Hello everyone.
Does your Recovery go through some flat periods?
Are you curious about how you can access your own inner wisdom?
If you are an addiction counselor, would you like to feel refreshed and energized after working with a group, and have the group itself feel refreshed and energized?
Allow me to show you how to ENLIVEN RECOVERY with Felt Sensing!
My name is Suzanne Noel. I am a Certifying Focusing Coordinator for The Focusing Institute in New York. Focusing has been proven to be a process that leads to significant therapeutic change. (See www.Focusing.org). It is about going inside ourselves and waiting for the felt awareness of something to emerge. As we stay with this, it comes into Focus! We get rapid insights into things and enjoy the bodily-felt shift that comes from this.
Yes, you can easily access your own inner wisdom and move into your right way of being!
Me and my clients have found that waiting for the meaning of the 12 Steps to emerge from inside us helps us “get them” in a new, solid way. As we move into felt sensing into the Best of Recovery, we get to live it here and now! And, we discover that Recovery feels good!
Recovery Focusing helps open inner doors to Recovery.
It helps dissolve our blocks to moving forward, makes space for our feelings to reveal their next right steps, and show us how to have compassion for ourselves and others.
By connecting and relating to ourselves, others, and our Higher Power in this felt sensed way, we begin living Recovery and feeling more alive and enlightened each time.
Here is a quote from my book Loving At the Edge: Recovery Emerging:
“As I close my eyes briefly, I see Focusing as being an “essence,” like an energy, entering the Steps. I see letters begin to wiggle, move, as if the word which holds the principle of each Step is coming alive. All the letters in “Honesty” begin jiggling and playing and wanting to dance with the next Step’s principle “Faith.” They are happily dancing together, celebrating, enjoying their new aliveness, as if before they were stuck in place, sadly unable to go anywhere, alive but frozen. Focusing brings in the life blood, slowly waking up the Steps, freeing them, and eventually allowing them to merge and dissolve into all of life, no longer separate, but part of life. I feel bubbles of energy in my own chest, a welling up of movement, a deep desire to dance as well! And, life is good.”
Great spiritual masters tell us that the key to happiness lies within. As many are finding in the power of 12-Step fellowship, sharing with others is the easiest path into this inner wisdom. Recovery Focusing integrates both 12-Step principles and Focusing processing into one practice, held together by Felt Listening, thus unlocking the inner felt wisdom of each. This sharing of Listening and Focusing enhances and enlivens the journey of Recovery, which is the journey into loving.
Here is a slide show on Recovery Focusing with my own original collages: Recovery Focusing: Shifting from being stuck in an addictive process to processing your stuckness. Enjoy!
Welcome!
If all this stirs your curiosity, please feel free to contact me for my next workshop or for one-on-one coaching. I also have a book for sale on http://www.lulu.com titled
“Loving At the Edge: Recovery Emerging.”
Thank you for being here with me and sharing my journey with me.
Suzanne
The Felt Meaning of Recovery 
Welcome to the magnificent inner journey of Recovery Focusing.
Focusing is about waiting for the felt meaning of something to emerge from your inner experience of it. As you go inside and wait, something vague will come to you — you will get a bodily-feel of it. Then, it comes into “Focus” with images, metaphors, a word or phrase, gestures, memories, or with an emotional feel.
When we felt sense into the Steps, we get fast insights and we feel shifted inside, lighter.
It’s as if our inner wisdom is easily revealed to us!
The best is yet to come.
Dear Suzanne,
This sentence, that you write, resonates the beauty and clarity of your Recovery Focusing project:
“Focusing brings in the life blood, slowly waking up the Steps, freeing them, and eventually allowing them to merge and dissolve into all of life, no longer separate, but part of life.”
Thank you for creating this blog!
Katarina Halm, Focusing teacher, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Thank you, Katarina.
I have never Blogged before and was nervous about sending the invites.
I would like to open the discussion up to more people: non-focusers, 12 Steppers, anyone who has any curiosity about Recovery. It is nice to feel part of a community. 🙂
Warm regards.
You know I love this way into recovery. Today started out gray and quiet. Sat to quietly and meditate. Found the sunshine inside and walking came to be part of the morning healing. Birds singing, the river rushing along, enjoying my friend’s companionship and of course, watching my dog, Maddie being a dog.
I wonder if you have found a way that Focusing serves any spiritual practice, bringing life into what can seem dry principles.
I know for me the Buddhist meditation I was attending was seeming stiff and the instructions did not not lead me to experience. So I sat on the cushion and focused, and they opened up.
