Books about Focusing

The Power of Focusing: Finding your inner voice by Ann Weiser Cornell – An easy to understand introduction to a self-healing practice called focusing. The principles of focusing was developed from research about what helps people to get better in therapy. You can learn a helpful way to turn toward your inner experiences without making instant judgements and learn to just listen to and learn from your deeper layers of knowing, wanting and understanding. The impact of developing this more accepting and attentive relationship with yourself is profoundly healing and makes changes become possible you could only dream before.

The Radical Acceptance of Everything: Living a Focusing Life by Ann Weiser Cornell – How can we bring peace to the inner wars that are in the way of having the life we want? For more than 30 years now, Ann Weiser Cornell has been exploring, teaching, and writing about the mysteries of emotional process, including the paradox of how we become more whole by acknowledging our parts, how the most despised places in us contain our greatest treasure, and how the body’s felt sense, held in a compassionate state of Presence, is the key to change. Now her key writings have been brought together in one place, freshly edited for this volume, with four new articles offering Ann’s leading-edge work. All are accessible both to the seeker of personal change and to the professional who wants to be more effective working with others.

I Know I’m in There Somewhere: A Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner Voice and Living a Life of Authenticity by Helene Brenner – Based on her work with over a thousand women across the country, psychologist Helene G. Brenner has learned that women feel the impulse to accommodate, adapt and mould themselves to serve others at their own expense. Her solution is an invigorating new approach to women’s psychology. The key to transformation, she explains, is not self-improvement, but self-acceptance–affirming and validating what we truly feel and experience and who we already are.

Bio-Spirituality: Focusing As a Way to Grow by Peter A Campbell and Edwin M. McMahon This is a fantastic book that can teach us how to connect with ourselves ( Body, Mind and Soul ) through Bio-Spirirual Focusing. The authors clearly explain how connecting with our unfolding felt experience is a key to a healthy spiritual development that helps to avoid some common spiritual traps.  Bio-Spiritual Focusing can be the foundation to create a holistic and non-dogmatic, body-based spirituality that fits today’s requirements and is also an Integral approach to spirituality (in line with Integral Theory). It is refreshing to absorb the author’s deep wisdom in this very readable and important book. I highly recommend this thoughtful, practical, and helpful book to anyone who is interested in connecting with their “higher wisdom”and to create a life that is guided by the Spirit.

Focusing in Clinical Practice: The Essence of Change by Ann Weiser Cornell – “Since Eugene Gendlin’s landmark book Focusing, first published in 1978, there has been too little in the way of clinical application of his seminal work. In her thorough, illuminating book, Ann Weiser Cornell fills this need. She clearly outlines the essence of change, explaining how it emerges from the client’s relationship with his or her living-sensing body. She demonstrates, step by step, just how these innate transformative moments occur and how we can guide our clients in that direction. It is ‘magic’ made simple, pure and simple.” –Peter A. Levine, PhD, author of In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness and Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma; recipient of the USABP Lifetime Achievement Award

Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual Of The Experiential Method by Eugene T. Gendlin – Every once in a while you read something which makes what you already know wake up and come alive once more. This is certainly one of those books. But it is also much more. The work of a clinician who is also a philosopher, Gendlin’s experiential psychotherapy brings powerful experiential techniques to enliven therapeutic contact in whatever therapeutic orientation. Beginners and old hands alike will find it extremely valuable, offering as it does step-by-step guidance on innovative ways to help clients learn from their own inner wisdom.

Focusing with Children: The art of communicating with children at school and at home: The Art of Communicating with Children at School and at Home by Marta Stapert – This book is about listening in many ways, both to your deepest self and to others. It is listening to what children say, feel, and think, but also to what is deeper than thoughts and feelings. Change in behaviour arises when children learn to listen inwardly, sensing what is bodily felt inside them. This process of change, called ‘Focusing’, is explained with many examples from the personal experiences of the authors, from their workshops, training and child-therapy sessions. The authors give a structured approach for use in schools and other group situations, but much of it can also be used at home by parents. With this book you can, quite independently, start to accompany children more consciously in their development, and by doing so, you will watch their confidence grow.

Your Body Knows the Answer: Using Your Felt Sense to Solve Problems, Effect Change, and Liberate Creativity by David I. Rome Combines mindfulness with the Focusing technique to tap into your body’s subtle wisdom for dealing with all life’s challenges. Your body has an answer to just about any question or challenge that arises. It’s simply a matter of learning to recognize and listen to the subtle physical signal that comes from someplace inside you other than your mind. With its short, accessible chapters and its abundant practical exercises, this may be the most compact and accessible guide to Focusing yet published.