How I met Focusing

 

 

My background is in Architecture, musical performance and creative writing. I play piano and find poetry, song writing and art making great ways to express and articulate ~ whatever I come across on my travels, inside and out.

 

Fifteen years ago I found myself struggling to get through my honours year of Architectural study at Glasgow School of Art, while dealing with a death in my family. Despite the support around me, I lacked something enabling me to digest the complexity of the situation and move gently forward through my life.

 

A few years later, a good friend suggested I read a book called Focusing by E. Gendlin. Instantly I knew I had found a skill I was missing, which would allow me to begin to better negotiate my inner and outer life and take steps to start easing myself out from being, very much, in the ‘soup‘ of personal history.

 

There is so much I want to communicate about this it is hard to know where to start, though ~ I am in no doubt that had I been aware of this skill while I was a student, I would have coped far better with the challenges of my degree and would also have had something profoundly useful to assist me in everyday life to negotiate my journey as a human being while at University and beyond.

 

            It has gently weaved its way through my life and I am grateful for that.

 

This skill is both hoped for by teachers and parents and often assumed that children will either have or develop, but crucially, are usually NOT taught HOW to nurture or practice. There is now no need for that.

 

Focusing makes clear HOW to learn this Internal skill, practice it alone or with others and allow the wisdom of our body to have a voice and a say in the direction we choose to take.

 

Although I met Focusing in a therapeutic context, it has proved effective in enhancing many creative areas of my life as a musical composer, performer, writer, home tutor with the VTO and in digesting family history.  I now want to put my energy into sharing it with others.