An Introduction to Focusing — Part 1: Clearing a Space
This is the first post in the series An Introduction to Focusing. Each post includes a short video practice and a written companion piece. You can start here or jump to any post in the series.
Most of us are carrying more than we realise.
Not in a dramatic way — just the ordinary accumulation of things. A conversation that didn’t go well. A decision that’s still unresolved. A worry that keeps surfacing. A feeling that’s hard to name but has been quietly present for days.
We’re often so used to carrying these things that we stop noticing them individually. They just become the general weight of being a person — the background noise that’s always running.
Clearing a Space is a Focusing practice developed by philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin. It’s usually the first thing introduced when learning Focusing, and for good reason. Before you can pay attention to any one thing, it helps to get a sense of everything that’s there.
What Clearing a Space actually involves
The practice is simpler than it might sound.
You’re not trying to solve anything, analyse anything, or make anything go away. You’re just taking a moment to notice what’s present — to acknowledge what you’re carrying — and then, gently, to set it a little to the side.
Not to get rid of it. Just to create some space between you and it.
The image Gendlin used was setting things down beside you — like placing objects on a shelf or on the floor next to where you’re sitting. They’re still there. You know where they are. But you’re not holding them right now.
What you’re left with, when you’ve set things down, is a sense of how you are underneath all of that. A felt sense of what it would be like if none of those things were there — even just for a moment.
That sense of spaciousness — however brief — is what the practice is working toward.
Why this matters for anxiety
If you experience anxiety, your inner world can feel crowded and relentless. Thoughts crowd in. Worries stack on top of each other. It can feel like there’s no room to breathe, let alone think clearly.
Clearing a Space doesn’t make the anxiety go away. What it does is create a small moment of separation — enough distance between you and what you’re carrying that you can begin to see what’s actually there rather than just being overwhelmed by all of it at once.
That separation is the beginning of something. Because when you can see what’s there — when you can notice the separate things rather than just experiencing them as one undifferentiated wave — you start to have a little more choice about how to relate to them.
How to use this practice
The video above guides you through a Clearing a Space practice in real time. You can follow along seated or lying down, with your eyes closed or soft.
A few things that tend to help:
Give yourself more time than you think you need. The first things that come up when you check in with yourself are often not the whole picture. Staying a little longer tends to reveal more.
Don’t try to solve what comes up. When something surfaces — a worry, a feeling, a sense of something unresolved — the practice isn’t to fix it or figure it out. Just acknowledge it. Notice it’s there. Set it to the side.
Notice the quality of the space itself. Once you’ve acknowledged what you’re carrying and set things down, take a moment to notice how that feels. Even if it’s subtle. Even if it only lasts a moment.
What’s next in the series
In the next post we’ll look at a practice called A Part of Me — a simple but significant shift in language that can change your relationship with difficult thoughts and feelings.
An Introduction to Focusing is a series of short video practices and written companion pieces exploring the basics of Focusing-Oriented Therapy. Each post stands alone but builds on what came before.
Focusing is one of the approaches I draw on most in my counselling work — both with individuals working with anxiety and with people who want to develop a deeper relationship with their own inner experience. If you’re curious about what it might look like to work with this more directly, individual counselling is available in Squamish and online across BC. You might also find the free Name It to Tame It anxiety course a useful companion to this series.
