Focusing and Self-Compassion: A Body-Based Practice for Anxiety and Inner Awareness

This is the fifth and final post in the series An Introduction to Focusing. Each post includes a short video practice and a written companion piece. You can start at the beginning with Part 1: Clearing a Space, or pick up from Part 2: A Part of Me, Part 3: Acknowledging What Is There, or Part 4: Giving Some Comfort.

If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, you’ve been building something.

Not a technique exactly. More like a way of being with yourself — a quality of attention that’s slower, more curious, and a little more compassionate than what most of us bring to our own inner experience by default.

This final practice brings the threads together. Focusing and self-compassion aren’t separate things — they’re expressions of the same fundamental orientation. Both are about turning toward your experience rather than away from it. Both involve a quality of presence that’s neither dismissive nor overwhelmed. Both require, and gradually build, the capacity to be with what’s actually there.

What you’ve been practising

It’s worth taking a moment to look back at what the series has covered — not as a checklist, but as a way of seeing how the pieces connect.

In Clearing a Space you practised stepping back from everything you’re carrying — creating enough room to notice what’s there without being immediately inside all of it.

In A Part of Me you practised shifting the language of your inner experience — from I am this feeling to a part of me is having this feeling — and noticed what that small shift makes possible.

In Acknowledging What Is There you practised turning toward what you found with recognition rather than resistance — letting difficult feelings know they’ve been seen rather than immediately trying to fix or escape them.

In Giving Some Comfort you practised offering the struggling parts of yourself something warmer — the quality of care you’d naturally extend to someone else, turned inward.

Each of these is a practice in its own right. Together they form something more than the sum of their parts — a way of relating to your inner life that creates genuine space for things to shift.

What self-compassion actually is

Self-compassion is one of those terms that sounds simple and turns out to be surprisingly deep.

Researcher Kristin Neff — whose work on self-compassion is some of the most robust in this area — describes it as having three components that work together:

Self-kindness — treating yourself with warmth and understanding rather than harsh judgement when you’re struggling or have made a mistake.

Common humanity — recognising that difficulty, failure, and painful feelings are part of the shared human experience rather than evidence that something is uniquely wrong with you.

Mindfulness — holding your experience in balanced awareness — neither suppressing it nor over-identifying with it.

What’s striking about this framework is how closely it maps onto what Focusing is doing. Clearing a Space and Acknowledging What Is There are both expressions of mindfulness — balanced, present awareness. A Part of Me and Giving Some Comfort are both expressions of self-kindness — turning toward your own experience with care. And the whole practice is grounded in the recognition that whatever you’re carrying is part of being human — not a personal failing.

Focusing, in other words, is one of the most natural and embodied paths into self-compassion that I know of. If anxiety is part of what you’re working with, this connection between self-compassion and body awareness is often where the most meaningful shifts begin.

Why the body matters

One of the things that distinguishes Focusing from purely cognitive approaches to self-compassion is the attention it pays to the body.

Self-compassion isn’t just a thought you think or a belief you hold. It’s something that either lands in the body or it doesn’t. You can tell yourself I am worthy of kindness and have it feel completely hollow — the words arrive but nothing shifts. Or you can sit with a struggling part of yourself, offer it some warmth, and feel something genuinely soften.

The difference is usually whether the compassion is felt — whether it’s arriving as an embodied experience rather than just an intellectual concept.

This is why the practices in this series work with sensation, with the felt sense, with what’s happening in the body as much as what’s happening in the mind. Because that’s where real change tends to live — not in the thoughts we think about our experience, but in the felt quality of how we’re with it.

This is a long game

It’s worth saying clearly: the practices in this series are not quick fixes.

They’re skills — and like all skills they develop gradually, through repetition and patience, over time. The first time you try Clearing a Space it might feel clunky and unfamiliar. The first time you try Giving Some Comfort it might surface resistance rather than warmth. That’s normal. That’s the practice working.

What tends to happen over time — with regular, patient practice — is a gradual shift in your relationship with your own inner experience. Less automatic avoidance. Less merger with difficult feelings. More capacity to be present to what’s there without being immediately consumed by it.

That shift doesn’t announce itself. It tends to show up quietly — in a moment when you notice you didn’t spiral the way you usually would have. Or when a difficult feeling arises and instead of immediately trying to make it stop you find yourself getting a little curious. Or when you realise, somewhere along the way, that you’ve become a slightly more compassionate witness to your own experience.

Those moments are what the practice is building toward.

Where to go from here

If this series has sparked something — a curiosity about Focusing, or a sense that this way of working with inner experience might be useful for you — there are a few places to go next.

The free Name It to Tame It anxiety course covers some complementary ground — particularly around identifying and working with thoughts, emotions, and body sensations in the context of anxiety.

If you’d like to go deeper with Focusing specifically, the work of Eugene Gendlin — particularly his book Focusing — is the original source. Ann Weiser Cornell’s The Power of Focusing is also widely considered one of the most accessible introductions available.

And if you’d like to explore this work with support alongside you — in a therapeutic relationship where these practices can be used in real time with whatever you’re actually carrying — individual counselling is available in person in Squamish and the Sea to Sky corridor, and online across British Columbia. Focusing-Oriented Therapy is one of the approaches I draw on most, and one I find genuinely useful for people working with anxiety, difficult emotions, and the kind of stuckness that talking alone doesn’t always shift.

You can read more about my training and approach on the about page.

A final note

Wherever you came into this series — whether you’ve followed it from the beginning or landed here first — thank you for spending some time with these ideas.

Turning toward your own inner experience, rather than away from it, takes a certain kind of courage. Not dramatic courage. Just the quiet willingness to show up for yourself with a little more curiosity and a little more care than usual.

That willingness, practised consistently over time, is one of the most genuinely transformative things I know of.

An Introduction to Focusing is a series of short video practices and written companion pieces exploring the basics of Focusing-Oriented Therapy. The full series: Part 1: Clearing a Space · Part 2: A Part of Me · Part 3: Acknowledging What Is There · Part 4: Giving Some Comfort · Part 5: Focusing and Self-Compassion