The Purpose  of   HEALING - K.I.S.S. - as stated 12 years ago - was and is   to help me and my potential P E E R s  "to HEAL ourselves into WHOLEness, and - by extension - all of CREATion!"

Intro to Healing-K.i.s.s. 2001-2013 and Overview of its main libraries [If you look for a word on this page, click ctrl/F and put a word in "find"]

I focus my experiencing and awareness on being "a   pioneer of  Evolution  in  learning  to  feel": I let my Body vibrate and my Heart 'womb' pain, shame, fear, boredom, powerlessness, so feelings can >heal >guide>fulfill>evolve, and ~~~ offer ~~~"goldmines"~~~ to us all!! "I want you to feel everything, every little thing!"

p.75

Body trust
In seeking this first-movement state of tranquillity,
you will find it helps to trust in your body.
Let your body return to its natural state – which is perfect.
The body can feel completey at ease and natural every moment.
Just let it.
Once your body is allowed to be itself, uncramped,
it has the wisdom to deal with your problems.
You will be dealing with these tense feelings and situations
with a relaxed, lose body.

p.76

The bad feeling is the body knowing and pushing toward what good would be.
Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being,
if you give it space to move toward its rightness.

The body senses vastly much more than we can think.
The body is an incredibly fine system within nature and the cosmos.
Its holistic sensing of what is prolife and what is not
indicates much more than a thought or an emotion can.

p.77

When I use the word "body",
I mean much more than the physical machine.
Not only do you physically live the circumstances around you,
but also those you only   t h i n k   of in your mind.
now and other times
you and other people
in fact, the whole universe.
This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system
is the body as it is felt from inside.

The body knows it
and immediately sets about the task of repairing itself
The body knows what its own right state feels like
and is constantly checking and adjusting its processes
to stay as close to that state as possible.

It maintains its temperature, for instance,
in a narrow range near 98 1/2 degrees.
People all over the world have precisely the same body temperature,
whether they live on the Equator or in the Arctic.
Your temperature stays in the same range
through summer and winter,
in exercise or repose,
for your body knows what is   r i g h t
and continually monitors and adjusts and compensates
to maintain the proper balance.
You don't have to exercise any conscious control over it
and you also trust it to know when something is going wrong.
It always does know.

p.78

When your temperature slips out of that narrow "right" range,
you feel unmistakably less than good.
Medical help only ministers to the body,
only helps here and there
with what is always the body's own healing process.
A doctor knows how to help heal a wound,
but the wound heals itself.
Similarly, whatever you do,
sense then whether it has helped your body's healing take a step or not.
Your body knows the direction of healing and life.
If you take the time to listen to it through focusing,
it will give you the steps in the right direction.

 

A vast Space

To do the first movement put your attention in your body,
and you propose to your body
that you feel totally fine and joyful about how your life is going.
Then you sense what comes there,
usually some discomfort about something in your life.
You see what that is (large or trivial doesn't matter),
and you acknowledge it ("Yes, that's there").
Then you place it next to yourself, in a friendly way, as if on the floor.
Now you ask your body,
"What would come, in my body,
if this problem were somehow all solved?"
Whatever your mind answers,
you wait until you sense what comes in your body.

Then you let that be for a little while.
Now you ask,
"Except for this,
do I feel totally fine and joyful about how my life is going?"
You do the same thing with what next comes.

Each time, you wait for the way your body responds to the question.
After the five or six things that usually come in this way, there is one more;
a "background feeling"' that is always there
(for instance, "always gray," "always a little sad,"
"always running scared," "always trying hard"

[Rachel: "I should be doing something more important"
or "ani lo maspiqah" ~~~~
2010_06_13-these "personal" feelings are gone,
but the general feeling that life is too difficult for me, still creeps around]

What quality is always there, now too,
and comes between you and feeling fine?
Set it aside as well
("Sometime I'll see what more goes with that… not now")
Again ask,
"What would come in my body, if that were also set aside?"

p.79

By this means you can sometimes come to an opening out,
a sense of a vast space.
Under all the packages each of us carries,
a different self can be discovered.
You are not any of the things you have set aside.
You are no content at all!
When you arrive at this wide space,
you might want to stay a while and just be there.
But to arrive there involved specific questions put to your body,
and a wait for some specific response from your body.

