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A technique that demonstrates how 'personal development' isn't methodologically different from 'critical thinking' or 'creativity' is a simple and profound window onto the nature of human being. Embodiment, focusing and the full self: a two-part minicourse This two-part minicourse will be more experiential than previous embodiment workshops. I will introduce a simple and profound cognitive method as useful in critical thinking and theory construction as it is in creative work or therapy; and I will consider what this amazingly useful technique suggests about the embodied nature of human knowing and being.
These are handouts accompanying workshops given at the
IMA winter residency 2006. Passages in italics are Gendlin quotations. I. Embodiment, focusing and the full self in creative writing and self-repair OUTLINE
I. Embodiment, focusing and the full self in creative writing and self-repair This first session of the minicourse will introduce the main concepts - 'felt sense', 'felt meaning', and 'felt shift' and the basic steps for Eugene Gendlin's focusing technique. We will be learning the method in the context of creative writing, but will also look at how it can be used for emotional processing and self-development. The fact that the same method can be used for both creative writing and therapy suggests how and when writing can be transformative. 1. Introduction to 'focusing,' felt meaning, felt sense a. who Gendlin is
(See bibliography for his books.) b. how his work is being used and who it is related to "Preconceptual experiencing." A framework in which to consider therapy, writing, art, religion, logic, science, research method, daily life and 'existential concerns' Used by:
Related to:
c. the main concepts
What Gendlin talks about is so familiar it's hardly noticed asking ourselves something and waiting for a nonverbal answer to form and then, if we articulate that nonverbal something, being somehow satisfied and being able to move on to a new thought. Example: when Gendlin was teaching Aristotle he would say, always work from two translations rather than just one, and get a feel for the nonverbal meaning that could have inspired both of them. i. felt sense A configuration of aboutness. Different ways to say it: feeling tone, felt meaning, feeling, experiencing, the feeling of a meaning, having a meaning, sensing, being, "the sensed feel of it" Examples:
Ways to say it:
ii. focusing
iii. felt shift
2a. The technique of focusing: focusing in writing (or any other art form) i. Preliminary exercise:
Write from the presence of your thumb, first from the outside, then from the inside. What's different is that when you write from sensation, it forms, it comes into being more. ii. Gendlin's 6 movements:
iii. quotes about focusing and writing We find that when people forgo the usual big vague words and common phrases, then - from their bodily sense - quite fresh colorful new phrases come. These phrases form in such a way that they say what is new from the bodily sense. We can let a come in any spot where we pause, and we can think from it, even if we don't write it. People find that never again are they just unable to speak from this felt sense. The various relations between sensing and speaking have not been well studied until now once one experiences this "speaking-from," the way it carries the body forward becomes utterly recognizable. Then, although one might be able to say many things and make many new distinctions, one prefers being stuck and silent until phrases come that do carry the felt sense forward. New phrasing is possible because language is always implicit in human experiencing and deeply inherent in what experiencing is. Far from reducing and limiting what one implicitly lives and wants to say, a fresh statement is physically a further development of what one senses and means to say. New phrasing is possible because language is always implicit in human experiencing and deeply inherent in what experiencing is. Far from reducing and limiting what one implicitly lives and wants to say, a fresh statement is physically a further development of what one senses and means to say. Then, to write down and read back what is said can engender still further living. What one physically senses in one's situation is not some fixed, already determined entity, but a further implying that expands and develops in response to what is said. Rather than "falling into" the constraints of the said, we find that the effects of the said can open ways of living and saying still further.[2] Statements that speak from the felt sense can be recognized by the fact that they have an effect on the felt sense. It moves, opens, and develops. The relation between sensing and statements is not identity, representation or description. *** 2b. The technique of focusing: focusing in therapy and emotional processing
Repair 'of mind,' 'of spirit,' of 'emotion,' of 'soul' - all of these are some form of repair of body. I prefer to talk about self-repair rather than 'healing' because 1. it helps bring attention to the fact that it is bodily structure that is being mended, and 2. it can apply to the whole range of structural disturbance, from the effects of harrowing trauma to ordinary inadequacies in daily life failures to be intelligent failures to be subtle failures to be perceptive failures to be as much ourselves as we could be. I also prefer it to 'therapy' because 1. that term often implies various theoretical brands (Freudian, somatic, etc), and 2. it implies a situation where the therapist is important. Thinking of the focusing process as self repair acknowledges that it is what the client does that is crucial, and it can allude to the successful core of any of the many therapeutic brands. Asking to be relieved of dysfunction isn't where it should stop. We can take ourselves beyond the obvious first levels of repair of dysfunction to enhanced ability to be, feel, know. So what is transformed, repaired, is our ability to be pleasurably and functionally - to be with the world. a. fear of experiencing Most people are at least a little frightened of their bodies and the untoward feelings that well up from their depths i. afraid of being overwhelmed with emotion. The answer to the first is that the method itself provides confidence in one's ability to get through any sort of emotional distress, because in the process of focusing the distress completes itself and shifts.
ii. afraid of finding out we feel or want something inconvenient, which will bring us into conflict with people whose support we need. The answer to the second is that making these feelings conscious means there's less acting out, accident, the more chicken-shit sabotages that happen when part of what we are is unconscious. We are able to be more sophisticated about balancing within our actual circumstances. Eva Pierrakos:
b. basic principle: focusing or attending in itself is restorative of structure and function Gendlin's work with Carl Rogers: that there are different theoretical frames for therapy but "experiencing themselves more deeply" is the core of success.
