I had been doing identity work for years by the time I found focusing.
The reading (The Body Keeps the Score, Atlas of the Heart, Boundaries, It Didn’t Start With You, etc.) and everything that came after it, trying to understand why the body holds what the mind can’t always articulate.
There were sound and smell triggers I was working through.
There were patterns of reactiveness I couldn’t seem to interrupt, no matter how much I understood them intellectually.
That was the gap. I could name the pattern. I just couldn’t stop it from happening.
I knew what it felt like to say yes before I’d had a chance to think. I knew the knee-jerk quality of my helping instinct – the way it fired before I could check whether I had capacity, whether the situation called for it, whether the yes I was about to give was actually mine to give. I’d written about it. I’d talked about it in therapy. I understood it.
But understanding something and interpreting it in real time are two completely different things.
That’s what focusing taught me. And I didn’t find it in a book or a wellness app. I found it through Shulamit Ber Levtov, a therapist, certified focusing practitioner, and someone I’m genuinely grateful crossed my path when she did.
How I Found It
It was the end of 2021 going into 2022. Shula and I had met through an overlap in professional communities; we’d both been part of the same mastermind at different times, so there was a little shared context before we ever spoke directly.
We started working together by focusing on Part One of the focusing curriculum developed by Anne Weiser Cornell and Barbara McGavin, using a workbook and regular guided sessions.
I want to be clear about who Shula is, because I think it matters. She’s a Registered Social Worker in Ontario, a certified Focusing practitioner through the International Focusing Institute, and someone who has been doing mental health and personal growth work since 2000. She works specifically with women entrepreneurs – she calls herself the Entrepreneur’s Therapist – and her approach is trauma-informed, nervous-system-aware, and grounded in the real complexity of running a business while being a full human being. You can find her at shula.ca.
Focusing, specifically, isn’t something she necessarily advertises as a standard offering. She introduced it to me because she felt I would benefit from it. That kind of discernment, meeting someone where they actually are rather than where your service menu says they should be, is exactly the kind of thing I try to do in my own work.
What Focusing Actually Is
Focusing is a body-based practice developed by philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. The version I worked through, guided by Shula and informed by Anne Weiser Cornell’s framework, involves learning to attend to what your body is holding, the felt sense of something, before your mind has had a chance to translate it into words or logic.
It sounds simple. It is not simple.
The first time Shula guided me through a body scan, I didn’t really know what I was looking for.
She asked me to close my eyes, take deep breaths, which I had genuinely never paid serious attention to before, and scan slowly from the top of my head downward.
My scalp.
My eyes.
My throat.
Working through each part, noticing any response.
And then she asked me to hold something in mind that had been weighing on me. Something unclear or unresolved, and as I scanned, I was to notice what happened in my body when I held that thing.
My stomach got queasy. Not dramatically – just a quiet, persistent unease that I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been paying attention.
She had me stay with that.
Describe it.
Ask it questions – not in a logical way, but in the way you’d gently ask something you didn’t want to startle.
- What does this feel like?
- What shape does it have?
- What is it trying to tell you?
The process of putting it into words – not to explain it, but to acknowledge it – was the practice. A
nd just in doing that, something shifted.
Not solved.
Shifted.
The Silence Session
There was one session I came back to more than any other.
Shula walked me through an exercise where I imagined being alone in a room – calm, breathing, settled.
And then someone walks in.
She asked: what happens next?
Without thinking, I said: “I would say hello. I would step toward them. I might even extend my hand.”
She paused.
And then she asked: “Have you ever thought about not speaking?
We did the exercise again. This time, I didn’t say anything. The person walked in, and I stayed quiet, waiting to see what they would do.
I began to feel like I might cry.
Not dramatically. But there was a real lump in my throat, a tightness I hadn’t expected because staying quiet felt rude. It felt like I was withholding something the other person needed. Like I owed them my immediate presence – my voice, my warmth, my service – from the first moment they entered the space.
Shula asked: “What makes you think they would be uncomfortable by your silence?”
I didn’t have a clean answer. I just knew that silence felt like an absence of care. And I’d been filling the silence my whole life because of it.
That session didn’t cure me of anything. But it named something I’d been living with for years without knowing how to see it: the compulsion to fill space.
The discomfort with pausing. The sense that showing up for someone meant showing up immediately, vocally, fully – before I’d even had a chance to check in with myself.
Silence wasn’t the issue. The issue was my relationship to silence and what its impact had on me.
What Changed – And What Didn’t
Shula was honest with me about this from the beginning: focusing is a lifelong practice. It’s not a fix. It’s a way of building a different relationship with your own body’s signals and learning to notice them, to pause, to let them speak before you react.
My reactiveness hasn’t been healed. I don’t think that’s the right word for it, but, let’s just day I am a work in progress and I do pause more than I used to. I’d say about 70% of the time, I try to remember to take an actual breath – a real one, not a performative one – before I respond to something that pulls at my helping instinct. I hold space in a way that feels different from before. More chosen, less automatic.
And I’ve learned something that I think is genuinely important for anyone doing the kind of excavation work I talk about in my own practice: self-awareness is not the same as self-regulation.
You can know your patterns inside and out – understand them, name them, trace them back to their origins – and still not be able to stop them from running in real time. That’s not a failure of understanding. It’s a signal that the work needs to happen at a different level. Not just in the mind. In the body.
Focusing gave me a way to do that.
The Six Principles
For anyone who wants to explore this further, the focusing framework includes six core practices:
- Being present
- Going slowly
- Sensing in the body
- Staying in contact with the unclear edge
- Holding a space for something new to emerge
- Welcoming what comes – whatever it is
These aren’t instructions so much as orientations. Ways of being in relationship with your own inner experience that, over time, build a different kind of attunement to yourself.
The workbook for Part One of Cornell’s program is substantial and rich. I have it and still return to it. If you want to explore the framework further, focusingresources.com is Anne Weiser Cornell’s home for resources, courses, and deeper practice.
And if you’re a woman entrepreneur who’s carrying more than your nervous system was meant to hold alone, which, if I’m being honest, describes a lot of us, I’d encourage you to look at Shula’s work at shula.ca. She’s thoughtful, trauma-informed, and the kind of practitioner who meets you where you actually are.
Why This Is A Lifelong Practice
Focusing isn’t an assessment. You don’t take it and get a result. You practice it, over time, with guidance or without, and the result is a different relationship with your own interior life.
For the work I do inside The Valued Experience®, specifically within the Garden of System & Self™, the body is always part of the picture. The excavation work isn’t just intellectual. It’s felt. And learning to attend to what your body is holding, rather than always leading with your mind’s interpretation of things, is one of the most useful capacities you can develop.
Focusing helped me develop it. I hope it’s useful to you too.
