Holding Onto New Awareness


Subtle insights which are powerful and full of meaning at the time of focusing often get lost when old mind sets, superego attacks, and resistance to change flood in to drown them. I have experienced this often in my own focusing. As a psychotherapist I fequently witness this happening with my clients' new awareness. I was looking, then, for a fresh way of holding on to the ephemeral. What was needed was a way of concretizing the experience, a way which would flow out of the sense and the message received, enhancing their power without losing their uniquely creative quality.

When Jessie came in for her weekly focusing psychotherapy session overwhelmed by sadness and anger at her life situation, I decided to try this. For nearly a year she had been trying to become pregnant through artificial insemination. She was angry about the doctor, about her husband's vasectomy and about her body's reluctance to conceive.

I asked her if she could step back from all that painful emotion to a place within herself where she felt she could be with the sadness without being overwhelmed by it. A few minutes later she told me she now had some space between her and it.

The felt sense of this whole sad situation was a body feeling of hunger: "a hungry, hollow place."

"Is there something which would fill that hungry, hollow place?" I asked.

Loving myself," she sighed at last.

"Let the loving yourself come clearer."

She held her lower abdomen, concentrating on the inner experience.

"Let the good energy of loving yourself fill you," I suggested.

Jessie was in touch with a knowing which was very deep and very important to her. All along she had suspected some unconscious resistance was preventing conception.

Yet I know how ephemeral even powerful inner experiences are. Unless we somehow concretize them, they can face into the misty recesses of forgotten experiences. Somehow I needed away to help Jessie hold onto her knew knowing.

"Is there a gesture to match the good way of being with yourself?" I asked her. She responded by gently cradling her abdomen.

I placed a drawing pad and crayons next to her. "Would you like to draw what you're experiencing? Could you catch some of this on paper?"

She considered this for a moment, then nodded eagerly. For the next ten minutes she sketched, frequently checking in with her body sense. What she produced was a symbolic representation of her abdomen and the felt sense of loving herself.

When she had finished I brought in the next concretization. "Perhaps there are words, something like a poem, you'd like to write down."

Jessie wrote some beautiful lines entitled "deep wellspring of love". This became the title of the drawing as well.

She took the sketch with the poem home, with the understanding that she would look at it many times in the days to come.

At subsequent sessions Jessie reported that it helped her stay connected with this new way of being with herself and with her situation. It also led to new understandings about her frustration with the insemination: how her desire to have a baby had been coming from a "frenzied, driving energy" and not out of the "smooth flowing deep wellspring of love."

"Holding Onto New Awareness", The Focusing Connection, Vol IV, No.2 March 1997.