Gene Gendlin:

“Experience is a myriad richness. We think more than we can say. We feel more than we can think. We live more than we can feel… …And there is still much more.”

“Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, 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.”  

“Through Focusing we can unlock doors and move into dimensions that cannot be entered through the intellect alone.”

“When you learn how to focus you will discover that the body finding its own way provides its own answers to many of your problems. The process brings change.”

“Focusing begins with giving your body a pause, a break, in which to let it become whole.”

“Whatever comes in focusing, welcome it. Take the attitude you are glad your body spoke to you, whatever it said. This is only one shift; it is not the last word. If you are willing to receive this message in a friendly way, there will be another.”

“Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a right way of being, if you give is space to move toward its rightness.”

“Life always has its own forward direction, whatever else might also be going on.”

“…when the right words are found, the felt sense opens; it flows forward. Where before it was stuck, now it flows into the meaning of the words”

“Focusing … is optimistic. It is based on the very positive expectation of change.”

“We might not like when we hear from the felt sense, but we want to be friendly to the messenger, or else we are not likely to hear more. So instead of criticizing or attacking “it” the client learns to be friendly toward it and glad about its arrival.”

“People are inherently at the driver’ s wheel of their life …inherently in charge of their human life process.“

“It took me a long time to learn that the ongoing bodily experiencing has its own inherent life-forwarding implying. The little steps that arrive at the edge are creative, imaginative, and always in some positive direction.”

“The essence of working with another person is to be present as a living being. And that is lucky, because if we had to be smart, or good, or mature, or wise, then we would probably be in trouble. But what matters is not that. What matters is to be a human being, with another human being, to recognize the other person as another being in there.”