1. Active non-doing

When clients enter therapy, there are often caught in an obsessive mode of “What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” Often therapists react to these anxious demands with the response, “What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” The compulsive problem solving that ensues is a major means by which therapy remains stuck. So one of the important things for a therapist (and client) to do is “nothing.” The Chinese call this state “wu-wei”, or “active non-doing”.

Wu-wei does not mean falling sleep, collapsing, resigning one’s self, or withdrawing. On the contrary, it is an alert yet relaxed mode in which one feels centered and open to the entire field of activity. Erickson had this in mind when he said: “Too many psychotherapists try to plan what thinking they will do instead of waiting to see what the stimulus they receive is, and then letting their unconscious mind respond to that stimulus”. (In Gordon & Meyers-Anderson, 1981, p. 17)
So wu-wei is a sort of a relational meditation process. It is what an artist does to let the creative spirit find her, or an athlete does before a big event.

The therapist practicing active non-doing feels connected to self and client, deeply curious about whatever is “waking up” in the client’s consciousness. The interest is in letting the client’s spirit touch you, find you, and guide you. There are many ways to enter this process: most involve conscious breathing, somatic relaxing, attentional opening, and cognitive curiosity (see Gilligan, 1997). Sometimes I even say a little prayer to let whatever needs to be sponsored come and find me and teach me how to love it and support it.

A major skill being cultivated via wu-wei is attentional stability. In problem spaces, one of the first casualties is the destabilization of attention. When disturbing experiences arise, the result is often over-rigidity, fragmenting, spaciness, constricting, etc. A person loses his center, forgets about his embeddedness within larger fields, and becomes unhelpfully reactive (rather than responsive). Wu-wei is a relational meditation that allows a person to reconnect with whatever is happening while regaining his center. From there, helpful responses can arise.

Active non-doing is especially helpful for both client and therapist at the beginning of each session. It can be introduced through a meditation, light trance, or other simple mindfulness practices. It can be consciously returned to throughout the session, especially when it seems that experience is stuck.


2. Therapeutic focusing

Eugene Gendlin (1996) found that one of the best predictors of the helpfulness of a therapy session is whether the client can develop, within the first part of the session, a “felt sense” of the problem. Gendlin (1996) points out that felt sense is distinct from simply emotions, physical sensations, or perceptions:
“A felt sense is the wholistic, implicit bodily sense of a complex situation. It includes many factors, some of which have never been separated before…. A felt sense contains a maze of meanings, a whole texture of facets, a persian rug of patterning—more than could be said or thought…One single thing, one statement, or next step can arise from the whole of it, if we allowed it to form. (p. 58)

In Gendlin’s “focusing” approach, a client is asked to develop a “felt sense” by letting go of trying to figure things out and then sensing how the body is representing the problem. Further listening and dialoguing with the felt sense is the basis for therapeutic progress.

In the self-relations method of therapeutic focusing, both client and therapist are asked to connect with and track their respective felt senses. In the first step of this process, the therapist gives primary attention to the felt sense in her own body as the client talks about his problem. For example, she may notice a sense of tightness, or emptiness in her belly as she listens receptively to the client’s presentation. She allows her attention to drop into that place, making it a listening center. Mindfulness of this center continues throughout the method.

In the second step, the therapist also attends to the client’s center of disturbance. The therapist might find the client’s voice tonality leading her to the center. Or she might look at the midline of the client’s torso, noticing where the energy either seems to be intense (anxiety) or withdrawn (depression). Tuning into that place (while maintaining her own felt sense), the therapist gently asks the client to take a few moments of silence to sense where in his body he most feels the center of disturbances. The client is invited to gently place a hand on that center to bring more attention to it.

The simultaneous sensing and tracking of the two centers is then continued for the duration of the session. One value is that it centers and stabilizes the attention of both therapist and client. One of the major problems about problems is they tend to destabilize attention; it can get fragmented, disconnected, too narrow, too intellectual, and so on. Therapeutic focusing can keep bringing both therapist and client back to their felt senses.

Therapeutic focusing also helps the therapist to listen to the story without being caught in it. It is important to appreciate that the problem narrative typically leads one away from connection, not deeper into it. It is easy to get caught in “talking about” the problem or even forgetting it; therapeutic focusing teaches you a way to “be with it” without being caught by the explanations or “story line”. In this sense, self-relations sees “problems” in terms of a disconnection between the stories of the cognitive self and the felt sense of the somatic self.

