Transcript of Edited Interview with Ann Weiser Cornell

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Christine 

Could you give me a brief sense of your identity as an educator?

Ann 

I am an educator, but I'm not associated with a school. I'm an entrepreneur, a businesswoman. I have a for-profit business that teaches Focusing and applications of Focusing, mostly remotely. 

 

Christine 

Would you mind describing Focusing for the readers?

Ann 

Focusing is a process that was discovered by Eugene Gendlin (a philosopher and psychotherapist) when he was doing research (he and others, including Carl Rogers) into successful vs. unsuccessful psychotherapy. What he saw in the successful psychotherapy sessions was that the clients at some point would slow down and grope for words, and they might gesture toward the middle of their bodies. And they might say something like, ‘I can't put this into words very well, but it's right here’. The clients had an ability to be in fresh, immediate contact with something called “experiencing.” Experiencing is a term from philosophy, from existential phenomenology. And those clients who did that tended to be the ones whose therapy was successful. The really striking finding was that if people weren't doing this kind of groping, pausing, sensing with fresh awareness, if they were instead just talking or if they were just cry, cry cry. If they weren't doing it in the first or second session, they didn't start doing it later.

It meant that the ability to do this tended to be predictive of success in psychotherapy. Gendlin's response was, we'd better figure out how to teach this to people who aren’t doing it naturally. He called it Focusing. It's a kind of attention that doesn't narrow in to some emotional state or some obsession or some conceptual idea of what your life is. But it widens out beyond what you've been specifically thinking and feeling to get a sense of the whole thing, that he called a felt sense, meaning something that forms freshly when you pause and invite it. Focusing is this process of pausing and becoming aware and it belongs to everybody. Every human can do it. And Focusing is also the process developed to teach this method because even though everybody can do it, a lot of us speed things up, come up with the answer right away. It goes counter to all that. So it's revolutionary in a way. I learned Focusing from Eugene Gendlin 50 years ago, and I didn't know at that point that I would become a teacher of it. But things developed. I did become a teacher.

 

Christine 

You're talking about pausing and being aware. In this book I'm looking at the idea that we have to change how we're paying attention - a really specialized mode of attention that then can be used in a lot of different ways. So when we're carefully attending to our sensations, our inner experiences, and our large and small movements, what do you think might be going on there and how is attention influencing those experiences, paying attention to them?

Ann 

Well, from Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy, we want to understand being alive as an ongoing interactive process. He says that body and environment are one process. So certainly body-mind, but also body- environment. In other words, when we breathe, we're breathing in environment and we're breathing out environment. We eat environment, we make ourselves, we renew ourselves from environment. Body and environment are really one process. And what he says is that living beings are always on the way to whatever's next for them. Even in our sleep, so many processes are going on. Processes are sequential. Like breathing, where the inhaling prepares for the exhaling and the exhaling prepares for the inhaling, and then there's being hungry, eating, digesting, elimination, getting hungry again, every kind of process we're involved in is a sequential process. So at each stage, we're not only doing what we're doing now, we're also in readiness to do what's next after that. And what that means is that your body knows what's next. You're leaning into what's next. What's alive is always on its way. 

And yet we can get interrupted. What we need to have happen next may fail to happen. But what he says that means that the readiness for the next thing remains. He calls that implying. Implying is his word for the body readying for what's next. He says, the body implies inhaling, implies exhaling. Inhaling also implies air. So implying means that you're on your way to what happens next. And implying is how we now have what's about to happen or what needs to happen if it doesn't happen. So with hunger, you would eat, but if you don't eat, you're still hungry. And then if you don't eat for a long time, there are other changes that happen. So our bodies carry both the implying of what happens next, and also the implying that is still here from some past failures. We may be carrying with us the shyness because of the way we were treated in third grade or the anger because of a certain thing that happened even earlier. And yet, when something finally happens that meets or fulfills or allows those next steps to occur, they can happen. It's never too late.

 

Christine 

In my work, I talk a lot about completing incomplete movement sequences.

