Changing Your Life, Moment By Moment: Focusing as an Active Pause

You get better at Focusing as you use it to get to know yourself better.

Focusing is a deeply personal process. And so, this course is designed as a safe and stimulating environment for a journey of personal exploration.

Learning Focusing is very different from learning something neutral, such as how to use a new app on your phone. Focusing is not neutral. Each time you do Focusing, it changes you. What happens is what we call a felt shift.

Sometimes, the change is really big and hard to miss. Much of the time, it is very subtle. If you keep looking for really big changes, you may not notice the smaller ones. This is why you practice turning your attention inside, to sense the felt shift when it happens.

These changes are not just mental activity. They involve your whole organism. I like to describe Focusing as an Active Pause, or as action-oriented contemplation. The word “contemplation” captures the quality of being present with the situation and sensing how your whole organism is affected by it.

Something shifts as your organism responds to the situation, and you become aware of this shift. First, in a fuzzy way. And then, it comes into focus (which is why we call this Focusing).

So, every time you do Focusing, something changes. You experience insight as a visceral response, not just an abstract idea. You are moved to action. This is what makes Focusing action-oriented.

Over time, the practice of Focusing makes you more and more intimate with how you implicitly respond to life. Organically, you become more engaged with what life presents you with.

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Much of what we do in this course is experiential. It includes witnessing Focusing sessions and discussing what happens, as well as Focusing partnerships in breakout rooms. As a participant, you are expected to participate in the breakout rooms as well as practice with a fellow participant between sessions.

Sessions will be recorded to allow people who miss a session to catch up. The recordings will only be available to participants, not the general public. They will be destroyed at the end of the course.

Please note that, in order to be eligible for a Proficiency in Focusing, you need to have attended in person at least 6 of the 8 sessions, made up for missed sessions by listening to the recordings, and regularly practiced Focusing with fellow participants.

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Participants who are new to Focusing, or relatively new to it, can self-coach with our Introduction to Focusing as action-oriented contemplation (a free 4-session online course).

Even if you are already familiar with Focusing, you will find it useful to get a sense of how I approach Focusing as action-oriented contemplation.