The Art of Focusing: Unveiling the Unnoticed

Feelings are a curious thing, different from the articulatable world we inhabit—the world of conscious logic. Yet, words are confining, creating inflexible boundaries and squeezing the complex richness into a litany of words. Feelings are ever-present within the being, but often go unnoticed. Only when we focus attention to their existence do we bring feelings to the light of consciousness, where the two vastly different worlds collide. Eugene Gendlin developed a six-step process of focusing in the 1960’s. His therapeutic teachings is still popular today.

The conscious mind manipulates, crushing the flows of sensory data into chunks of recognizable meanings. The moment information touches our powerful mind, consciousness molds the underworld of feeling through logical calculations of naming and explaining.

Consciousness is part of human genius—and ignorance. Feelings, much different than logic, when brought to the surface often frighten the explorer, who often pushes the new discovery back into the darkness, where feelings continue to thrive unnoticed, silently do their bidding, guiding action, and creating drama.

The Biological Underpinnings of Emotion

At the primordial beginnings of feeling, the neurons emote, stirred from changes in the environment. Here in the underpinnings of life, the body lives, reacts, and struggles as it adapts to the surroundings. These instances of change begin in the body and are the start of a long chain of events that occur in microseconds.

During the journey, the changes often collide with consciousness where complex structures of thought give meaning to the movement already in process. We pull the wordless primordial feelings from the darkness, evaluate context and history and translate the internal movements into something easily grasped by logic.

What is Focusing?

Focusing is a therapeutic approach to identifying and understanding messages proceeding from felt-sense. In the Journal of Humanistic counseling, Katje Wagner writes focusing “assists clients in approaching conflict (whether defined as individual, relationship, social, health, and so on) with an attitude of curiosity and openness, entering into the unknown and allowing vague sensations and emotions to take form and express themselves verbally—in a way that gives a persona felt sense of meaning, promotes health, and enhances well-being” (Wagner, 2006).

Focusing is a technique to gain access to the wisdom of the body.

Understanding the Complexity of Feeling

Feelings are complex flows of chemicals, communicating between cells, gathering information from the senses and translating the data into survival behaviors. These working are intricate and complex, far beyond the logical explanation the proceed from our simple structure of words. We a bodily sense of each encounter, feelings without words. Feelings are foreign to most, without tangible words to describe felt experience. Focusing allows people to relate to their experience in a different way (Hendricks, 2007). We feel something but don’t know what it is.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, A professor of psychology at Northeastern University and director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, explains:

“Your brain must figure out the meaning of those flashes and vibrations, and its main clues are your past experiences, which it constructs as simulations within its vast network of neural connections” (Barrett, 2018, p. 58).

Within consciousness, we march to less glorious goals, protecting egos and soothing failures. This game of words and superficial adaptations misses the greater agenda created through millions of years of the evolving life. Our simplistic explanations belittle the grand existence—the universe and the spectacular event of life. Our words cram all the wonder into the simplicity of our minuscule role. The priorities of the ego choke openness to experience, limiting the richness, and settling on logical constructions.

We demand words to correct feelings if the feelings depart from our misguided framework of understanding. We discredit, explain away and denying the existence of the greater part of life—feelings. With over-powered egos, we disassociate with our own humanness.

Felt Sense

The internal movements caused by biological reactions to events create the basic building blocks of feeling. We vary in ability to recognize these movements. Our childhood introductions to the goods and evils of feeling etch into our brain’s responses of openness or denial. Parents that work with children to attune to these marvels of life, teach the child a different form of intelligence that will serve them well in the world and especially in relationships. Our skill of proprioception or felt-sense is described by Jon Kabat-Zinn as the vital sixth sense (Kabat-Zinn, 2018).

In the realm of body awareness, we discover the fundamental moorings of identity. When feelings are perceived and respected, we bring a greater understanding to experience with more specificity and precision than logic permits.

“Everybody has a continuous ongoing flow of bodily lived experience. A felt-sense is formed when we deliberately pay attention to the flow of experience in relation to some situation or issue or problem” (Hendricks, 2007).

Embedded in consciousness is executive power. A function that creates a degree in interference in natural and automatic processes. Martin Seligman describes executive functions as:

“Focusing and ignoring distractions, remembering and using new information, planning action and revising the plan, and inhibiting fast impulsive thoughts and actions” (Seligman, 2011).