 

Ann 

There you go. And all we have to do is take out the word movement in ‘completing incomplete sequences’, because those sequences may have to do with being loved or being seen as a individual who has worth, in other words, they can occur at that complex level, or they can occur at the level of movement and at every level in between. So what's happening when we pause and bring awareness to that is we add something; these things go on without awareness.

I want to tell you a story. In preparation for our talk today, I reread an article by a friend of mine called named Glenn Fleisch. Glen Fleisch studied Focusing and gesture and wrote some wonderful articles. He talks about a client who came to a therapy session and said, ‘my life is just out of control. I'm surrounded by people; my kids, my husband, my boss, they're all demanding things from me. They're all coming in and impinging on me, and I just don't know what to do about it’. At the same time, the client makes a sweeping gesture. And so the words are, I don't know what to do about it, but the gesture is something that's possible, possibly a thing to do about it. And so what he would do is he would say, ‘As you say those words, I see you making this gesture’. And then he'd play it back. Then, ‘I wonder if you'd like to become aware of that gesture and maybe consciously do it a few more times. And then the person would say ‘Oh wow! That feels really good’. And that's what I'm referring to. That's a great example of what I mean when I say awareness adds something more.

 

Christine 

It sounds like it dovetails with what you're saying about the human beings always leaning into the next thing, that the adding more is helping you find the next thing where the gesture wants to go. 

 

Ann 

Exactly. Glen Fleisch calls it a gestural lead. He says the gesture is leading toward a life forward direction. Gendlin used that term, life forward direction. And he often would say life wants to live and living forward is what happens when the next thing that's right occurs. So Fleisch's work said the client’s gestures were leading toward before they consciously caught up with what they were doing. 

 

Christine 

So you're talking about life forward, and yet you're not talking about life planning, like thinking, ‘I want to accomplish this in my life, and therefore I'll set this goal’.

 

Ann 

Precisely. There is a place for planning. But when I have found my life flowing in a integrated and holistic way, my words are ‘I find myself;’ like: ‘I find myself making that phone call to the person I thought I didn't dare to talk to’.

 

Christine 

One distinction that could be made is when we are immersed in an experience and when we're thinking about that experience. Could you comment on how your work holds that difference and possibly uses those two states differently? 

 

Ann 

There is a third way. Because being immersed in experience is really nice. You want to be immersed in the beautiful sunset or kissing your lover. And you can also think about such things, which can also be interesting or useful. But what we do in Focusing is neither being immersed nor thinking about. I teach people to not be immersed. We use language to do that – ‘I am sensing something in me feels’, and then the description. So ‘I'm upset’ is immersion, or we call it merging or identification. And then we change it to ‘I am sensing something in me is upset’. So now I am not the one upset. I am the one who is sensing the one who is upset in me. Something in me is upset, so I'm not merging, but it's also not thinking about.

So now I'm sensing something in me as upset, and I am going to stay with that experience of being upset as an attentive, compassionate, curious observer, but it's a little warmer than that. I'm going to stay with the one in me that's upset. “How is that? What's the feel of that?” So it's an attentiveness and it's awareness, but not thinking about it. And I have to really teach my students that your habit may be to think right here, and thinking means going away from the experience. It means, well, what could be causing this? Or how can I make it go away? But the experience itself actually knows it's next steps. So thinking about isn't going to help. What helps is coming down here [gestures to the middle of her body], staying attentive and yet not immersing.

 

Christine 

It seems like that has something to say about our sense of identity. It's like you're saying ‘where in the experience am I located,’ and I'm located in some place that can witness.

Ann 

That's right. I'm deliberately moving the placement of ‘I’, I'm upset or I'm sensing something in me as upset. And the ‘I’ could be in some kind of universal vast consciousness instead of down here in my body. I could be identified there. So there's a lot of places where you could be, but this one is for the purpose of getting to know yourself better and allowing the life forward energy to come forward and allowing next steps to occur.

 

Christine 

It sounds like a more fluid sense of self or identity. The ‘I’ is moving. It's not always the same place.

