Focusing for Physiological Healing - (Research Project 1)

This research investigates whether conscious awareness can play a direct, participatory role in physical healing by engaging with and embodying the inherent meaning of illness as purpose — why it is appearing and happening in an individual’s life — as a transpersonal, psychospiritual intention. Grounded in a non-dual subject–object, mind–body model, the project explores whether the cumulative integration of this inherent meaning or purpose — accessed through the felt sense in Focusing-Oriented (body) Psychotherapy (FOP) — can bring about not only psycho-emotional change or transformation but also measurable physiological regulation or healing of the affected system or illness-related physiology itself in individuals with chronic urticaria.

To capture this process, the study employs both local physiological tracking (targeting the affected skin areas through electrodermal activity, infrared thermography, and bioimpedance) and general systemic monitoring (heart-rate variability and autonomic regulation). In doing so, it becomes the first study to measure real-time embodied meaning-integration processes and their physiological correlates—both in general, and specifically for chronic physical illness—thereby advancing a scientifically grounded, empirically documented transpersonal model of conscious (self-)healing.