The Sea and Ayelet

 

The Sea and Micha and Arnon

The FRIENDLY HEARING

[Rachel: THESE ARE EXCELLENT EXERCISES
TOWARDS "TOTAL SELF-ACCEPTANCE"]

The first movement is the time
when you establish an environment of friendly feeling within yourself.
You prepare to give yourself a fair hearing.
"How are you now?" you ask, gently.
"What's with you right now?
What's the main thing for you right now/"
And then you don't answer in words. No, you wait.
Let the answer be the feelings that will come in your body.
[ for me, Rachel, – the feeling, sensing comes with moving & breathing]
People can always think of some long list of things
that might, or ought to, trouble them.
This is not the list we want.
We want only to hear what is now keeping your body from feeling sound.

 

[SELF-ACCEPTANCE] till p. 82

At first you might hit a blank and become impatient,
because after all, you think you know.
"I'm fine, except for my bad feeling, as usual, about my main relationship,
and that other worry."
But this is answering your question yourself.
The body doesn't answer that quickly.
It takes about thirty seconds.
Surely you would be willing to accord your body thirty seconds?
And yet, oddly, most people never do.
.
Most people are pretty unfriendly toward themselves most of the time.
If you are like most,
you have treated yourself less like a friend than like a room-mat you don't like.
You grumble at yourself,
insult yourself,
get impatient with yourself when things go wrong.
You construct a model of the ideal person you wish you were,
and then you condemn yourself
because you are imperfect as measured against that ideal.
"Oh, I'm just lazy," you insult yourself.
"If I really wanted to get somewhere I'd work harder.
I set up these good goals for myself
and then I back off and flounder and make excuses."
And so the lecture goes.
Until you have focused, asked in a quiet and friendly way what is really there
"Lazy" is only an external word, an insult.
But your body knows why and how you are as you are,
and some of that will turn out to be important
if you will give it a friendly hearing.

[2006_10_26- an hour and a half,
before Yanina, Alexander and their friends are supposed to come,
and will take the book back.

While copying and being surprised by what I read,
my mind keeps rehearsing, how I want to tell Yanina –
that it is stunning, how far in understanding Gendlin and Levine came
but how they never hit the bottom of it:
that emotions have to be moved, vibrated physically
in order to heal and to evolve
and also in order to give their guidance
about what I should do, change, not do,
how to solve a problem, a dilemma etc.
and I feel the pressure to teach her.
And then I know, that I have to let go.

Also while learning the new things
I immediately try to translate it into working with people –
and in fact the phonecall from Zipi truly demanded from me
to work with her right there .

But it didn't make me happy.
I didn't feel satisfied or successful.
So I feel guilty and unworthy.
My righteousness pattern wanted to tempt me to call her
and ask "if it helped her".
But now I can accept it in my body, that I am not "flawless",
and that though wanting to help,
wanting people to love themselves,
so often either fail in doing so
or even add to their predicament, like in the case of Gabriela :
"your reaction (to my cancer) was extremely unhelpful."
In the pool I remembered that pathetic attempt to "help" ,
when I was 16 or 17, standing in line with the homeless
to enter the public shelter on the Marienplatz in Stuttgart....
And then I remembered the tenth picture of the Zen Ox-herding
– this fat man sitting on the market-place seems to have no purpose,
he is not driven by "wanting to help, teach, save the world",
but he is doing exactly that.
"When they have passed,
their life's work is done,
the people look and say: it happened of itself…"}

I'll now - October 29, 2007 - quote the entire passage,stuck to my computer,
since I got this saying of Laotse, after all, from Yanina (November 11, 1982)

"The great of earth,
How softly do they live
The lesser ones it is are praised, revered;
Still lesser, feared.
but these,
One hardly knows that they are there,
So gently do they go about their task,
So quietly achieve;
When they have passed,
Their life's work is done,
The people look and say:
It happened of itself..."
[see my song, based on biblical metaphors]

Society mostly gives you the same unfriendly hearing
you probably give yourself.
"Shape up" the world says.
Results are wanted of course,
but sometimes they are wanted so quickly, so tensely
that there's not a minute to see what is in the way.
Yet one minute can make a vast difference.
Other people often don't want to know
what is really stopping us or frustrating us.
"Just do it right."
The inward complexity,
which can stop us
but can also make us better, more effective, interesting, and creative,
is often not welcome.
There are those condemning words
– lazy, not motivated, selfish, self-pitying, too sensitive, too demanding –
which do not really describe what is in us, but rather, dismiss what is in us.
But we must look inside ourselves.


