Meditation versus Focusing: How Gendlin’s practice differs
First, some background
I have been practicing meditation on and off since about 2008. I started with some workshops, and then joined the Consciousness Explorers Club in Toronto in 2015. I attended many of their drop-in Monday night sessions and took a Saturday workshop they hosted with Shinzen Young on mindfulness meditation (See Hear Feel). My most intense experience though, was a ten day silent meditation retreat I was lucky to do in Thailand. Called a Vipassana, there are centres around the world teaching this technique that is said to be one of India's most ancient forms of meditation.
I began training as a teacher in Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing practice in 2014, after having experienced it in a therapy setting. I was drawn right away to teach it, though it took me some time to understand why. I was certified in 2015 and have been teaching Focusing ever since!
In this blog, I compare Focusing to meditation, and I use some personal experiences to illustrate.
The similarities
Shinzen Young, defines mindful awareness as concentration power, sensory clarity, and equanimity working together. In many ways, Focusing practice builds these same skills. He further elaborates them as follows:
You can think of concentration power as the ability to focus on what you consider to be relevant at a given time. You can think of sensory clarity as the ability to keep track of what you’re experiencing in the moment. You can think of equanimity as the ability to allow sensory experience to come and go without push and pull.
Let’s take them one at a time, and also notice where they do slightly differ.
Concentration, is maybe the most well known skill we work on in meditation. There are three main camps or kinds of meditation: mantra (Vedic, Transcendental Meditation, sound), a mindful approach (breath, MBSR), or a guided awareness journey. Regardless of the type of meditation, the main practice is concentrating on one’s mantra, one’s breath, one’s body. Our mind, however, can take us away from whatever we are concentrating on. So in that respect, concentration in meditation can be a bit hard. In Focusing, we are staying with our content, which since it is about us is usually quite interesting to us. Therefore, my experience is that while Focusing, it is very easy to concentrate. I’ve rarely had a Focusing experience where my mind wanders, unless I am listening and my partner is deep inside themselves for more than 30 seconds.
Clarity of sensations includes what we see (if our eyes are closed, this means mental images), what we hear in our head/thoughts, and what we feel in our body (physical sensations and emotions). We gain better clarity of sensation in both practices. I remember during my Vipassana that I learned to notice when my body was shifting position sooner. This allowed me to more quickly correct my posture and not get as sore while sitting for up to two hours at a time. Vipassana teaches us to stay with gross (big) sensations for two minutes, and then continue with a body scan. In Focusing practice, we spend most of our time getting clarity of sensations, so this skill gets very well developed. We have a special word for what is becoming clear: the Felt Sense. It is more than physical sensations, the felt sense also includes emotions, thoughts and, as my Focusing teacher Jan Winhall teaches, memories in its aspects of experience.
Equanimity is probably the hardest thing in meditation practice. It is the practice of achieving an inner balance. Of not suppressing senses or grasping for specific experiences. In meditation, we can have lovely experience and want to create it again. Having such an expectation makes it very difficult to achieve that goal. I learned during my Vipassana experience that the only two times I was able to sit the entire sitting without moving were the two times I told myself I was going to do it. Full stop. The other times, I said I was going to “try”. And then I struggled the entire sit with the question “was the pain too much?” in assessing my sensations, or grasping for less pain. In Focusing this is, again, much easier. Here, we have what’s called the Focusing Attitude. Like in meditation it has a kind compassionate side, and a welcoming attitude. Since each Focusing experience is quite different, getting a felt sense of a slightly different issue or creative project, we normally don’t have an expectation of how it will go. We just let it unfold as it does.
Some big differences
Staying with vs. letting go: how content is taken care of
I learned this way of differentiating Focusing from meditation from David Rome. He says “in mindfulness practice, one learns to let go of the thoughts and feelings that arise, no matter what they are. By contrast, in Focusing we consciously choose to stay with a felt sense.” Another way of saying this is that in meditation we say “hello, goodbye” whereas in Focusing we say “hi, how are you? why are you here? what do you want me to know” and listen with the Focusing Attitude to hear the inner knowing our body has for us. This difference is why I believe Focusing is often easier to learn than meditation. In staying with what is arising, we don’t have to course correct. Our body is always guiding us exactly where we should be. In fact, I like to say Focusing is like a treasure map to yourself.
Best practiced with a partner vs. done alone, together: how we take care of each other
The most powerful Focusing sessions seem to come with a Focusing partner. Someone who listens to us Focus. It is typical that once listened to, the roles are reversed and then the previous listener becomes the Focuser. While we do use guided Focusing sessions in teaching, similar to being led in meditation, the best sessions are when someone is listening to you personally. What does that mean? It means someone is holding space for you and helping to keep you grounded. As such, Focusing takes advantage of our ability to co-regulate each other. The listener also says back what you choose to share aloud (either the gist, or each word describing physical sensations, emotions, or content). They can also guide you, by providing prompts or questions for your body to answer. This is normally done in a group of two, but can also be done in small groups or even in a larger group. In those cases the other participants join in holding space.
Experience a felt shift vs. return to calm: how one carries forward during the process
In my experience, a Focusing session as short as ten minutes can come with what Gendlin called a felt shift. This is a feeling of physical relief, a shift in how the body is with the topic. It feels suddenly lighter or more dispersed. It feels better. Following the physical shift, insights and other body wisdom can come. According to Gendlin, at times the “felt shift changes the constellation of the whole problem and the person’s attitude toward it”. In so doing, the felt shift is carrying forward our process. In other words, a felt shift is both a physical shift and a mental paradigm shift. There is an element of creativity in the process. I have had such a shift in meditation at times. In particular, I remember during the Vipassana that I experienced a flow of ideas that changed what I thought was possible. Generally speaking, however, my meditation experiences have brought me more calm and grounding, with the capacity to be more creative off the cushion, not while on it. And that to me is one of the big differences with Focusing, we access a resilient state and use it for creativity during the practice.
When to use each tool
David Rome calls Focusing a practice to complement meditation. In fact, he and other meditators have called it the missing link in their contemplative practice. I agree. They are different tools and have different benefits. Meditation is a great way to let go of thoughts and feelings, to create a calm space to live life and reduce some stress. However, as the saying goes “what you resist, persists”. When an issue is constantly needing to be cleared, it is time for another tool. It is time to Focus on that issue, transform it, and come up with solutions. To find growth and healing, for long-term change, not just short-term relief.