Reddit Reddit reviews The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing

We found 4 Reddit comments about The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Books
Self-Help
Personal Transformation Self-Help
The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing
Psychology, Focusing, the power ofAnn Weiser Cornell, Ph. D.
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4 Reddit comments about The Power of Focusing: A Practical Guide to Emotional Self-Healing:

u/ReferenceEntity · 17 pointsr/streamentry

It feels like a lot of us are struggling with this right now, with curiosity about Tataryn's stuff but unwillingness to spend hundreds of dollars to test it out. Hopefully he will develop a bit more affordable content in the next few years. (Do we have time to wait?)

I'm thinking about buying The Power of Focusing which I read here or on the TMI subreddit is a better update to the Gendlin book. But I haven't gotten around to it.

I talked to my therapist about this. She asks why I'm looking to do something on my own rather than working with her. She is probably right.

In the meantime I'm spending a lot of my time on the cushion doing body scans on the chest and time off the cushion trying not to run from feelings.

u/GodoftheStorms · 7 pointsr/CPTSD

I highly recommend learning Focusing -- a process of learning to tune into your body to find insight about what's really going on for you in life. It was discovered by a professor at the University of Chicago named Eugene Gendlin back in the 1960s-80s, when he was conducting research about what separated successful therapy from unsuccessful therapy. He found that people who had successful therapy were more likely to tune into their "felt sense" of a problem -- that is, their vague, unclear bodily sense of their experience. Since then, Focusing has been integrated into a lot of different therapies, especially trauma therapies like Somatic Experiencing. I bet that what you're experiencing as "off" is exactly such a felt sense. You can try the six steps above and see if it helps to get some insight into what this feeling might mean for you.

If you're interested in learning more, I like Ann Weiser Cornell's book The Power of Focusing as an introduction to the process.

u/kaj_sotala · 4 pointsr/streamentry

> Emotions have their own distinctive feel to them, not quite a physical sensation, but close. It feels like the emotions are somehow above bodily sensations. That's my subjective experience of them. It's like the body is the earth, with the emotions being the grass growing on it. Or something.

> So I became aware of this sadness, not quite the same thing as the knot, but definitely linked to it, and I sat with it. I probed the knot for a while, trying to coax it into opening, releasing, while simultaneously using self talk. I realized after doing this for some time that what I was doing was sort of violent, so I backed off and tried a different approach that lead to a breakthrough.

> There was an impatience to the way I was relating to the sadness, I just wanted to get underneath it, move past it, have it purify itself away. Essentially, I didn't want to feel sad. I learned a while ago not to approach physical tension and pain like this. Why would the emotions, or anything else, for that matter, be different? To move through something so that it may pass is just as aversive as ignoring it. It creates yet more tension to have to deal with.

> So I changed my tone, the way I was speaking to it, the words I was speaking to it. I softened, relaxed emotionally (what a novel idea) and found myself feeling tender and vulnerable. I started to say things to the body like, "you've done a great job protecting me all these years by containing this sadness within you, but you don't have to any longer. It's okay to let go, I'm just going to lay here with you until you decide to open."

> It was a beautiful experience that led to some wonderful feelings of metta, karuna, and tenderness. The soft gushy stuff that is usually so foreign to me. This experience showed me in a direct way the power our thoughts can lend us. Hence the entire idea of Right Speech and Right Thought. I felt silly for never seeing this before.

If you haven't already done so, you may be interested in checking out Inner Relationship Focusing (1 2 3) and Internal Family Systems; what you describe here sounds very similar to them. They're basically detailed techniques for doing the kind of work you describe having done instinctively. (The "distinctive feel of an emotion" sounds like what Focusing usually calls a "felt sense".)

u/armillanymphs · 2 pointsr/streamentry

>Dhammarato's message seems to be that most forms of therapy are like going into the garden and taking a long, hard look at the weeds, while correct practice of the dhamma is like rooting up the weeds and throwing them over the wall.

I think that's one helpful way of looking at it, if it's assumed that one is primarily relying on therapy without practice. Perhaps there are areas of the garden one doesn't know of or doesn't care to look, and then the scope of dharma practice is limited to what one is comfortable with. With my own experience of counseling, I found that it helped bear the weight of all the stress in my life, freeing up energy and space for practice (rather than relying on practice to take care of everything). In an understanding the mind sense, I saw how defensive I'd get when I talked about practice and worrying that my counselor would think I was crazy, which was awesome insight practice. Plus, there is a lot to be said for the sacredness of someone holding space for all you are, given that it isn't easy to truly speak our truths to those close to us given karmic ties.

Some other considerations include the fact that there are buddhist counselors / therapists, and that there a variety of therapeutic modalities beside talk therapy, which is what I see comes under criticism mostly.

>I can absolutely see the potential to overlook/bypass what I'm experiencing, and yet here I am, engaging with this stuff fully and investigating.

​I didn't mean to suggest you weren't, but that sometimes aspects of our psyche lurk at the edges of the unknown, and a therapist can help one walk towards and through that out our tease out blindspots.

>Yes. I'm always grateful to have access to more resources, especially on recommendation from others here in this community.

Focusing is a practice borne from Eugene Gendlin observing what made therapy effective: the capacity of patients to feel into their bodies and acknowledge their feelings in a conversational way. Judith Blackstone, a psychotherapist with experience in Zen, Dzogchen, and Mahamudra, created a system that emphasizes integrated non-duality from a somatic perspective. Finally, Feeding Your Demons is fantastic as well. If you're left wanting other recommendations do get in touch.

One final note: I don't disagree with your comment that dharma could potentially take care of this matter all on its own. However, it's useful to consider the variety of modalities that can remove obscurations from another angle, of having a variety of tools so to speak.

Wishing you success in your journey – take care.