Therapeutic focusing also establishes a center-to-center relational connection between therapist and client that can be used to track what’s happening. For example, I was talking with his client about some difficult aspects of his marriage. We had established some form of therapeutic focusing, and the man seemed very connected. But after several minutes, I suddenly felt a disconnection to my own center. I noted this aloud to him, and wondered what he was feeling in his center. He started talking faster, but I asked him again gently. He noted that he felt the same, that he had gone off somewhere. This awareness allowed us to reconnect with the felt center, so that what was being talking about was connected to felt sense.

3. Providing sanctuary, proper naming, and blessings

As you connect with felt sense, you can begin to mid-wife new life into a person’s being. Felt sense is a first stage of a new identity-related process that can be more fully developed through sponsorship practices such as providing sanctuary, proper naming, and blessings.

Providing sanctuary means offering a safe place, both within the bodymind and the community, for a person or experience. The requires touching it with human presence, allowing it to be, listening deeply, and extending connection to it. It is what an artist does in welcoming the creative impulses that visit her, or what a parent does when a child approaches with a skinned knee. If these felt senses are ignored, rejected, or cursed, they can turn nasty and unbearable. Their human value will go unrealized, and real suffering will result. So the stakes are enormously high.

Thinking in terms of sanctuaries suggests that we think of a person’s center as having two levels: emotional context and emotional content. Virginia Satir pointed to this difference when she would ask a person two questions: (1) How do you feel about that? and (2) How do you feel about feeling that way? The first regards emotional content, the second the feeling context in which the content is held. The latter Is especially important: the person who develops a bodymind sanctuary within which any experience can visit feeling context has made it safe both for the experience and for the person(s) involved to “just let it happen”.

A major value of creating a sanctuary is that it differentiates the experience from the person experiencing it. This is a central goal of many bodymind practices, including hypnosis, meditation, EMDR, and self-relations. For example, as the experience of rage arises, providing it with place (for example, in the belly) allows the person to bear witness to the rage without identifying as it. At the same time, providing sanctuary within a mindbody center (heart, solar plexus, or belly) gives it a specific container, so it doesn’t spill out, project, or overwhelm the person or others.

As the person can bear witness to it, proper naming may develop. Proper naming is not meant as an objective classification, but rather as a touching of a felt sense with language. It is not an act of separation or dissection, but rather one of communion of subject with object. Naming adds an entirely human level to an archetypal experience, transforming it and extending it into the realm of human consciousness. (Without language, an experience is living but not human.) In most symptoms, a significant experience has not been properly named, held, and blessed; it is therefore dominant but seems to have no human value, for the simple reason that the sponsors involved have not properly welcomed and named it as “value-able”.

For example, a man who spent much of his adult life as a top-notch, hard-working lawyer began to slow down as he hit seventy. He was exhausted at night, his body wracked with anxiety, fear, and worries. His attempts to muscle the tiredness into submission just made matters worse. When he finally slowed down and listened to the felt sense in his heart, the presence of “death” was sensed and named. He broke out sobbing, continuing for some time. As the sobs subsided, he talked about how he had been running from death and it was overtaking him. Further conversations with “death” clarified his interests in living with quality time for as long as possible, which led to a significant change in his lifestyle, and the relationship of his “head” with his “heart”.

There are many ways to properly name experiences that are felt but not sponsored. For example, a simple exercise that I often use with couples and sometimes with individual clients involves having the clients get comfortable, centered, open to the field, and tuned to each other. Partner A speaks the following statements:

- Today my woundedness is about ______________
- Today my longing is for _____________________
- Today my strength is about ______________.

For each blank, the person lets a word or phrase come to mind, and then speaks it. It is important that it not be planned; the response should just come from listening to one’s center and letting it happen. For example, the person might say: Today my woundedness is about missing my daughter…. Today my longing is to be held…. Today my strength is about reaching out to others. In speaking each experience, the person seeks to let the energy lift from his center and extend into the relational field holding both partners. This is then released, a silent pause is taken, and the next sentence is undertaken. After Partner A finishes his three statements, Partner B responds with her own three. This cycle can be repeated a number of times, 5-6 being most typical. Such an exercise, which can also be practiced alone or silently during a conversation, is a simple way to bring sponsorship to whatever is arising in one’s center. Bringing mindfulness to an activated experience gives it place, and the connection between cognitive self and the somatic center can allow each experience to be a valuable resource rather than a distracting or symptom-causing nuisance. This is the difference that sponsorship makes.

