Subtitle: How You Can Transform What’s Impossibly Stuck
Recommended to me by: Their courses and books about Focusing
McGavin and Cornell co-run Focusing Resources and teach Inner Relationship Focusing. Focusing is a way of looking inward with gentle curiosity and keeping company with what’s unclear to help it clarify and shift.
Back in 2020, I took their year-long course Getting Free: A Year of Untangling. It turned out to be a good year to be taking an online course! I knew they were writing a book about the course material, so I was curious when I saw that it had been published.
I had an immediate sense that the material had been reorganized, and flowed much better than the course handouts. Interestingly, late in the book they say that they had to step back and get a sense of the whole book, and were led to do a major reorganization.
The book clearly and kindly explains their techniques for dissolving Tangles – stuck places in our lives where we are at war with ourselves, and everything we do to try to solve the tangle just pulls it tighter. They include both personal stories about tangles, and stories from their students.
While I left the course feeling like their techniques were too persnickety and heady and intense, the book softens all that. Recommended if you’ve learned some Focusing and are curious about applying it to those tangled, stuck places.
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