TS: I notice I feel really moved by this part of our conversation because I think a lot of times we approach something like body-centered inquiry because we’re going to get rid of our pain and get to the bottom of it and discover that, “Oh, this happened to me and now I’ve forgiven it, and I’m free and I’m happy and it’s over.” Here you’ve obviously gone so deeply into the practice and have discovered your helplessness. That’s so profound to me.
JF: It definitely has been for me and it actually brought up something, which I had the good fortune to talk to Dr. Gendlin about this, is that I notice that many people use body-centered inquiry as a tool for psychological healing, which it’s phenomenal for that. There’s a tendency that, “I’ve got an issue. I sort of clarify the issue. I relax. I open my awareness to the felt sense. I notice where I feel it. I give it a name. I give it some space. I ask it what it needs. It begins to shift. I feel what the unmet need is. I bring empathy to that. I feel a little bit better. Then I’m on to the next issue.”
But what I noticed in my own practice with this, just as every time I would work with my migraines and my physical pain, and I realized this is not going to be psychologically resolved—this just seems to be an experience of raw, unfiltered pain. The only way I could be with it was some kind of shift in identity, that I needed to open to something larger than my capacity to fix it in order to be with it. Part of what happened is it just opens me to the suffering of others. One of the venues for me when I’m caught in a migraine and I open to it as fully and intimately as I can, is to remind myself that other people feel this too, and there’s a profound shift that happens.
What I’ve noticed for myself, that when I do this process for myself or when I lead other people through it, is what I find most interesting is when there is that felt shift—when that deep ache in your heart begins to move and shift and change, and grief begins to turn into gratitude and you begin to turn your attention to explore—what does gratitude feel like on the inside? How big could this feeling of gratitude get? That it becomes a doorway into the nondual. It becomes a doorway into the pure open presence. To me that’s really the fruit of the practice, is moving from this tightly bound self that’s working on an issue to this capacity to hold it in awareness itself.
TS: Jonathan, I’m curious if you’d be willing to lead our listeners in a short practice of some kind of that might give them a sense of right now identifying the felt sense in their experience and investigating, becoming familiar and potentially learning something from the process. Do you think we could do that?
JF: That would be great. In fact, why don’t we do a little process around making a decision?
TS: Sure.
JF: Because this one, it could be really tangible and helpful, I think.
TS: Perfect.
JF: Would it be helpful for me to preface this with a little story?
TS: Sure.
JF: Yes. I think the example might be helpful to get a sense of how this process works because it can be quite reliable. A number of years ago, I was invited to a conference on the psychology of happiness with Martin Seligman and it was at a local university. I was invited to be a presenter and there would be kind of a faculty lunch and so forth. I immediately said yes because I’m just kind of a greedy person. I realized as time went by that I wasn’t feeling great about it. I was being asked for the copy and the headshot and all that sort of thing, and I kept resisting. I thought, “What’s going on?” Finally the deadline was coming, and I thought, “You know, I have option. I could always just say I’m not going to do it,” because I felt so unsettled inside.
Then I remembered this process. How this process works is when you have a decision to make, you break it down to kind of binaural. You know, two options, maybe three. I chose, OK, one option is I can just make up an excuse and beg out of the conference not too late. The other option is I can say, “Yes, I’ll do it.” What you do then, once you have that clear sense of what option you’re going to choose, you choose one of those and then you tell your body, “This is what I’m going to do,” and then you pay attention to the felt sense, to how your body holds that. I thought, “OK, I’m going to do it. I’m going to tell my body I’m going to do it.”
Immediately I began to feel this clench inside. I’d feel a tightening in my belly. I could feel myself beginning to hunch forward a little bit. I recognized it. I brought attention to it. It had a feeling of kind of like being the younger brother, not ready for primetime, feeling small. There was sort of a shyness to it. It was a pretty yucky feeling, but I continued to try to bring some compassion to it. Then one of the pivotal questions is, “Well, what does this need?” I asked, “What does this sort of tight crunched down, small, shy feeling inside need?” The word “help” popped to mind right away. I thought, “Help, what does that mean?” Then I realized I hadn’t taught in an academic setting in a really long time, and really what I needed was some help to find out who was there and what kind of copy I would write.