Thank you for starting this.
Birrell
Your dry principles opened up.
🙂
Exactamente.
Felt sensing is really about…energizing…as we shift/release our way of holding things (in the head!) and FEEL their meaning in a new way.
Hi Birrell and Suzanne,
Yes I also find that focusing helps with my spiritual practice. Every now and then I go through a bit of a “dry” period with my relationship with my HPower – it feels as though the connection is not quite there. I find that the best thing to do is to put all my concepts and previous experience to one side and to simply go inside in a Focusing way and be present to what’s there. It sort of feels like my HPower’s presence is there in among all of that, especially as I put things aside or simply “fall through” the issues. I don’t need the words, just to let the FS elaborate itself and shift into that connected place, and the it’s like reconnecting a connecting pipe that got dislodged. Thereafter the Silent Presence can communicate again – without words – and I can move on.
As they say – keep it simple.
Peter P – Recoverer and Clinical Psychologist/Therapist
Hi Peter.
Yes, it’s like your Higher Power’s presence is inside, and by just being there with what is inside and allowing the Felt Sense to elaborate and shift into a connected place, the Silent Presence can communicate again.
I am amazed at how easily I can return to a space of serenity and well being when I focus; and in this state, I feel as if I am in communion with the Higher Energy of the universe. This sense of being at ease with “All That Is” is my “conscious contact” with my Higher Power and the higher experience of connection.
It comes so effortlessly with felt sensing!
Focusing had moved my Recovery forward in deep, powerful ways. I am now believe that Felt Sensing is the opposite of an addictive process.
Cheers!
Hello Peter & Birrell & Suzanne
Yes, isn’t focusing just a wonderfully complementary process, and such a snug fit, with meditation. As regards the “how” of integrating these processes, Leona Dawson has prepared some wonderful suggestions, which are to be found in an article she placed in the Library of the Focusing Townhouse. It’s well worth reading. I enjoyed her setting out of how focusing can be brought in as needed. I have this feeling that if the Buddha were around now, sensing the stuff which we Western meditators bump into on the cushion, he’d very likely give focusing the thumbs up!
Pam Wernich (Counsellor in Cape Town currently training in focusing work)
What a wonderful start for your blog, Suzanne. It is beautiful. I will do what I can to spread the word about this great gift, Recovery Focusing. And I love the name for your book. As you know, there is lots of self-help related to Focusing on my website, as well as an e-newsletter with practise exercises.
Yes, Kathy.
Let’s hope this is a nice connector pool where people can stream into each others ponds. I like it that so many have websites to which readers can go when they get here.
Life is good!
I am inspired how you have brought Focusing and the 12 steps together…Focusing enhances any process, any life. You have inspired me to look for places where I can bring Focusing together with another established and valued process. I am looking forward to reading your blog.
Yes, I think that is why the Focusing Institute encourages the “Focusing and…”
At the week long we put the …first. Music and Focusing. Meditation and focusing. Community work and focusing. Collage making and focusing…
🙂
Suzanne;
congratulations, blogging is fun and you have so much to share, good on ya !
Smells like to me; the principles are universal. Even if one does not meet the definition of addict, we are all addicts, recovering from a past, a nasty attitude or a glutonous habit. The advantage of Focusing is taking it south, out of that egomaniacal brain down into the heart and her inside companions who are far wiser and kinder.
One concern I have; great insights may be followed by more and more great insights. They do not necessarily result in the desired change, the increased awareness or wisdom we think we seek. Insights are mighty interesting, i have a huge collection of them. Unless they are routed and rooted, allowed to replace the old program, they are just so many shiny baubles.
I love you, so glad you are going cyber !
d
Yes, you are so right. Insights are just insights.
But, with Focusing, they are bodily felt and they come from our own body wisdom, so they are more “grounded.”
Generally, this is why I like the 12 Steps and meetings: I stay grounded and slowly integrate spirituality by sustaining my practice of, yes, going to meetings and working my Program daily.
The old program gets replaced with time. 12 Steppers have to replace their old patterns of thinking and feeling (and the whole culture of drinking/drugging/shopping/obsessing, etc) with a new culture.
One day at a time!
Hi Suzanne
Congratulations on your blog, looks like you are sharing all your wisdom and having fun with it. Writing is one of your many talents, we all enjoy reading it!
I love you very much my dear friend and wish you much success.
aromatic blessings
Monika
Thank you, Monika.
It should be fun.
We’ll see how it goes.