rule-makers in our culture showed and told us were unacceptable as we grew up, so we learned to eliminate them from our conscious life one way or another. However, they are not eliminated, they are just stuffed down into our subconscious life. They become like Jell-O. Most of they time they just sit there, wobbling in response to the normal bumps and grinds of life. But every now and again comes a big squeeze, more pressure than normal and like Jell-O, it squeezes out through the gaps between our conscious mind and our subconscious mind and appears in our life. Only it comes out fast –it flies out and splats onto the other person. Now it looks like their stuff.

So, how does this relate to my argument with my husband – who is now covered in multicoloured “Leona” Jell-O. Well, in NVC he can, if he has the presence of mind, wash it off. He doesn’t have to own it. He can check in for what is his material and what is not; he can give himself some emergency self-empathy. Secondly, he can check out my Jell-O. He can respond to it. He can say – hey Leona, it sounds like you really care about… and you are really stunned as to how anyone can respond like…. I’m wondering how you feel when you notice that response and what needs of yours are not being met. So, he can offer empathy to my exploding Jell-O.

Or

I can learn to listen more fully to myself. This is the part I like most because it feels, to me, self-empowering, self-loving, self-connecting and self-accepting. I can:

• acknowledge the rising tide of pain – a simple “hello rising tension and tightness I sense you there” and “I wonder if you are a part inside of me that has never really been allowed into the light?” and then pause and notice what comes…

• then later, when I have time and space, listen to my “shoulds” – I can take some serious time to hear how life has been for those parts of me that I have not been allowed/continued to allow into my life. I don’t necessarily need to go into the story of why that happened but rather acknowledge its pain of living in the shadows, of not being acceptable and accepted.

• listen for feelings, needs/values, to the metaphors – the intricate, unique richness of each part’s living experiences

• reflect back what you hear so that these parts know they are heard. Ask if they feel heard. Invite them to tell you more.
• Let them know that more than one conversation is possible. That this is about gently getting to know each other again – becoming friends again after a long estrangement.

This process of deep self-empathy takes some effort – actually it takes a huge effort. I reckon bungy jumping has nothing on the deep self-empathy process in terms of courage (and yes, I have jumped).

How can you do this process? Well, here are some of the ways I have tried and others I respect have I tried:

1. Journaling – writing as a dialogue – listener and speaker so each part gets heard
2. Moving between chairs – the chair represents each part and we mediate between the part that holds the “should” and the part that now wants to be heard (aka the shadow). This is a form of NVC mediation. We are helping our parts to hear and understand each other.
3. Listening partner – to reflect each part, to hold the safe energy and support you.
4. Movement – allowing the body to move and express the living energy of each part; really feeling into how our muscles, cells and body structure has held both the “should” and “the part that needs to be fully heard”.

Why does this matter? Isn’t it selfish for it to be “all about me”?

Could it be that if our inner world is at peace then our relationship with the outer world can hold space for peace?

What a fabulous idea by Diane at the Healing Library.

Six-Word Memoirs

Posted: 24 Jan 2009 11:31 AM CST

Because sometimes less is better?

Six-word memoirs can be found in a book, Not Quite What I Was Planning.  They can also be found on the website of Smith Magazine where you are invited to submit your own six words.  But I think the best place to first encounter this concept may be at the NPR site where you can watch a slide show of twenty-eight memoirs, all excerpted from the book and paired with photographs and drawings.

Consider these—(three of my own favorites)—

Never really finished anything, except cake.  by Carletta Perkins
Nothing profound, I just sat around.  by Daniel Rosenburg
Naively expected logical world.  Acted foolishly.  by Emily Thieler

So many possibilities.
Doesn’t this make you want to play around with writing your own six-word memoir?

***********************************

Mine?

Fought with anger. Lost in irony.

Sought peace. Found acceptance. Everything ok.

Born short. Grew shorter with age.

Only 5 foot tall. Felt six.

Always more. Loves the last word.

I do not believe we can be truly empathic with others without embodying self- empathy first. 

Yes, I have drawn your attention to “embodied self-empathy”.

I have just finished co-hosting a 4 day Focusing residential and two of the trainers-in-training ran a workshop on the caring-feeling presence (from Biospiritual Focusing).

I really got an embodied sense of how my body knows when it is completely and wholly accepting (my words for describing self-empathy) of all of me and I have noticed that since that workshop I have been so excited to bring my attention back to this embodiment. It would come as no surprise to any of you, I am sure, that the more connected I am with this, my embodied Presence, the more able I am to self-empathise beyond words into my deeper pain and living experiencing AND then the  more I am able to hold a caring-wholly-accepting presence with others.

In my trainings I integrate Focusing into the NVC training by going to feelings before observations. I use, Ann Weiser Cornell’s saying hello, or acknowledging of the feelings and then a sensing into what our body knows about this. Once these feelings feel heard by my inner self then I find I have the space and inclination to make an observation that is more objective and leads to agreement.  Then, later, before making requests I use Focusing to “vision” what my body knows and can show me about how it is when my needs are met. From this space my request is more gentle and less dependent on the other person agreeing to it.

One other way I use Focusing is by using metaphors for some of the feelings. For example, when I feel “disappointed” it may be not such a big thing, when my friend feels “disappointed” it actually feels like a deep pain to her. So if she hears me say I am disappointed she interprets a higher level of pain than I may actually feel. When she tells me she is disappointed I may not realise the depth of her pain. This comes from Gene Gendlin’s TAE process and the differentiation between our public knowing and shared understanding of a word and our own individual bodily knowing of that word in our particular context.  A metaphor however, gives the listener an insight into my inner landscape. The other reason I like metaphors is that the listener doesn’t seem to take on board that they are the source of disappointment in the same way.

To be honest I am gradually coming to some sense of realising that my inner relationship with myself is critical to my NVC practice – much more so than I had realised when I started learning and practising NVC. I am moving towards developing a more extensive workshop on connecting with our inner caring-feeling presence and embodying it through a variety of experiential activities. This seems like a wonderful foundational training. The first step towards inner peace. Then, my instinct tells me the listening and expressing in NVC will flow from our inner world.

Still ruminating on this…but here are some of the ways I have heard people describe embodied self-empathy:

caring-feeling presence

radical acceptance of everything

having a good relationship with yourself

self-acceptance

Presence

spacious non-judgment

poignant stillness