4. Cultivating archetypal energies: fierceness, tenderness, and mischievousness.

Effective sponsorship, whether of one’s self or another person, requires the use of a number of complementary energies. For example, a helpful sponsor must be able to embody and extend fierceness in many ways: staying committed, seeing through “bullshit”, remaining focused, taking a person’s seriously, respecting and defending boundaries, and so forth. A good sponsor must equally cultivate tenderness in self and others via a soothing presence, an ability to emotionally touch and be touched, a gentle and kind presence, compassion, and so forth. Effective sponsorship also requires a sense of playfulness or mischievousness: a twinkle in the eye, a sense of humor, a capacity to hold multiple perspectives and shift gracefully among them, and so forth.

A sponsor lacking any of these energies might run into difficulty. Fierceness alone deteriorates into rigidity and crankiness. Tenderness by itself can sink into a sort of Barry Manilow-like sentimentality. Mischievousness in isolation makes everything a cynical game. Tender fierceness interspersed with timely humor has a much more powerful effect. Thus, an effective sponsorship works to cultivate and blend these complementary energies within one centered approach.

At the beginning of a session, I typically check in with myself to ensure the presence of a felt sense of each of these energies. If not, I take a few moments to access each of them within me. I then look to sense the presence of each energy within the client. This may be initially challenging, as a client may seemingly present only one. For example, a new client recently presented primarily in a helpless, regressed, vulnerable mode. While accepting that mode as valid and genuine, I looked to sense her hidden fierceness and her “inner rascal” before proceeding any further. Once I could sense them, I felt a much deeper connection, respect, and calmness with her.

There are many ways to cultivate these archetypal energies. For example, one training exercise done in dyads is as follows:

As with the “today my woundedness” exercise, the major interest is in relaxing, dropping into center, connecting with partner, then using the mindfulness of speech to touch and awaken an emotional center, then extend the energy into the interpersonal field. This is the purpose not only of hypnosis but also other performance arts: to develop and express an embodied experience within an energetic relational field. In this “embodied relationality”, old patterns may be reorganized into new meanings.

Each archetypal energy has many forms: integrated or unintegrated, undeveloped or mature, etc. By recognizing this, the therapist can sense a “problem” as an undeveloped or unintegrated form of an essential human resource. Thus, an angry person can be deeply appreciated for their fierceness, and encouraged to “do it more, do it better”, in ways that connect it with the other energies and allow new, more helpful forms to develop. Again, a basic principle of self-relations is that the problem is the solution: what seems to have no value may, under proper sponsorship conditions, be transformed into a deeply valuable expression.

5. Replacing negative sponsorship with positive sponsorship.

Each of us carries many sponsors within our head, some positive and some negative. A positive sponsor is one who (1) helps awaken awareness of the goodness and gifts of self, (2) helps awaken awareness of the goodness and gifts of the world, and (3) helps develop practices and understandings that connect the two domains. A negative sponsor is one who (1) turns awareness away from the goodness and gifts of the self, (2) turns awareness away from the goodness and gifts of the world, and (3) promotes practices and traditions of neglect or abuse against self, others, and world. Using these definitions, it is easy for most people to identify examples of both positive and negative sponsors in their lives.

In exploring sensitive areas in therapy, it is common that negative sponsors will get activated. Self-relations suggests that a difficult experience becomes a clinical symptom when three things happen: (1) the somatic/archetypal self feels a disturbance (what we call the activation of a “neglected self”), (2) the normal cognitive self disconnects or dissociates, and (3) negative sponsors overtake the “neglected self”. The therapist should be sensitive to when this happens, and work to replace negative sponsorship messages with positive ones.

One straightforward way to do this is by (1) identifying a repetitive problem sequence in a person’s life, (2) tuning into where in the sequence the person accesses a felt sense of somatic disturbance (i.e., a neglected self), (3) identifying the negative sponsorship messages that are influencing the neglected self, and (4) replacing them with positive sponsors. For example, Jill was a 51-year old woman building a successful business consulting practice. She complained about experiencing anxiety when talking to new clients. We explored an example of this, and she noticed herself beginning to feel “tension and fear” centered in her solar plexus about thirty minutes before the appointment. Self-relations emphasizes that such disturbing experiences are not the problem: the problem (or solution) occurs in terms of how they are sponsored. To identify the negative sponsorship messages, Jill was asked:
(1) As you experience those difficult experiences, just take a moment and sense the presence of your mother in the room. And as you do, just notice what she would say or do in response to witnessing the struggle you are voicing here right now. Jill imagined her mother to be very silent and depressed, with an implicit message of, “you’re asking too much of yourself, you’re going to get hurt”. When asked, she noted that her solar plexus responded to that message with a sinking feeling of fear. I commented, “that’s good to know… that when you hear that message, your inner self feels that way.”
She was next asked:
(2) As you return back to sensing yourself struggling with that experience of anxiety, just take a moment and sense the presence of your father in the room. And as you do, just notice what he would say or do in response to witnessing your experience here.

