Note: Focusing for skeptics is a far better description than I could give. I will attempt my own description anyway, for triangulation reasons.

2nd note: this technique was invented by Eugene Gendlin. The book Focusing goes into more detail, although I'm told the audiobook is better.

Introduction

We can (fake) categorize all knowledge you have into two types: tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Roughly speaking, explicit knowledge is knowledge where you know why you know it: math, typing, writing, reading, skateboarding, etc. Tacit knowledge is knowledge where you are less sure of why you know it: intuition, vague emotional stuff, inner sim predictions, etc.

One extremely rough way to put it is that explicit knowledge is in the mind and tacit knowledge is in the body. This is false, but the useful sort of false. It's not like tacit knowledge isn't in your brain, but how tacit knowledge usually manifests itself is through sensations instead of thinking (think confusion, surprise, fear, excitement, etc.) To me, this makes it seem more like tacit knowledge is my body telling me things and explicit knowledge is my brain telling me things.

Focusing is a technique designed to allow tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge to interface. The goal of focusing is to turn vague bodily sensations into pieces of information that you can actually think about. I find this technique extremely hard to do, but extremely valuable if done correctly.

Focusing

Serious thinking usually begins by clearing the mind. Focusing begins by clearing the body. When focusing, there should be no physical sensations to distract/intrude upon the feelings generated by tacit knowledge. In practice, this probably involves finding a comfortable seat or lying down.

The first step in focusing is to locate the tacit-knowledge-feeling, also called a felt sense. This kind of feels like knowing you forgot something and trying to remember what it was. It also feels similar to looking for something without knowing what you're looking for, only that you'll recognize it when you find it. The felt sense usually begins extremely vague and blob-like. Almost always, felt sense are negative in some sense, i.e. your body is telling you that something is wrong.

The second step is to figure out what exactly the felt sense feels like. The process that this is most similar to is wanting to describe something and trying

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