Your Body Knows the Answer Using Your Felt Sense to Solve Problems, Effect Change, and Liberate Creativity

A manual for Mindful Focusing—a new integration of Western psychology and Buddhist mindfulness techniques for accessing your inherent wisdom and solving life’s problems

Ever come up against one of those moments when life requires a response—and you feel clueless? We all have. But there’s good news: you have all the wisdom you need to respond to any situation, even the “impossible” ones. It’s a matter of tuning in to your felt sense: that subtle physical sensation that lives somewhere between your conscious and subconscious mind and that can be accessed through Focusing—the well-known method developed by the psychologist Eugene Gendlin.
 
David Rome’s technique of Mindful Focusing unites Gendlin’s method with Buddhist mindfulness practices to provide a wonderfully effective method for accessing your felt sense—so you can problem solve, deal with challenges, and respond honestly and creatively to the world around you.

DAVID I. ROME is a certified Focusing Trainer who has brought Focusing together with Buddhist mindfulness-awareness practices in workshops in the United States, Canada, and Europe. He began practicing Buddhism in 1971 and served for nine years as private secretary to the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. David played a leadership role in the early development of Shambhala International and Naropa University and was one of the first teachers in the Shambhala Training program. He has served as President of Schocken Books and Senior VP for Planning of the Greyston Foundation and is a senior fellow with the Garrison Institute, a Hudson Valley research and retreat center applying contemplative methods to solve social and environmental challenges. Your Body Knows the Answer is his first book.

Introduction

PART ONE: MAKING FRIENDS IN YOURSELF
1. Steps toward Finding the Felt Sense
Exercise 1.1: Creating a GAP (Grounded Aware Presence)
Exercise 1.2: Friendly Attending
Exercise 1.3: Noticing "something"
2. Three Gates to the Felt Sense
Exercise 2.1: From Physical Sensations to Felt Senses
Exercise 2.2: Dropping the Storyline
3. The Feeling beneath the Feeling
Exercise 3.1: The Feeling beneath the Feeling
4. Cultivating Felt Senses
Exercise 4.1: "How's It Going?"
Exercise 4.2: Noticing What Your Body Is Already Holding
Exercise 4.3: "What Wants My Attention Just Now?"
5. Working with "Situations"
Exercise 5.1: Starting with a Situation
6. Focusing the Felt Sense
Exercise 6.1: Focusing the Felt Sense
7. Requesting Insight from the Felt Sense
Exercise 7.1: Empathic Inquiry
8. Small Steps, Felt Shifts, and Receiving What Comes
Exercise 8.1: Small Steps, Felt Shifts, and Receiving What Comes
Mindful-Focusing Protocol
9. Cultivating Self-Empathy and Defusing the Inner Critic
Exercise 9.1: Befriending the Inner Critic
Interlude
10. Mindfulness, Awareness, and the Sovereign Self
11. The Deep Nature of Life Process

PART TWO: LIVING LIFE FORWARD
12. From Insights to Action Steps
Exercise 12.1: Finding a Right Next Step
13. Deep Listening
Exercise 13.1: Deep Listening
14. Conflict
Exercise 14.1: Vicarious Felt Sense
Exercise 14.2: Taking Turns
15. Making Tough Decisions
Exercise 15.1: Deciding from the Felt Sense
16. Under-Standing
Exercise 16.1: Reading with the Felt Sense
17. "First Thought Best Thought"--Felt Sense in Creative Process
Exercise 17.1: Composing a Haiku
18. Enlarging Space
Exercise 18.1: Enlarging Space
Exercise 18.2: Wandering with Wonder
19. Contemplation: Sensing for the More
Exercise 19.1: Sensing for the More