The other day, I saw a post by someone who wrote about how they had become clear about Gendlin’s Focusing. This made me think of how I very often, when I teach Focusing, have to take a moment and sense and feel, and often say to my students “I don’t quite know”, or they share something they find hard to grasp and I answer “Yes, I find that hard to grasp too”. In particular, it is, and has been, hard for me to explain what a felt sense is. Not only to others, but also to myself.

I think that trying to ‘get clear’ about that is probably going to be in the way of ‘getting’ Focusing.To me, Focusing is about being NOT CLEAR. A felt sense is hard to talk about, grasp, understand, get clear about etc., because it defies the clarity that the Western culture wants and strives for and loves so much. What Gendlin offers us (at least one of the things), is a way of practicing allowing what is NOT at all clear to be and breathe.

He invites us to set aside our stories about ourselves and the world, our already made boxes, categories, concepts, socially accepted meanings and understandings can take a pause, and we can practice going to the edge of our knowing. Or maybe, rather, the edge of our not knowing.

Being on an edge of not knowing can be quite scary (which is why we prefer to be clear and to come to clarity), and if this practice doesn’t lead to solutions and clarity, why would the Western mind bother with it all? Isn’t that stupid? Won’t we end up just being malleable and lose track of ourselves and stop caring about things that are hard etc.?

I’d say that all of that might be happening wheather we get caught up in always trying to get clear and fix problems etc., just as much as allowing a not-focused sense of staying right on the edge of not-knowing. In the video below, around 1 minute and 41 seconds in, Gendlin says “Not knowing is a thick place”

So what can happen from not trying to get clear, keeping curious about the (scary) edges of lack of clarity etc.?

If you sense inside yourself and try to feel your life as a whole, you might find that ‘nothing’ is really so clear, most situations have myriad possible ‘outcomes’, people in your life are much more than what you can count or clarify. And if you take time to feel ‘all of that’, some of the things that you might usually hold on to, like ideas of who you are etc., might start feeling less important or less prevalent.

When that happens, you might discover something along the lines of “you are quite ok as you are”, and life is ocmplex and full of stuff that is impossible to ‘understand’ or grasp, and that, somehow, allows for more choice. It allows for more breath, more space, and somehow more ‘you’.

And what is so good about being more ‘you’ and having more ‘space’? I might say that then you can bring even more of teh uniqueness that only you have to offer into the world, which is not something ‘clear’ or ‘already made’, but is maybe more ‘in the making’, always growing and changing and ‘next’. And from my point of view, that is what the world of ‘everything has to be clear’ really needs to become more human and caring about the natural world anew…