Respecting The Blocks


How often have you been really frustrated because you can't concentrate on Focusing? Maybe your mind keeps wandering. Maybe you get too sleepy. Maybe you write grocery lists when you're trying to stay with the felt sense. Or maybe your head fills with a cloud and it's all white noise inside your body. Whatever happens, something in you just doesn't want to stay with the issue or feeling you've decided to work on.

Chances are good you're dealing with resistance. Resistance comes in many forms. Whatever form is comes in for you, you can be sure it's the organisms way of protecting you from an emotional overload. It's a sign that your organism considers what you're dealing with too scary (sad, disgusting, bad, etc.); or perhaps it's something you're "not supposed" to know about.

The resistance wouldn't be there if you hadn't needed it at some time in your life. If your response to pressure is to be spacey, you can be quite sure you learned how to space out at some early stage in your life when you needed to escape from intolerable stress.

If the blocks served us well in the past, it makes sense to treat them with respect, thanking them for helping us when we needed them, and checking on whether they are still needed, and if so, to what extent? We never take a battering ram to the blocks. Instead, we want to establish some sort of relationship with them, negotiating with the blocks for what woudl allow us to move forward safely.

For example, we might ask the block, "Would it be all right to loosen (cool, shrink, relax) a bit?" If the block answers yes, we can work with that, carefully checking for just how far it can loosen, cool, shrink, or whatever. If the block answers no, we work with that. We can ask, "How does it feel in my body that this is just too scary (sad, upsetting, etc.) to be with?" We can wait for the felt sense to respond, and then Focus on the body's knowing as expressed in the felt sense.

The resistance is meant to keep us safe. We have regard for our own safety by "going around" our protective blocks, never bashing into them head-on. Besides, if we don't work slowly and carefully with our hurt places, the protective blocks just tighten up even more, further frustrating our determination to concentrate on Focusing.

"Respecting the Blocks", The Focusing Connection, Vol. XIII, No.2, March 1996.