Suppose you are interviewing a rather shy person
who hasn't been allowed to say much for some time, perhaps some years.
You would not get impatient and yell at the person after five seconds.
You would ask questions gently and then wait at least thirty seconds

p.81

before concluding that the person was a hopeless idiot
and also empty and incapable of speech.
Nor would you reject the first thing that was said.
This doesn't mean I am demanding
that you change yourself completely before you even begin focusing.
I am not suggesting
that you can be self-accepting and self-loving
and all the things you'd like to be and perhaps are not just
by reading these pages.
Rather, it is an attitude you can take for this special time of focusing.
There is also some strong, harsh voice
that interrupts loudly when one tries to listen inwardly.
Sometimes it is a critical part of oneself.
Sometimes, however, it is a perfectly good life energy that is impatient.
"I've been in the same spot for years,
now I want something to get me out."
This is a perfectly justified feeling, but it too must wait.
"But I've waited all my life."
Sure, but now wait only these few minutes
so we can hear from your internal self.


Let's ask gently, "What do you feel down in there?'
It is important in the first focusing movement
to establish this atmosphere of a friendly hearing.
Be prepared to accept for a moment whatever feelings you find inside.
Don't argue with them.
An unfriendly hearing is one
in which certain answers or all answers are rejected
before they are even fully heard.
It is the kind of hearing an angry teacher gives a disruptive child .
It is the kind you have probably given yourself too often:
"Well, what do you have to say for yourself?
How do you explain this new mess you've gotten us into?"
"Well, I"
"shut up! I'll tell you what your trouble is…"


The first movement of focusing is not like that.
In this movement
you smile at yourself,
hold out your hand to yourself
"Hello, there, how are you feeling now"
Having asked that question, you carefully avoid answering it.
Let the answer come from inside, and accept it for the moment.
"Lots of problems"
"Oh, lots of problems huh? "
Well, Ok, let's just clear a space among them for a while,
so we can sit in peace…
Which problem feels the heaviest right now?
That one? …
Ah, that sex business, is it? What else?
Keep your cleared space.
When you begin to focus, don't be inside any of these things.
Stand back, or stand next to, what you focus on,
Ask: "How does that feel today, all that about sex?"
And you are into the second movement
with every chance of making something shift.

fascinated

ve-Arnon hikka al sela

mi-ma'ayane ha-yeshu'ah

 

 

p.83

Chapter Eight: If you can't find a felt sense.
Where to look for a felt sense

p.84
A felt sense is the many-stranded fabric of bodily awareness
that (for example) guides golfers as they tee off [sic].
It would be impossible for them to think of all the details
of location, surrounding environment, and body movement
that are woven into aiming.
But the body knows the complex set of coordinated movements
it must make to swing.
The single felt sense of the situation
incorporates the problem and the bodily known solution.
Golfers cannot think out all these details intellectually.
When a golfer swings,
several hundred different muscles must all work together in a precise way,
each coming into action at a certain microsecond,
each exerting just the right amount of pull on the right bone
for the right length of time.
The body feels all this as a whole.
If you observe a golfer getting ready to swing,
you can see the whole body taking aim.
It's done not just with the eyes or the arms
but by changing the placement of the feet,
rotating and repositioning the whole body.
Golfers aim with the feel of the whole body.