What is the physical meaning of dissociation, segregation, reactivation or integration? Conscious and nonconscious parts of a neural network. Attention adds energy and/or synchronization so that dissociated or segregated structure can rejoin the conscious network. c. how to: finding out what's going on Just ask the question until the felt sense stirs:
d. how to: processing panic, fear, pain, etc You do need a way to process difficult feeling so that you don't have to be afraid of it and can relax into it and let it restructure you to be able to do what you want to do. This method is effective for any form of emotional distress. Here's how:
If it stops shifting there are several things you can do.
If you find yourself sighing you can take that as a confimation of whatever your last thought was. There might be a series of shifts as you go on with the dialogue. Personal example: My experience is that what I call the solar (solar plexus), the area under the ribcage, just under the diagram, is my early warning system. If something is not right, if someone is lying, if some threat is not yet properly recognized, I feel tight in the solar. If I concentrate in the sensation, feel into it more, sensation may move to the heart area, and there it is felt as pain not tension. It can be very acute. If a certain kind of think-y defense sets in, feeling shifts back to the solar again, so I have come to think of a tight solar as blocking pain at the heart. If I can continue to concentrate and feel into the heart pain it will sometimes shift to the throat, where it is an ache like the ache of not crying. It may also shift directly to the forehead, where the sensation is like a child's anxiety. If I can keep feeling where it is, keep tracking it with close attention, sensation will sometimes as if melt out the top of the head and be gone, so that what is left is a whole-body sensation like airy transparency. Sometimes the sensation shifts quickly but sometimes it persists. At those times several things may work. One is to use Gendlin's technique of talking to the sensation, asking it what it is about, and so on. There will often be a big sigh when I name the cause correctly, and then I find it has shifted. I'm grateful for these direct ways to shift emotional pain because they make me more confident of being able to handle losses and uncertainties. e. the role of a companion Useful relation: considering what will bring the other's felt sense alive. Resolving not explaining.
3. What is implied about the relation of writing and self-repair These elements felt sense, focusing, and felt shift - can be used both for creative writing and for therapy or emotional processing. Connect these questions:
If felt shift actually is the feeling of our physical (perhaps neural) structure repairing itself, it seems to imply that the activity of writing is transformative if and when it brings the writer into felt shifts. What I most want from my own and other people's language is just that sense of resolving something, making it feel right. Resolving is a word used in optics, where it is used of lenses; we talk about the resolving power or the resolution of a lens. In other words, in this context it is inherently related to the notion of focus. And focus is a word related to fire. I like this conincidence of resolution, light, and the drawing together of separate lines integration. I believe the process of writing is 'transformative' when it connects something, structurally. My hypothesis is that language, whether intended as 'personal' or professional, repairs the writer to the extent that it involves this connecting And can repair a willing reader in a similar way - which is why it is so valued. Are there implications for Transformative Language Arts practice? What kinds of use of language might be transformative? Writing that consults, connects with somatic sensation, including 'feeling'. Slow writing? Writing that takes us out of the speed of normal conversation. The slowness possible in writing allows particular kinds of cognitive change. Writing that looks for personal truth and accuracy rather than effect. The process of looking for the right way to say something makes us consider it, constellate it, more intensively. Are there implications for the way we judge what we read? Body feeling can tell us what writing is doing. We can use our own sensation when we are reading to diagnose falsity, ambition, laziness, tension, training, immaturity, relaxation, honesty, love, paranoia, defensiveness, anxiety, grief, dullness, intelligence, and so on how we feel reading it can tell us what kind of body state it was written from. 4. Focusing and embodiment What it has to do with embodiment. Embodiment1 the fact that human bodies are evolved and embedded in a physical world; implications of this fact for our understanding of any human activity, including cognitive skills like thinking and imagining, language, creativity, therapy, spirituality. Embodiment2 felt experience of one's own body, as opposed to dissociation; doing the various things we do guided by such felt experience. Groundedness.
Language that does or doesn't evoke non-language body systems It can be perception of the room. It can be memory. It can be sensation. All of it is via body there is no other way and via the world itself there is no other way. Language and non-language, both, are by means of the body. A technique that demonstrates how 'personal development' isn't methodologically different from 'critical thinking' or 'creativity' is a simple and profound window onto the nature of human being.
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