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I’m thinking about focus wheels today.  Writing and exchanging focus wheels is something that Patty and I do with each other nearly every single day.  We started doing them around the beginning of this year.  Focus wheels have turned out to be a phenomenal means of maintaining good feelings most of the time.  We try to do at least one focus wheel each day during happier times.  When one or the other of us is feeling down, that’s the time to bear down and write more focus wheels.  They are simple to do, and they pack a powerful punch towards processing negative feelings and supporting good feelings.

Trouble is, I’ve had some difficulty figuring out how to adapt focus wheels to this blog.  Patty and I hand write our wheels, and they are really kind of a stylized sort of diagram thing that is not very conducive to a linear left-to-right top-to-bottom format.  Well, this morning I’ve begun to think of focus wheels in a new way.  What if I think of focus wheels as a sort of structured poem?  I mean, they aren’t really poems, but there is something like structure to them.  I mean, they aren’t like haiku, which (in English) is typically approached as a 17 syllable poem in 3 lines arranged in a 5 syllable / 7 syllable / 5 syllable structure.  Focus wheels are nowhere near that constrained, but they do have their structure.  Let me explain how Patty and I approach them.

To start, along the top edge of a piece of paper we first write a brief statement of something that is going on that isn’t as good as we want it to be.  Examples of a typical opening statement might be something that we’re feeling annoyed about, something that we feel bad about, maybe something that’s causing us to feel guilty or angry or otherwise unworthy.  We make this statement brief and to the point.  Next, in the center of the page we write a thought or sentiment opposite to our opening statement.  For example, if I write “I feel depressed today” as my opening statement (the mood or attitude that I want to improve), then in the center of the page I might write, “I love it when I feel joy and happiness flowing through my whole body.”  Then we circle that center statement (the mood or attitude that we want to build on) and we go around the clock (so to speak) and write 12 statements in a circle around the center statement.  The objective is to write 12 statements, true to our real life experience, that support and/or build on the center statement.  If approached with an open heart and a genuine intent to improve our current state of mind, by the time we finish a wheel, we typically feel much better than when we started it.

Here’s an example of a real life focus wheel that I wrote this morning:

 

Click for high resolution image

By the time I wrote the twelfth statement around the center thought, I was feeling pretty good.  And it only took a few minutes to turn my crappy mood around.

So, if I think of the focus wheel as a poem (for the sake of doing focus wheels in a blog), I could create a poem structure in 14 parts.  The first stanza would be the mood I want to improve.  The second stanza would be my center statement, the mood that I want to build on, and then the next 12 stanzas would be the 12 statements around the clock laid out in linear fashion.  Yeah, I know, it’s a pretty loose definition of “poem”, but I think I can make it work for me. 

I look forward to being able to put some focus wheels here in my blog.

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