Exploring Two Inner Paths: How Focusing and Buddhism Intertwine and Complement Each Other

This essay will explore how the practices of Buddhism and Focusing support each other when taken as separate but converging pathways to deepening inner and existential wisdom. It is based on my personal reflections, drawing upon over 10 years of Buddhist practice and almost five years of Focusing practice as well as some research into the philosophy of Gene Gendlin. I’m going to explore these two pathways, by mapping them on to the Buddhist model of the Threefold Way.

The Threefold Way of Ethics, Meditation and Wisdom lays out a spiritual developmental framework under which different practices and ways of being in the world, can be categorised and explored. While it’s offered as a threefold path, it doesn’t represent a linear happening of sequential experiences. As one’s experience of one deepens so does the others. In this way, each contains the seeds of and supports the others and in actual practice might be developed simultaneously. The cocreational quality of the three, is therefore in line with the spirit of Focusing, so far as it is implicitly relational.

As I explore Ethics, Meditation and Wisdom through a Focusing lens, I utilise quotes from Gendlin, which I have found inspiring and representative of the essence of the convergence I am hoping to put forward. The quotes elicit a Felt Sense in me of the Buddhist concept I include them under. As such while it is personally relevant, it may require a creative leap or a ‘pausing with’ to makes sense, so to speak, to the reader. So I invite the reader to make space for the quote to land, before moving on to my interpretation of it.

Ethics

“What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.”

The practice of Buddhism starts with the practice of Ethics. Shared across all Buddhist traditions, the most well-known formulation of ethics are the five precepts which are concerned with kindness, generosity, truthfulness, contentment and awareness. It concerns one’s intentions and actions and can only be practiced to the extent that one is aware of one’s own underlying motivations.

While some formulations of the precepts may make them sound like rules that need to be followed in order to be  ‘Good’, in spirit they are guidelines that rely upon the individual taking ownership of their actions and point to how an enlightened person would act. An enlightened person is someone who is loving, generous, helpful, truthful and kind in speech, increasingly content and joyful, and is fully aware of the cocreational, interconnected nature of all life and experience. One can say a person who’s is ethical in every way, is an enlightened person.

Focusing cannot be practiced without similar ethical foundations. It requires a kindly, compassionate attitude towards the felt sense, the giving of space and gently attention to the body, and what I personally find most striking, as stated in the opening quote for this section, an openness to and a taking of responsibility of what is true. The practice of Focusing deepens one’s awareness of what is really there, and in doing so makes one aware of feelings, intentions, thoughts, motivations which might have, up until that point, been out of reach of one’s conscious awareness. Thus, the practice and outcome of Focusing is a deepening ethical sensitivity similar to the experience of practicing ethics in the Buddhist context.

An ethical approach to one’s experience, in turn has an effect of further sensitising one towards others’ inner experience. It enhances one’s ability to navigate the complexities of interpersonal relationships, fostering harmonious relationships with ones’ self and others. As one’s life becomes less complicated in terms of one’s friendships and relationships, one can have more space for practices like meditation and can certainly deepen in capacity for concentration.

Meditation

"The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I believe that one of the tasks of the mind is to listen to the body."

The purpose of Buddhist meditation will vary from tradition to tradition but broadly speaking, meditation aims to create the conditions for one to develop concentration, stillness and energy, which supports one to ‘look’ at experience, as it. More recently these conditions have been grouped under the umbrella term of mindfulness. While mindfulness is one aspect of meditation, it is important to consider what one is becoming mindful of and why. Ultimately Buddhist practices aims to develop the conditions for insightfulness to happen. One of these conditions, I would argue, is the unification of experience, which in Focusing we might refer to as Presence.

The practice of Focusing has many similarities with Buddhist meditation, in aim and outcome. Focusing emphasises the importance of being aware of ‘the whole body’ as a way into seeing things as they really are. This leads to the integration of emotion and reason (and/or thinking) in the experience of a Felt Sense, emerging from Presence.

Within a Felt Sense thought and feeling meet and are often indiscernible, experienced as one unifying experience. In fact, the ‘rightness’ of this convergence of these two faculties is often one of the prerequisites of a ‘shift’ one might feel in witnessing the edge of a felt sense for the first time. One no longer needs to distinguish between what they think about something and how they feel about it. There will often be a resolution of conflicts, a unification and integration of psychospiritual energies.

Perhaps where Buddhist meditation and Focusing differ, is in the use of the narrative, for the cultivation of insight. Buddhism points to three markers of ‘conditioned existence’, which when reflected upon, can lead to an experiential knowing of how things really are. These markers are the ever-changing nature of things (impermanence/anicca), experiences not having a real, substantial core (non-self/anatta) and the fact that however hard we try to get what we want, even the trying itself, will always lead to a sense of dissatisfaction (suffering/dukkha). The practice of Focusing can, and does bring us to these insights but it is not explicit or intended to be pointed out to, in the way it’s been put forward by Gene Gendlin (at least not in any way I have practiced). Buddhist meditation however, does invite active reflection of these characteristics. Ideally it is done in a way that incorporates and facilitates a whole body listening into the reflection, not just as a thought experiment.

One can say that Gendlin has focused on another characteristic of the nature of reality, namely the interrelationship of all experience. In Buddhism one might relate this to the teaching on Pratitya Samutpada or conditioned-coproduction. Conditioned co-production points to an undeniable convergence of both practices’ insistence on seeing experience as interwoven and co-emerging with all other experience. We’ll now turn to this shared teaching as we look at the application of Wisdom in both traditions.

Wisdom

"Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people -in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside."                  

Patitya Samutpada, or dependent origination, I would argue, is the quintessential Buddhist teaching, which explains the interdependent nature of all things. It teaches that all phenomena arise in dependence on causes and conditions. This insight helps one understand the complex interconnectedness of life and the interdependent nature of thoughts, actions, experiences in this moment, in the past and into the future.

It also reveals that everything is empty of fixed and separate identities, but more importantly it hints to the fact that while everything is ‘empty’ of self-existence, it is full of co-existence. I believe this is the point Gendlin makes in the above quote and thus cuts through any nihilistic tendency or outcome of pursuing insight into emptiness and provides the other side of the coin, so to speak, of all things being empty.

As all phenomena is conditioned and empty of a fixed and separate entity, this includes the self. Buddhism teaches that there is no permanent, unchanging essence or self at the core of our being. Realizing the concept of no-self allows one to transcend self-centeredness (selfing) and develop greater compassion and interconnectedness with others.

Focusing provides a very practical way of experiencing working with selfing. As we dis-identify with stories while we Focus we stop the ‘selfing’ process, de-entangle ourselves from it and can experience a shift or sense of freedom due to tending to the felt sense fully without pushing and pulling that comes from identification. There is a lot more I can explore around the overlap of Buddhist wisdom teachings and Focusing philosophy, but perhaps that is for another essay.

To conclude,  perhaps a little abruptly, I have found Focusing and particularly Gendlin’s conviction and demonstration of the interconnectedness of all life, supportive of my existential quest in meaning and mystery. I have and continue to appreciate the deeply ethical nature of Focusing and how it supports my meditation. Focusing has brough to my life a strong and heartfelt connection with ‘my body’, which at times does feel like all bodies, everywhere, all at once, both affirming what I believe to be true through my Buddhist practice and showing in very practical ways, what’s possible to experience, beyond concepts and self-identification. I feel grateful to all my teachers and peers along the way for their love for what’s really true, and their desire to find out together.

Dharmacharini Varadhi Itir Binay, PhD