A Healthy Relationship With Feelings

We should develop a healthier relationship with our feelings to utilize their power. The body is constantly bombarding the brain with information. The brain responds sending streams of messages back to the body. This is the body/brain feedback loop. The entire organism (body and brain) constantly adjust to adapt to the dynamic surroundings, predicting sensory clues forecasting future events.

Knowledge is gathered to to properly respond by allocating sufficient energy to organs and tissue. The process is imperfect. Life is unpredictable. Our predictions (largely unconscious) often fail. The body/mind bond signals the occurrence of prediction errors, sounding alarms, and igniting somatic markers. When learning occurs, we adjust, making necessary changes when similar events repeat.

Learning does not always occur. We force the somatic warnings back to the darkness, justify and blame, covering the havoc with the beautiful cloths of self-justification, protecting our delicate egos, and opening ourselves to further hurt from recurring mistakes.

Eugene Gendlin and Focusing

During the 1960’s and throughout his career, Eugene Gendlin examined the function of focusing. Working closely with famous American psychologist Carl Rogers, he discovered that a patient’s approach to felt-sense was highly predictive of the outcome of therapy, regardless of the style or skill of the therapist. Successful clients, instead of speaking from fully-formed, logically consistent sentences, they demonstrated a more tentative, uncertainty when speaking about their feelings.

The tentative language and uncertainty by some clients suggest a respect for the living complexity within felt-experience. Over-intellectualizing, forcing feelings into well-formed sentences, enables conversation but limits exploration.

Gendlin believed that successfully working through a problem required the wisdom of the body.

Gendlin explains:

“Nobody can figure out, intellectually, all the details of a personal problem. No therapist can. You can’t— neither for someone else nor for yourself. The details are stored in your body. The one way to find them is through focusing” (Gendlin, 1978, p. 43).

Focusing is the gateway to felt experience. Felt-experience can’t be confined to the smallness of language. Focusing is a way to open up the massive world of feeling the exist beyond the simpleness of words.

Focusing and Attention

During most of our awake hours, we focus on the outside world, responding to others and making plans. Bessel van der Kolk writes:

“Neuroscience research shows that only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside” (van der Kolk, 2015).

Focusing on the visceral affects creates an additional level of biofeedback for evaluating prediction and examining errors. Our initial investigations into felt-sense may lead to a sense of vagueness—a murky encounter with foreign wordless experiences; but with repeated voyages into the soul, we gain clarity and definition in the clusters of sensations. Our new exposures to felt-experience updates our brain’s model of the world, refining predictions and the value of experience on our soul.

The body is the foundation of the conscious mind. Our mind and body are intimately connected. Although in discussion, we separate their functions, in reality they are one. We cannot be divided up into definable parts without diminishing the astonishing compilation of the whole wondrous human organism, infinitely more than a sum of the parts.

We need consciousness, logic, and cultural learning to survive. Most important, we also need a healthy connection with feelings.

Antonio Damasio wrote:

“The most elementary product of the proto-self is primordial feelings, which occur spontaneously and continuously whenever one is awake. They provide a direct experience of one’s own living body, wordless, unadorned, and connected to nothing but sheer existence” (Damasio, 2010).

Wellness and Emotions

Our ultimate wellness depends on a working relationship between the inner world of feelings and the outer demands of structured learning. We must integrate these competing worlds to transcend the limitations of each.

We must build a bridge between felt-sense and cognitive understanding where both modalities of wisdom can co-exist. Accordingly, we work to cultivate both mentalities, not sacrificing one for the other. We cultivate feelings through attuning to the internal movements, allowing feelings to exist without the constraints of words.

Paradoxically, we paradoxically expand the connection through occasional labeling and exploratory searches into meanings hidden within the feelings. We give more depth to these connection by expanding our vocabulary of emotions, providing more granularity to words relied upon to when discussing incidents of emotion.

Giving Feelings Space

By directing attention to the body, we become explorers of the mysterious, enlightening our minds to a different facet of living, free from the logical world of language and judgments. These proprioceptive examinations reconnect us with the very source of life. We reclaim vibrancy and an alternate, perhaps even superior, concept of our identity.

