Sunday, March 08, 2009

Inside "Focusing" work by Ann Cornell

The further I get into a book by Ann Cornell called, The Radical Acceptance of Everything, the more I see her work aligned in its efforts to what I've already come to embrace in the Fourth Way. There's no spiritual, historical background behind "focusing," but the success made by her and her colleagues greatly raises awareness in a way that repairs the wrong work and dysfunctionality of being human, rendering us the worst of machines. Concepts used for FOCUSING and those offered by the Fourth Way have completely different intents and exist on different scales of being. For the hearer, the ideas of focusing exist only insofar as are effective tools for direction and guidance for those engaged in the theraputic process itself. While Fourth Way concepts reveal an intellectual and descriptive mode or level of thinking about being human, Cornells concepts support a process between speaker and listener in which the listener is challenged semantically in precise ways which result in transformations to the awareness. The effect on awareness reflects a clearer and much wider field of reality we all seem pretty much blind to at present and in our past.

Just today, after reading anecdotes in which FOCUSING techniques were applied to obtain results, I found my own personal awareness significantly shifted. It's a very difficult process to withstand. In particular, the sorrow associated with recognizing how much of life is or was missed growing up. How unaware I was is overwhelmingly shocking as I see how I might just as easily been instructed as a child in a way leading to higher levels of awareness that we all actually need to be fully human and happy, in the first degree.

One of the most important distinctions I can offer at this time about the difference in the quality of awareness has to do with the idea of listening. The work of Cornell is all about focusing one's listening on what we have not been listening to and long ago forgot even existed. These PLACES and AREAS for which our awareness was withdrawn, continued to exist influencing us in such negative but hidden and unacknowledged ways.

So, now is the beginning of a real period of recovery in my life.

And all the time, while growing up, going to a psychotherapist, I was under the impression that I was either doomed or cursed in some way, somehow defective in my core and that my happiness was always going to be at best transient, always covering over the knowledge that in some permanent way I was not relevant to my world.

Well, with today's new insights among other recent ones, I have begun to feel encouraged to engage in relative work I can either devise or find to test out what's possible for the health and healing of my being-awareness. The core of it all is pure awareness, the evolution of it through higher consciousness. It's not really changing the process as much as it is evolving my ability to be aware, and in that higher awareness the process of life and its quality transforms by itself.

My issues, for now remain the same in general, though a lot of movement has taken place within these contexts in the last few days.  Family, love, money, health, happiness, liberty, justice, spirit, education. These remain my main and primary issues in life, today.

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