Then I asked myself, “Well, if I had that kind of help, would I still want to do this conference?” Immediately my body just was a big yes. It felt up. It felt excited. It really helped me to understand that when we’re conflicted around a decision, something inside wants to do option A, but something inside doesn’t, and oftentimes there’s an unmet need in there. When you can get to that unmet need, it can be sometimes very, very helpful. Perhaps I could lead just a short little practice on this?
TS: Yes. Wonderful. Thank you.
JF: Wonderful. Great. You might—if you like, you can close your eyes. You might want to slow down your breath a little bit. Just notice where you feel the breath on the inside. You might reflect on some decision you’ve got up ahead of you. It might be something as practical as what are you going to have for lunch or what are you going to have for dinner, or you might want to broaden that out to some decision you’ve got that feels a little bit unsettled. Over the next few breaths, you might clarify what that issue is all about. What wants your attention? If you have a sense of that, you might reflect now, what are your options? If you could break down two or possibly three options, you might do that now.
In a few moments now, I’ll be asking you to reflect on one of those options you might like to investigate, and then I’ll be asking you a series of questions that might help you to sense what it’s like on the inside. So you might select one of these possibilities. Just sense which one feels like it would like a little bit of investigation. It doesn’t really matter. Then when you’re ready, just tell your body, “This is the one I’m going to do.” As you think about following this option, what felt sense begins to form on the inside? It might be strong and unmistakable. It might be flicker or blip. It might be vague, unformed. What is that something inside? Where do you feel it? Does it have a shape or a size or a color? Is there a sense of its density? If it could hold water, how much water could it hold? You might just check in and sense, does it feel OK to stay with this inquiry? Does it feel safe? If so, you might continue this investigation.
When you imagine going down this option, what does it feel like on the inside? Whatever this felt sense may be, you might ask what it needs or how it wants you to be with it, and just to listen. Noticing anything that may have shifted inside, anything that may have moved or changed, and regarding this decision ahead of you, you might take a few moments to reflect on the following question; regarding this decision, what advice do you have to give yourself? If you were to do that, not perfectly or not all the time, but if you were to follow that, what would that feel like inside? What would that be like? You might, if you like, kind of cycle back and spend a little more time with it, or you might explore another option, but quite often I find that just choosing one of these options will oftentimes lead to a felt sense of what might be most wholesome. Then you can deepen the breath and kind of let this practice fall away.
TS: Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for that. I found it very personally helpful.
JF: Oh, good.
TS: Very clarifying.
JF: Again, when we can tune in to the gut feel, that kinesthetic intuition, there’s a tremendous amount of wisdom in there.
TS: I noticed it didn’t necessarily solve my problem, but it told me you could get more information in this direction, in that direction, and that will then help you be able to come to a decision.
JF: Wow. Fantastic. Fantastic.
TS: Now Jonathan, I notice we haven’t talked very much about you and your evolution as a teacher. I wonder if you can share with our listeners a little bit about your personal story, if you will, and how that brought you to be teaching now, body-centered inquiry really as the focus of your work?
JF: I think from a very, very early age I had a very profound awakening experience as a child that really shifted my attention in life.
TS: Can you tell us about that?
JF: Briefly, when I was a kid, I grew up on a farm, a beautiful farm in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, and maybe six or seven or eight, I just had an experience of leaning up against this big pine tree behind the house. The best way I can describe it is I felt myself kind of merging with the tree. In my seven-year-old language, the best description I had for the experience was that the stars in the sky felt like cells in my body. Then I ran inside to tell my mother and I told her, and she looked at me and said, “Wash your hands. It’s time for dinner,” which was a little bit of searing experience for me, actually quite a searing experience.
I had this very deep internal experience of something I couldn’t articulate, and that set me off. I was also raised a Quaker, which is a wonderful tradition to grow up in, and fortunately I discovered meditation when I was 15, and yoga. I just knew instantly that this would be something I’d be doing for the rest of my life. And so I continued with my meditation practice through high school and through college, and found a community where we meditated together. Then stumbled into an ashram when I was 25, into the Kripalu Yoga ashram, and stayed for about 24 years.
