“Focusing” for skeptics

A very effective way of doing this is simply to take the focus of your attention away from thinking and direct it into the body, where Being can be felt in the first instance as the invisible energy field that gives life to what you perceive as the physical body.

Focusing, by contrast, is optimistic. It is based on the very positive expectation of change. It doesn’t envision a human being as a fixed structure whose shape can be analyzed once and for

A felt sense doesn’t come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling.

When you are uncomfortable or even in pain, you don’t have to label it as bad or unjust and catastrophic. Instead, keep it right there where it is so you can still do something with it. And how you do that—that magic tool—is focus.

The central premise of this stress-reduction method is focusing on the self: noticing our responses, even if they are conditioned by habit, in order to be fully conscious of them. In this way, we connect with the here and now and limit thoughts that tend to spiral out of control.