It may be that conscious direction is needed on one part of the process.
The golfer may be thinking,
"This time I must keep that left elbow straighter."
But all the other aim-taking motions occur without conscious thought
as the golfer thinks about that left elbow.
The preliminary movements are guided by the whole body's feel,
finding its balance,
seeking the feeling that says,
"Yes, now I am ready, I feel right. Now I can swing. "
Golfers cannot describe that feeling of "ready",
because too many details are involved.
They know the feeling when it comes, however.
When the body-feel is right, they swing.

p.85
There is another way to get at this question
of where and how to look for a felt sense –
another kind of example that may be more familiar and useful to you.
Suppose you have been listening to a discussion
and are about to say somethng relevant and important.
The others are still talking.
You don't have your words prepared.
All you have is a felt sense of what you want to say.

p. 90
In a way, you are now going through the focusing movements backward.
This works well for some people.
The most common procedure is
to make contact first with the felt sense of the problem as a whole .
But if you find that it is more effective for you sometimes
to start with words and work backward to the felt sense of  a l l   t h a t
by all means do it that way.
But if you do, be sure that your inner attitude is one of asking, not telling.
…how your body experiences them, and let your body-feeling answer.

 

p.91
When nothing feels bodily

"Before I could learn to focus", someone said to me,
"I had first to discover how the ordinary emotions were really in my body.
I used to feel fear and anxiety and excitement, of course,
but I used to feel them all around me.
Like they were in the air, sort of.
It took me some time to realize that they were in my body,
like my heart pounding, or a sinking feeling in my gut.
I had to learn this first about the ordinary things everybody feels,
that they were inside.
Only then could I look for a felt sense inside."

Test yourself now.
Can you put your attention inside your stomach?
Sense a distinct feeling there, perhaps warm and fuzzy, perhaps tight and tense.
If you cannot get such a sensation in your stomach,
then you need to work on this.
Put your attention in your left big toe; wiggle it. Press it down.
Now you feel the sensation it it.
Now come up to your kneee.
This time don't move your knee, just see if you can find it from inside.
Then move to your groin,
and from there move up into your stomach.
There you are.

p.92
If you find your mind wandering while trying to focus

To bring yourself back, you need to be gentle,
something like dealing with a small child. …
Gently put your arm around yourself, so to speak and guide yourself back.
It doesn't matter how many times you have to do that.

Much water is needed to make mushrooms grow
so that caterpillars can find their breakfast

 

 

 

If You Have Few Feelings

It may seem to you that you are simply not very complicated inside,
that you don't have that complexity of feeling strands
that I am describing in this book.
But you do have it.
You are human.
It is there.
We are so accustomed to the simple patterns –
if someone cheats us we are mad, if someone ignores us we are hurt –
that many people don't look
beneath these simple patterns to their own unique complexity. ..

p.93
All people feel "bad " or "hurt", when they are ignored,
but just how and where it gets me
is not the same as just how and where it gets you.
This "just how and where" is beneath the simple feeling
that is patterned and universal.
To make touch with that could take a little time.
You have to say to yourself,
"Yes.. that's right… I feel hurt, and that's natural,
yes, of course I know why, they ignored me.
Sure, that's it, but…
let me sense   a l l   t h a t   which is involved for me in this.
It has to do with all-about-that person
and all-about-me-with-that person,
and all-about-what-it-means-to-me-to-get-ignored-anyway."
Soon you will feel the mass of things not yet clearly known.
Then you can focus on the felt sense and then on its crux.

Practice:
as you go through your daily life,
stop inwardly once in a while and ask in a friendly way,
"How am I now? What am I feeling now?"
Don't tell yourself the answer. Wait. See what comes.
Don't say bad things to yourself ..
just be pleased that you have found it,
that it is clearly felt.
Come to know your inside space.

p. 94
Your friend's assessment - "you look angry" - may be quite wrong.
You may feel upset, worried, annoyed, impatient, disappointed, apprehensive, or … no name
When you apply one of those well-worn unit-labels to a feeling
– angry, scared, bored –
the tendency is to think
you now know everything there is to know about that feeling.
You have given it a label, you have identified it, and that's that.
But there is always much, much more to know,
for there is an infinity of possible ways
to feel any labeled feeling such as anger.
Welcome esp. those feelings that come without names.
Pause, listen and let fresh words flow from it:
"I feel… like I ought to be able to do something about this,
but… I'm walled in, or something."