TS: Oh my.
JF: Having a practice at the core was so, so powerful for me, but also I think because it sensitized my own suffering, it sensitized me to the suffering of others, and through all the different modalities that I’ve explored over the years, through different yoga technologies and meditation technologies, what has been so helpful for me as kind of a head-based person has been this potency of exploring this world on the inside. Now living outside of Washington, DC, and working with very, very bright, motivated, utterly stressed-out people, it has been such a privilege to share these practices with those who are really looking for freedom in the midst of busy, very, very engaged lives.
TS: I wanted to end on a note that draws on something you talk about in the Body-Centered Inquiry audio training series. You talk about how at a certain point, when someone becomes really familiar with the practice, that they have this experience of stepping into something that you call an “evolutionary process”—almost like the innate intelligence of the body takes over in a certain way in someone’s life. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, this evolutionary process that doing this kind of work can unleash in our experience?
JF: Yes. There are two things about that. One was sitting in retreat with Sogyal Rinpoche and engaging into all those technologies, and I had some very, very powerful experiences. I asked him in a little private meeting I had with him, “If I continue to practice these techniques, what can I expect?” I was so startled by his response. He looked at me and he smiled and he said, “Confidence.” He said, “You will develop confidence that you can be with anything.” I’ve really come to recognize that more and more in my life—a sense that no matter what arises, I can be with this. That may come with age, but I do think it comes with practice.
But I’ve also found that really living in cooperation with the body does help us more and more move from the realm of the cognitive, with this judging, comparing mind, more and more into a sense of flow. I like to think this is a very intuitive process and the linear rational mind is very, very good at comparing and judging and figuring things out, but the moments when I’m really in flow, when I feel kind of hooked up or deep intimacy or connection to the mystery, there are three things that are not happening; I’m not judging, I’m not comparing, and I’m not trying to figure things out. I think what happens, what I’m sensing in my own life and with others is that the more we can open that internal sensitivity to what’s here, not only do we heal what’s between us and feeling free, but perhaps we live more and more out of that flow space where our intuition becomes more alive. It affects our decision-making. It affects all of our choices.
TS: I am going to sneak in one final, final question here, which is, you said a couple of times this question, “What’s between us and being free?” almost as if this is a kind of ultimate inquiry or something that we can do with ourselves to really look at what’s between us and being free. Why is that question so important to you, Jonathan?
JF: I learned part of that protocol as part of the Focusing protocol, but I find it to be tremendously helpful because when I can sit—and how I tend to practice it is really through the repetitive inquiry to ask myself that question repeatedly, “What’s between me and feeling free?” Well, the first response might be, “You know, I’m a little dehydrated. I didn’t drink enough water today.” Part of the practice in this approach is you say hello to it, you set it to the side. Then you ask again, “What’s between me and feeling free?” “Oh, you know, there’s this anxiety that I’ve got around this phone call I got to make next week.” Say hello to that. You place that to the side. When I do that practice and when I lead other people in that practice, quite often there will be a point where either I or someone else will say, “You know, other than these 15 things, I’m feeling pretty free.” [Tami laughs.]
What it does is it gives you a sense of the landscape where you can really sense, “Here’s what’s between me and feeling free,” but it also cultivates the sense of who I am as the awareness of all of this, and that I find to be quite extraordinary. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning and I have those moments of clarity and then the software program starts booting up, and before I get my feet on the floor, I’m already amped up into some anxiety. I might just lie there for a little while and just say, “OK, so what’s between me and feeling free right now?” I might name four or five things, and sometimes just the naming of them, the recognizing of them will cultivate a little bit more, a little bit more relaxation.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Jonathan Foust. He’s created with Sounds True an audio training series on Body-Centered Inquiry: Meditation Training to Awaken Your Inner
Guidance, Vitality, and Loving Heart. It’s packed with guided meditations, practices, and some pretty good wisdom stories and some funny stories of Jonathan as well. It’s really quite an amazing training program that you’ve created.
JF: Thank you so much.
TS: Thank you so much for being a guest on Insights at the Edge, and thank you, everyone, for listening. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey.
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