Focusing in Naturopathic Medicine

One of the fundamental philosophies of naturopathic medicine

Your body knows how to heal

With attentiveness and care, we can learn what the right kinds of support might be.  As we nourish the terrain for healing, new possibilities emerge.

The Search

  • Many of us are drawn to natural medicine because we want to get to the root of our health concerns, and to address the underlying causes of symptoms, so that we can feel our best, or in some cases so that we can simply function.

  •  In natural medicine, the prevailing viewpoint is that if we can find the right diet, address deficiencies, reduce inflammation, balance our microbiomes, hormones and neurotransmitters, we will feel better.  This approach can really help, much of the time.  

  • However, sometimes this approach misses the mark, and creates more stress and overwhelm along the way.

The Cycle

  • We live in a culture where the dominant messaging is that our success depends on a perpetual sort of striving.  Unfortunately, a well-intentioned health industry often reinforces this message.  The implication is that if we are struggling, we should be more diligent and more vigilant.
  • We might find ourselves working harder and harder in order to feel better, compounding the problem by our own efforts to solve it.
  • If our quest for healing creates more stress, then 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 lean back from our usual way of approaching problems, and ask, “what would be the path of ease?”
  • Rather than focusing on what went wrong and how to fix it, we might find that inviting what would feel right opens up more possibilities and 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 Eugene Gendlin and carried forward by many types of health 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

Have more questions?  Please contact the office.

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