We Coax feelings into the open with non-judgmental kindness. In the security of kindness, we learn more of ourselves. Curiously, we observe felt-experience without the damaging harsh judgement or simple labels. The amount of our income, the balance of our bank accounts, and size of our vehicle serve no purpose in the world of feeling. The value of these trinkets of modern life is created through a conceptual structure of words.

The practice of focusing invites a different evaluation for life, where mere existence infuses vibrancy back into the daily humdrum. We contact a living source of energy, by embracing the feelings. But only through practice can we enjoy the connection. With practice, the feeling of existence gains clarity, establishing a helpful presence in our lives.

We can utilize the energy of feeling without smothering it. The power gives life and substance to our being. The master learns to give and take from multiple forces, using the resistance of one, while drawing energy from the force of the other. Accordingly, the two powers of feeling and logic merge together, and we transcend the parts. Orderly but not boring, unpredictable but not chaotic.

Gendlin’s Six Step Focusing Practice

Gendlin in his extensive writing and research created a template for building the bridge. He taught a six-step program for achieving success in both worlds. Like any other technique, steps can enlighten and interfere with the underlying concepts, too much focus on the structure and we lose the expansiveness of curious undefined explorations into our beings. Gendlin warns of this problem as well, However, he understood breaking down a practice into identifiable steps is necessary for learning.

He explains:

“The inner act of focusing can be broken down into six main sub-acts or movements. As you gain more practice, you won’t need to think of these as six separate parts of the process. To think of them as separate movements makes the process seem more mechanical than it is— or will be, for you, later. I have subdivided the process in this way because I’ve learned from years of experimenting that this is an effective way to teach focusing to people who have never tried it before” (Gendlin, 1978. p. 47).

The tyranny of the technique must be carefully guarded against. In general, techniques are the foundation of logic, providing an easy escape from the purpose of wordless and judgeless examinations of self. Proceed with caution.

Step 1: Clear a Space

Gendlin’s first step is to clear a space for observation. This is achieved through curious, non-judgmental, dispassionate approaching of internal experiences. Above all, discovering feelings within the body, without a need to name or explain opens space. This step is inline with eastern practice of meditation. During these explorations, we uncover the feelings that existed unbothered by consciousness but severely impact our lives.

Step 2: Identify Felt-Sense

Second step is to identify felt-sense. We give clarity to discoveries, noticing pressure, emptiness, and warmth inside. We continue to simply observe, respecting the unknown, standing in awe of the mystery.

Step 3: Give Felt-Sense a Handle

During the third phase, we give the felt-sense a handle. Here we begin the integration—build a bridge. We selectively label one of the discoveries. This shouldn’t be immediate; too quickly and we lose the expansiveness of feeling without words and judgment. We might be drawn into the same routine of manipulation through labeling, losing the greater wisdom gained. But at some point, we need to draw the feeling out and give it a handle, that we can use for integration into the essential world of logic.

Step 4: Resonating

With the fourth-step, we return to observation, evaluating the handle in connection with the feeling. How does the words resonate with the feeling? Are they adequate? Do they properly describe the feeling? Do they help incorporate the feeling into healthy action? We examine the sense of wrongness discovered in our assigned words. We are trying to mediate our habit of our habitual blind and deafness to feelings. Initial handles often fail to adequately describe the felt-sense. Instead of giving a handle that serves egotistical needs, we try to provide a handle that bring the reality of the feeling to a graspable existence in our conscious world.

Step 5: Asking for Guidance

Moving to the Fifth step, we seek guidance from the newly discovered forces. What wisdom does this feeling impart? How can we address the emptiness or the constriction? At this point in the focusing process, we are seeking productive meaning from the emotion.

Step 6: Receive the Experience with Openness

The sixth and final step is to receive the experience with openness (Gendlin, 1978, pp. 48-49).

Although Gendlin originally intended his six-step guideline as a self-help program, it quickly became a modality of therapy. Emotions are confusing to many. Feelings frighten. Working through the process without professional guidance may slip quickly back to old patterns of harsh judgments and denials. We may need an experienced therapist to hold our hand as we walk through the mysteries of feeling (Wagner 2006).

