Focusing in Naturopathic Medicine

One of the fundamental philosophies of naturopathic medicine

Your body knows how to heal itself

Our task is to clear the path, to move what is stuck or blocking us from moving forward, so that we can restore balance.

The Search

Most of us want to get to the root of our health concerns, looking for the underlying causes of symptoms.
In the quest for healing, we might focus on nutrition, repleting nutrient deficiencies and removing inflammatory foods, as well as prioritizing exercise and ‘managing’ stress.
We might work on gut repair, enhancing digestion and rebuilding the microbiome.
We may need to support detoxification and antioxidant pathways, or focus on rebalancing hormones and neurotransmitters.
We might need to address harmful microbes, or support recovery from environmental triggers like allergens, mold or other toxic exposures.
There’s a lot of places to look and many ways to go about it.

The Cycle

Many times this approach is really successful, and yet sometimes, it can be overwhelming and arduous.
Getting healthy can become a full time job.
We might find ourselves working harder and harder in an effort to feel better, eventually with diminishing returns.
We might find ourselves locked into a state of hyper-vigilance, with an increasingly narrow comfort zone. Or we might find ourselves ready to give up, because it all just seems so hard.
This is when our approach to restoring health might actually be in the way — and keeping us stuck.

A New Approach

When we’re stuck, it often helps to step back from the status quo and our usual ways of approaching problems, so that we can explore a new path.
We might notice that when we are trying to fix, manage and control our bodies, it can create more tension and distress.
Rather than focusing what feels wrong and how to fix it, we might find that inviting ‘what would feel right’ opens up more possibilities and perhaps a forward movement.
Cultivating a spacious and responsive interaction with our bodies, we can experience healing as a dynamic process that carries us into deeper alignment with our vitality.

WE CAN ASK OUR BODIES

What if instead of trying to manage and direct our bodies, we invite a conversation with the stuck places?

What happens when we hold space for an interaction, and welcome our body to share its wisdom, trusting that it has something to show us?

When we listen closely, we can awaken an inner knowing, an awakening that brings vitality and reveals a deeper path to healing.

Focusing

We can tap into this inner knowing using the tools of Focusing, a practice developed by the philosopher and psychologist Eugen Gendlin and carried forward by many amazing practitioners throughout the world.

In Focusing, we re-orient from removing, changing, and fixing problems, and toward a place of deep listening and present moment experiencing.

As we create a compassionate curious space, something, a bodily knowing, may come forward. In the practice of Focusing, we call this ‘something’ the felt sense.

The felt sense is a present moment, bodily sense of a whole situation. It can be described as an ‘uneasiness’ about a situation or problem.

The felt sense may include, but encompasses much more than simple emotions, thoughts or physical sensations. Whereas emotions, thoughts and sensations are often repetitive, the felt sense is always freshly forming.

The felt sense contains intricacy and nuance and often subtlety, and is particular to this very moment — the felt sense carries the implicit knowing of the whole experience, both what feels wrong and perhaps what would feel right.

In Focusing, we attend to the freshly forming felt sense, to our own immediate experiencing and see what emerges. We invite a sense of its own knowing and hold a space for radical acceptance.

We learn to trust that the next steps are already happening, as we are experiencing them.

In this unfolding, we find a new sense of direction and a fresh energy to help carry us forward.

In this process we may discover that the medicine is not as much about what we take or do in order to feel better, but rather how we listen and how we hold what wants healing.

SCHEDULE A FOCUSING APPOINTMENT NOW

Focusing in Naturopathic Medicine

One of the fundamental philosophies of naturopathic medicine

Your body knows how to heal itself

The Search

The Cycle

A New Approach

WE CAN ASK OUR BODIES

Focusing

Have more questions? Please contact the office.

Naturopathic Doctors don’t treat diseases, they treat people.

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