If you feel blank, or stuck, or empty -
for focusing just about anything will turn out to be a feeling.
The absence of feeling is also a feeling.

p.95
lf you are angry at yourself,
or trying too hard,
or too restless
or afraid to focus
whatever gets in the way,
you can focus on that for the moment
instead of the problem or difficulty you wanted to focus on.
It may be that your body needs this obstacle to be removed first.
" There I go again, trying so hard I get all tense.
Let's just feel what is  a l l   t h a t  about trying so hard. "
Or:
"I feel too restless to focus.
I'm too jumpy.
I wish I weren't so jumpy, so I could let my attention down inside."
"OK, let's take the jumpy.
What is the whole feel of this jumpy?"

In this way you respect your body's sense of what has to be taken up next.
Usually that turns out to be a new and better way into the problem.

p.96

If You Avoid Your Feelings

"I don't want to open the lid"
but you are not any kind of container
in which feelings writhe around with lives of their own.
You are a process,
and your feelings are a part of that process.

p. 97
For example,
there is the way I felt with my father when he wouldn't listen to me,
a feeling of helpless anger.
Isn't that the same feeling I had then, have now, and can have
whenever I bring it back to myself?
Yes, but I am never  j u s t  this feeling.
I am a whole body.
Therefore this feeling that I call "helpless anger"
comes along with a thousand other things.
Each time this feeling comes back to me
it has a different totality with it.

[Rachel:
I experienced this to be true for every kind of feeling,
except the feeling of disgust that rears its head,
whenever I remember sexual abuse-
perpetrated towards myself
or towards somebody near me...]

When in focusing,
I ask my body to let me have more of what's in that whole feeling,
the very way I approach myself
changes the totality.
The good-feeling focusing process itself changes much of the surroundings
in which this feeling is now produced.
My memory of my boyhood feeling won't change,
but the way my whole body produces the feeling will be different.
And that is one way to understand
why focusing allows the body to change
what has long been stuck and unchanging in us.
Our feelings are newly produced each moment.

 

 

 

 

If Too Many Feelings Come Too Fast

"Take any one, and stop it, and stay with it"

p.98
If your critic makes you feel bad

The best way to deal with the critic (everyone has one!)
is to wave it away with some disrespectful comment.
Mine usually says the same things, over and over.
So I say to it,
"Go away and come back when you have something new to say."
Or "I don't have to listen to anybody who talks to me in that tone."

p.99
Wave it off with your hand, and put your attention in your body.
Wait till you are again sensing your own inward source,
where the felt sense of the whole problem forms.
Find out, underneath the critic,
what  y o u  really feel and perceive, and need.

"I go right to my bad feeling, and feel bad as always"

"When I came in here I felt fine,
I focused on my bad feeling , and now I feel bad.
Is this what focusing is for?"
No ! Focusing involves
letting a felt sense form something
wider than and different from your old familiar bad feeling.

p.100
Sure, you know your particular depressed place..
Focusing is  l i g h t er  than heavy emotions.
Sometimes heavy emotions do come in focusing,
but a felt sense is always easier on the body than emotions.
Great passions, insane jealousy, tearing resentments, grand sufferings –
these are sometimes patterns set off by little feelings you hardly noticed.
Focus on the "little" feeling that set it off.

You can focus while you are waiting for a bus.
Just see what's between you and feeling fine.
Don’t go  i n t o  these, just say "Yes, that's there…"
and feel the relief that comes from making the space.
Then, if one problem needs working on,
get the whole felt sense of it!
"What is it like to have that there, now?"
By the time you get on the bus you'll feel much better..
Focusing takes a few minutes, ten, fifteen, let's say even half an hour.
But not more.
Then it's time to talk, rest, do something else.
Do not grind away at things.
You will return later.
Meanwhile , the body will process it.

p.101
Emotion versus felt Sense: this distinction is vital

As you focus on a felt sense you may get further emotions coming out of it.
But a felt sense is not an emotion like anger..
It is a sense of your  t o t a l  emotional situation,
a feel of many things together,
in which an emotion can be embedded
or from which an emotion is produced.