The six-steps are a technique to assist. But the truth is much deeper than the technique. I worry that during the labeling and inquiring steps, we will lose the power of non-judgmental examinations, allowing our conscious mind to manipulate the gains for self-serving egotistical advances. As a result, the tyranny of the technique prevails and we slink back into our discomforting existence. The rule, the law, and written covenant, while necessary for the logical mind, derails the spirituality of a deeper practice of focusing. We must cultivate the two mentalities: feeling without words, and better words to describe the feelings.

Associated Concepts

Emotional Attunement: This involves understanding and responding to others’ emotions, fostering stronger relationships. It highlights the impact of childhood experiences on emotional development and advises on breaking unhealthy patterns to promote emotional flourishing.
Interpreting Emotions: This concept refers to discovering the meaning surrounding our emotions.
Emotional Validation: This is the act of recognizing, accepting, and affirming others’ emotions, fostering trust, connection, and a sense of being understood. Validation helps regulate emotions, fosters self-compassion, and supports secure attachments. It plays a crucial role in building trust, intimacy, and healthy relationships.
Somatic Intelligence: This refers to understanding and managing physical sensations to support mental health and well-being. These practices are often utilized in therapy and fitness methodologies, promoting awareness, emotional regulation, and overall wellness. However, they require careful adoption due to some unregulated aspects.
Circumplex Model of Arousal and Valence: This model provides a two-dimensional framework for mapping emotions based on arousal and valence. It illustrates how emotions vary in intensity and positivity/negativity.
Cognitive Arousal Theory: This theory explores the link between cognition, emotion, and physiological arousal. Proposed by Schachter and Singer, it emphasizes the role of cognitive interpretation in shaping emotional experiences.
Attentional Control Theory (ACT): explores the influence of anxiety on attention, highlighting the delicate balance between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attentional systems.

A Few Words by Psychology Fanatic

So, before you venture into the techniques of integration, learning first to discover the world of feelings is the priority. The Buddhist practice of bare attention is a good place to start, essentially a combination of Gendlin’s first two-steps. We do this by giving “clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of attention (Epstein, 2013, pp. 109-110).

By giving pure, uncorrupted attention to moment to moment experience, we cultivate a new relationship with felt-experience, a new perspective that invites deeper insights and changes the path to learning. Basically, only through cultivating this new world of felt-sense do we create the opportunity to connect feelings with the conscious world of logic, bringing the two experiences into a larger whole.

Feelings, without words, will always remain somewhat mysterious if we allow them to exist without fear of their power. However, we can befriend them, enjoy them and thrive on their wisdom. We can be enlightened by the wonderful world of felt-experience. And in D. W. Winnicott’s remarkable words, only in this “state of not having to react” can the self “begin to be” (Winnicott, 1958, pp. 183-184).

Last Update: December 23, 2025

Resources:

Barrett, Lisa Feldman (2018) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Mariner Books; Illustrated edition. ISBN-10: 1328915433; APA Record: 2017-26294-000
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Damasio, Antonio (2010). Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Vintage; 1st edition. ISBN-10: 030747495X; APA Record: 2010-24474-000
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Epstein, Mark (2013). Thoughts Without A Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective. Basic Books. ISBN-10: 0465050948; APA Record: 1995-97419-000
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Gendlin, Eugene T. (1978). Focusing. New York: Everest House. ISBN: 0553278339; DOI: 10.1037/h0088716
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Hendricks, Marion N. (2007). The Role of Experiencing in Psychotherapy: Attending to the “Bodily Felt-Sense” of a Problem Makes Any Orientations More Effective. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 37(1), 41-46. DOI: 10.1007/s10879-006-9033-x
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Kabat-Zinn, Jon (2018). Proprioception—the Felt Sense of the Body. Mindfulness, 9(6), 1979-1980. DOI: 10.1007/s12671-018-1028-7
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Seligman, Martin E.P. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Atria Books; 1st edition. ISBN-10: 1439190763; APA Record: 2010-25554-000
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Van der Kolk, Bessel (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books; Illustrated edition. ISBN-10: 1101608307; APA Record: 2014-44678-000
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Wagner, Katje (2006). Inside Out: Focusing as a Therapeutic Modality. Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education and Development, 45(1), 45. DOI: 10.1002/j.2161-1939.2006.tb00004.x
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Winnicott, D. W. (1958) Birth Memories, Birth Trauma, and Anxiety, In Collected Papers: Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books. ISBN: 0876307039; APA Record: 1992-98762-000
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