Jill sensed her father getting tense, telling her to just focus on what needed to be done and to forget about her feelings. She noted her solar plexus respond to this message with a feeling of greater fear and confusion. I encouraged her to simply study and note each inner response to each sponsorship message.

I then suggested that this feeling of fear would probably revisit her many more times across the course of her life. She was learning how her mother sponsored it and how her father sponsored it, and how her inner self responded to such sponsorship messages. While that was good to know, even better was that it was her turn now: she now had “first options” in terms of how to sponsor that feeling when it returned. We examined how positive sponsorship might involve creating a place for the feeling, touching it with kindness, deep listening, proper naming, and collaborative conversation with it. I pointed out that when the feeling came, her cognitive self could remain, with a resulting bodymind integration that would allow creative new responses.

As she developed this embodied relationality, a deep calm spread through her. She looked radiant and at peace. I suggested she imagine herself going through the problem sequence while maintaining this positive sponsorship of herself. She successfully navigated through the process not only in the session, but also in the actual challenges faced over the following several weeks. This example suggests just one of many ways that positive sponsorship can replace negative sponsorship (see Gilligan, 1997, for other examples). In encouraging this process, it is important to recognize that resistance sometimes occurs. A person might say, for example, that he doesn’t deserve kindness or respect. In such instances, it can be helpful to first access that person’s patterns of positive sponsorship towards significant others—for example, a child, pet, or best friend. (Most people know how to nurture others much better than themselves.) For instance, Ray was a client who was experiencing deep insecurity after he lost his job. He flatly refused to provide positive sponsorship for his feelings of confusion and fear, claiming they were undeserving of attention. I asked him if he had children, and he softened as he told me of his three young boys. Were one of his sons to experience confusion and fear, I asked, how would he respond? Would he yell at him? Hit him? Electroshock him? Tell him to go to his room and not come out until he lost those feelings? To each of these questions Ray responded “no”, he would never do that. Each time, I acknowledged with a tender fierceness, “Yes, I see that you would not do that to your son.” I then asked him how he would respond if it were a different son, or a friend, or anybody else? Would he hurt, punish, or ignore them? To each question he again said “no”, which I continued to acknowledge. When asked what he would do in such situations, he replied earnestly that he would want to support and comfort the person in need. I said I believed deeply that he would provide tender support to anybody in that situation, so the real question remained: Was he somebody too? Was he a human being deserving of respect, love, and kindness? As tears fell from his eyes, I suggested he go inside, touch the place where he most felt the confusion, and provide positive sponsorship. Thus began a process of reconnecting with the center of his being, a process that continued in many positive ways over the next months.

IV. Discussion

Each person is given a life to be lived and enjoyed. As this great gift opens across time, a multitude of primary experiences are brought through a person’s center and into their field of awareness. Sponsorship is the relationship process that gives form, meaning, and value to each of these core experiences. Sponsorship can be positive—that is, it can awaken awareness of the goodness and gifts of the self and the world—or it can be negative, in the form of curses or inattentiveness that numbs or darkens awareness of soul and world. Sponsorship is initially held entirely by outsiders, but as psychological growth develops, the possibility of self-sponsorship is added. Positive sponsorship allows an experiential pattern to change and grow over time, while negative sponsorship freezes a pattern in form and meaning, forcing it to repeat itself over and over in a process that Thomas Merton called “ineffective suffering”.

When the suffering from negative sponsorship becomes unbearable, disturbing behaviors may arise as unsuccessful attempts to resolve it. What seems like irrational or incomprehensible behaviors from the outside can be compassionately sensed as important efforts at healing. By demonstrating and encouraging positive sponsorship to these disturbing experiences, a wonderful transformation can occur. A life lived in fear and oppression can shift to one lived in courage, self-acceptance, and delight. Such is the difference that positive sponsorship can make.


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