 

Ann 

I think that I’s do move. Even people who don't know this fancy way of talking that I teach, people change their ‘I’s’ all the time. I remember watching a client say, “I'm angry. I hate my anger.” So there's the I that's angry. There's the I that hates the anger - the self switched instantly from one to the other. And when I listen to people, I hear that happening all the time. So I think the self is fluid in that way.

 

Christine 

So is it possible that when we attend consciously to our ongoing experience, that we access information or resources that weren't accessible before? 

 

Ann 

There's a nice quote from Gendlin. The short version is, ‘Experience is a myriad richness. We think more than we can say, we feel more than we can think. We live more than we can feel, and there is much more still.’

Christine 

So do you feel like there are specific techniques that you use in your work to access those resources that we weren't accessing before?

 

Ann 

I tend to work with people who are experiencing some kind of frustration, block, or stuckness in life. Their life isn’t as fully satisfying as they might like. What I've learned is that it's in the difficulty that you can find the answer, by doing a process of sensing, sensing the felt sense right there where the difficulty is. And there is always more. And by staying with the difficulty you get the next steps, the ‘more. Another great quote from Gendlin: “Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness”.

What I believe he meant by “give it space” is this process of Focusing, meaning attending to the whole felt sense of something, attending in a way that is neither immersed nor thinking about, but is simply sensing. And that's the space, because if you're immersed in something, that doesn't give any space. And there's a place for that experience. It's not that it's a bad thing to be immersed, but if it’s painful, the thing you're immersed in, then you can get space. And then in that experience of having more space, the potential for the next steps is always there.

 

Christine 

So this brings up the idea of what change is and how conscious moving can be a change agent. So what kind of embodied changes might you be looking for in your work, and what are the practices that would support that?

 

Ann 

The whole model we've been talking about indicates that the way each person needs to change is unique. Yes, there are commonalities among all people. We all have certain similar needs, and yet one person might need is to spend more time on their own, withdrawn and being more contemplative. Whereas another person might have been doing that so much that what they need for the next step of their life is to get out and express themselves more. This process of sensing the felt sense allows a tapping into the body's knowing of what the next step is. It also allows the change that comes to be the change that is implied by that person's living. In my book, Focusing in Clinical Practice, I call it the client's own change. We want our clients to change precisely into what is their own change.

And by following the track of this inner knowing, this inner sense of rightness, we can get the sense of our own change. And we also have an inner sense of wrongness. We may get the inner sense of wrongness before we get the inner sense of rightness. When you know what's wrong, you're moving towards knowing what's right. 

I think from Focusing we get the ability to be more curious, more calm, more available to other people. I tend to think that's the natural state of the self, that when what's supposed to happen doesn't happen, we carry the hurts from that. If we don't have repair and recover, then we're living half constrained. We carry the hurt, but then that can unfurl, it can open again. It can heal. What's been stuck or stopped can resume. And then we feel like we're more ourselves again. People say, ‘Yeah, now I feel like I have become who I always was, who I was always meant to be’.

 

Christine 

We have this felt sense experience. There could then be this transition towards the production of something in daily life. For instance, it could be a dance that you choreograph, or it could be that the Focusing experience has led you to write something or speak to someone in a new way. As you lean into the next thing, there's a human tendency to want to produce things. How do you see that in Focusing? 

 

Ann 

I think that's beautiful. And I think that it is one of our natural ways of living to produce things. A snail produces its shell. We're making things by living our living. Our living makes things. But as you were posing that question, the term that came to me was zigzag. This is a term Gendlin used, and it's something you do within a Focusing process. So you feel something in your chest, and then you say, ‘how would I describe this’? And the description could be words, it could be sounds, it could be a gesture, or there could be an image. We carry the description back to the feeling, and the feeling changes a little because the description's been offered to it, or maybe it changes it a lot, and then the description needs to change. So that's the zigzag. There's a going in and checking, and then it comes out again and we check again.

