Get Into It with Gila: Rena Reiser on Focusing and the Body Mind Connection
Rena Reiser is a somatic practitioner in northern Israel who specializes in a method called focusing. Somatic just means "of the body." It's a catch all term covering everything from breathwork to dance to focusing.
Sixteen years ago Rena got mono and was told she'd be sick for six months. She'd already been dealing with migraines and back pain for years. Her husband kept pushing her to read Dr. Sarno's book. She thought it was quackery until being sick that long scared her enough to try it. Sarno's theory: repressed emotion creates real physical symptoms as a distraction from the emotional issue. She traced her fever to a conflict with a coworker, processed it, and her fever broke 24 hours later. She started using the same approach on her migraines and back pain. It worked.
For years she coached women on stress and food using tools she'd picked up along the way. She'd say "listen to your body" without a name for it. Then a client told her, "I didn't know you did focusing." She had no idea what that meant, and the method she'd used her whole career already had a name and a field behind it. She trained and got certified right away.
Focusing was researched in the 1950s by Eugene Gendlin, who studied thousands of hours of therapy sessions to figure out why some clients improved and others didn't. The answer wasn't the modality or the therapist. Successful clients would pause and notice something vague in their body, something unclear and hard to name, then search for odd, specific words to describe it, like "a lukewarm bubble." Once they found the right words, something in their body would settle. Those were the clients who got better.
That moment of matching words to a vague bodily sensation is the core of focusing. Many other somatic therapies grew out of this same research, but most stay purely in body sensation with no words. Focusing bridges sensation and language, connecting the right brain and left brain.
We talk through the 7 level Experiencing Scale, which measures how deeply someone is in touch with their body in a session, from talking about anything with zero emotion all the way to an ongoing relationship with felt senses as they arise. A skilled focuser's job is to notice where a client is and gently bring them one level deeper, never further than they can handle.
Rena shares what happened to her own interoceptive awareness after a recent stretch of war in northern Israel. Her signals shut down completely. She couldn't tell hunger, fullness, or exhaustion, and had to rebuild safety in her system before she could go deep again.
We get into why interoceptive awareness is foundational to intuitive eating but not enough on its own, why focusing is different from a quick "where do you feel that in your body," and why the vagueness and slowness are the whole point.
I also share a story from the book Strangers by Belle Boggs about a woman whose body still wanted to hold her ex husband's hand even though her mind hated him, and my own experience with the daily knot in my stomach during after school hours with my kids, even though I want to be there. This is what it looks like when the body hasn't caught up to what the mind already knows.
We also talk about whether ancient and indigenous cultures already knew this, and how Judaism's emphasis on ritual and bringing knowledge from the head into the heart might be doing the same work.
Books mentioned: Focusing by Eugene Gendlin, and The Power of Focusing by Ann Weiser Cornell. Rena is also writing her own book on focusing through a Torah lens.
Find Rena at RenaReiser.com.
I relate to Rena's work because I see this same gap in intuitive eating. I'm working to fill it by adding other modalities to my practice and writing about it in my upcoming book. If this resonates, reach out to book a free 20 minute consultation.
Reach me at 570-878-3642 or gila@gilaglassberg.com