And that's within the Focusing process. But that same thing can happen with something that's being produced or created. I give it a try. I draw the line on the paper, and then I pause, ‘is that what I wanted to draw? No, wait, let me erase it. Or, yes, but I need to add blue’. And so there's a back and forth, a sensing. This is also what parents ideally do with their kids. They recognize something, they respond to it, and then they see what the kid offers back. That may also be in the therapy process. We don't just have clients talk to us and then say back things to them. There's a very close back and forth. I say one thing, my client says something back. I noticed from the saying back that what I said wasn't quite right. I can adjust it. I can try something next. So this is the zig say, the interactive process, which can result in a book, an institute, a masterpiece, a symphony,

If we're responsive to each other, then all these yummy things happen, including learning, including creating, including loving. And we build each other, we're creating each other. This conversation is much richer than it would've been if I had just typed my answer to your question.

 

Christine 

It reminds me of what developmental psychologist called scaffolding. That together, you create a kind of scaffold that allows you to climb towards some new learning.

 

Ann 

And you're creating the scaffolding as you climb.

 

Christine 

Your work seems to involve a practice of open inquiry into inner experience. What happens in the body when we enter that state of curiosity and inquiry? What do you think the body is actually doing when it gets that kind of attention and intention? 

 

Ann 

When I am having this kind of process in myself, I feel relief, a sense of openness, a warmth; stressful spots that were painful or tight will loosen. There's a sense of excitement, a sense of relief, a kind of homecoming sense. When something is a challenging or stressful experience, it's often localized. So the tightness is in my throat, the heaviness is in my chest, the squeezing is in my solar plexus. Then that's attended to, that's heard for how it feels, and the experience is being related to with compassion and without any judgment or pressure to change. Shifts occur that are experiences of loosening, and whatever this is, becomes less localized. It spreads out. People report, ‘it's still there, but it's much broader. It's not a pinpoint anymore. Now it's across my whole throat’, and it's calmer, milder, and then it goes away. Something that was difficult or stressful becomes something enjoyable.

 

Christine 

It puts me in mind of when I used to teach neuroscience, when they started to be able to do brain imaging, they found that people with P T S D would have these hotspots that were just red hotspots, and then they were surrounded by dark where nothing was happening. And when they brain scanned people who had been identified by their peers as very creative, how they were using their brain was different. The whole brain was in use. But it was cool. It was diffuse throughout the whole brain.

 

Ann 

Diffuse, there you go. Interesting. 

 

Christine 

In your work, what are the essential ingredients of using conscious experiencing and sensing effectively? 

 

Ann 

I think the essential ingredient is the lack of trying to change things. Changing by not trying to change - a lack of effort, a lack of judgment, a lack of criticism. An acceptance. But not acceptance as in resignation. It's more of a warm, loving compassion. Acceptance and curiosity is a big factor. Because curiosity as a lens through which to view whatever we're viewing has that openness built in. And plus that sense of ‘I don't know what's going to happen’. So openness, curiosity. Those are essential.

I wouldn't mind saying a little more about the body. So through doing Focusing, I feel we redefine what is meant by body. Body as a structure located in space is only one version of how the body can be described, perhaps not the most useful one. So perhaps a more facilitative description is the body as an interactive process. The body-mind, all these processes together are always in this kind of motion, the motion of leaning in, turning toward, responding, always in motion. And that body is an interactive process. So when people do Focusing and we say ‘Notice where in your body you feel that’, they might move a half-inch forward and say ‘Here, it's here’. 

We’re also sharing that with other bodies. We're in a shared field. Gendlin came up with the word interaffecting. And that interaffecting is always going on. And he has an amazing concept where he says, ‘You who I'm being affected by have already been affected by me.’ So neither one is first. So interaffecting doesn't even take time. It's already happened. He likes to tell the story of being in the Navy in the Korean War and he kept being given this job of tuning this device where there were like nine dials. And if you got the first one right, then you'd have to do the second one. But doing the second one meant you had to go back and change the first one. And the third one meant you had to go back and change the second. But eventually you could get them all. Interaffecting is like that, but it takes no time to happen. It’s simultaneous.