Focusing II: Embodiment, focusing and the full self in critical thinking
and theory creation
This second session of the minicourse will demonstrate
how you can use focusing both to discover for yourself just exactly what
you are thinking and feeling about someone else's statements or theoretical
framework; and to arrive at theoretical thoughts of your own
thoughts that are subtle, original and accurate expressions of your own
experience.
- 1. What is this session
for and where does it come from?
- 2. Thinking changes the
structure of the body
- 3. Thinking is an ongoing
relation of felt sense and language
- a. the ""
- b. speaking from a ""
- c. carrying forward
- d. "how they go on
from it"
- e. expansion/elaboration/logic
- f. making or using a theory:
"one can move in the field created by these terms"
- 4. Critical implications
- 5. Political implications
- 6. Embodiment and the full self
II. Embodiment, focusing and the full self in critical thinking and
theory creation
Gendlin Eugene 2004 "Introduction to Thinking At the
Edge", The Folio, Vol. 19 No. 1 http://www.focusing.org/tae-intro.html
1. What is this session
for and where does it come from?
Thinking on the edge stems from my course called "Theory
Construction" which I taught for many years at the University of Chicago.
systematic way to articulate in new terms something
which needs to be said but is at first only an inchoate "bodily sense."
We now teach this in a bi-yearly four day course
This workshop is based on a very recent paper of Gendlin's,
that I found on his website. It was originally exciting to me because it
so closely described the actual experience of doing philosophy what
thinking was like, and where my critical relation to texts and traditions
was actually coming from, and what was guiding me as I was innovating a
new framework.
I hadn't originally thought of trying to teach from this
paper of Gendlin's, but then I started to connect it with a difficulty I
notice many students having. This difficulty seems to be a difficulty with
thinking from their own experience. Another way to say this is to call it
a difficulty with thinking in one's own voice in educational contexts. Gendlin
calls it this the "public language barrier."
The way I see it at Goddard is that students who write
and speak wonderfully from concrete experience freeze or get garbled when
they switch to some form of more abstract or 'academic' language, which
they feel is required for a critical essay, a thesis or a process paper.
So this workshop is about staying within your lively natural
intelligence even when you are working in these formats. It's about thinking
in that lively natural way.
It's about actually thinking, rather than rearranging
other people's formulations. Thinking from your own experience. Finding
what you actually think about something. Finding what actually interests
you. Getting to the bottom of something in a way that satisfies you.
This is what finding a thesis statement, for instance,
is really about.
It isn't going to be possible in this one short session
to go very far into teaching or experiencing the thinking at the edge
process, but maybe it will be possible to just plant a notion about how
it works, which you can follow up on your own when the need comes up.
With Focusing we find that the human body is much more
finely ordered than the definitions of our various cultures and common
phrases. Behind the usual emotions, feelings, memories, images, perceptions,
and thoughts is the directly-sensed murky zone. When it opens we discover
that we and others are rich, intricate, finely organized and always imply
freshly emerging possibilities.
the role of felt experiencing in all our conceptual
operations are not illegitimate 'biases'. They are natural and proper functions.
(5 in intro to E)
we discover that we can think with the greater precision
and intricacy that is characteristic of situation, experience, practice,
action ...... This is more orderly and precise
than the pretended, overarching definitions.
Failure comes if there are only logical, event-describing,
or emotion-expressing modes.
Such thinking is not only a fuzzy felt sense. Moves
of precise understandings exceed cuts and forms.
2. Thinking changes the
structure of the body
I am changing as I talk and think and feel.
Here is the most general possible way to understand thinking
as an activity of a physical body: like every other kind of human function,
thinking can occur only by means of changes in the physical structure of
a physical body.
What does 'structure' mean, here? It means the organization
of parts into a whole, that organization being what allows it to do what
it does. In relation to thinking, the range of relevant scale of structure
might be quite wide, from the large the overall muscular set of a
body to the very small the arrangement of neurotransmitter molecules
on the axon of a neural cell.
At all of these scales the general principle is the same:
ANYTHING we are or do, we are or do by means of the physical structure of
our bodies.
What I have named above is the central working assumption
of embodiment studies as I understand it. Saying it is an assumption means
that we try it out we see what happens if we start from there.
In my understanding, we don't actually need to know very
much physiological detail to be able to make use of this assumption. Even
if we understand physiological structure only in very general and basic
terms, we can still develop a useful theoretical framework.
We can ask, what is a "," a felt sense, physiologically?
What is focusing, physiologically understood? What is a felt shift, structurally
speaking?
And here are some very general but still useful ways of
answering those questions:
We can feel a "......" that sensed body-internal
something because somewhere in the body we are structured one
way rather than another. Maybe there is a little network active only in
the brain. Maybe there is a little network in the brain that is responding
to some other kind of structure somewhere else in the body. In either case,
we are feeling/sensing something because somewhere a structure is active.
And what would focusing be? In very general terms,
a. attention/consciousness/focusing increases activity
and organization;
b. increasing activity and organization increases connection
and integration;
c. and then, again, increasing connection and integration
increases activity and organization, but over a wider and/or more formed
network.
So felt shift, then, is when physical structure changes
as a result of focusing, and we feel it change.
Here is a further question: when we talk about connection
and integration, what is it that is being connected?
Not 'mind' and 'body', because physiologically speaking
mind cannot be separated from body - it is part of body.
So what we are talking about here can't be a relation 'with
the body,' but instead must be a relatedness within the body.
3. Thinking is an ongoing
relation of felt sense and language (a sort-of definition of thinking)
We cannot present language in terms of the artificial
scheme of signifying, symbolizing, reference, denotation, an external relation
between words and what they "stand for." But we can let how language
works and moves tell us about how language works and moves. 21
The steps help break what I might call the "public
language barrier" so that the source of one's own thinking is found
and spoken from.
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.
a. the "......"
It's a felt constellation of experiencing, which is a constellation
of felt meaning: the constellation of the sensed/known/felt meaning
of "all that."
In the last session I emphasized sorts of sensation, like
pain, that are easier to contact, but what I am talking about here is a
more subtle kind of sensing, which is still a sensing, but it's more a dim
kind of sense of knowing or meaning, which at first can be quite
inchoate.
Gendlin's example of meeting someone on the street and
knowing exactly how to greet them and greeting them appropriately. It's
a knowledge that is multiple, subtle, complex and already integrated within
itself and with the situation. This sort of complex multiple subtle already
integrated knowing is available in more intellectual contexts too.
"governed by that whole multiplicity"
"You don't need to take the time to lift out this
and that."
we can't think without felt meanings
whenever we feel something, whenever we mean something,
whenever we live in a situation, whenever we think (E 14)
That finer sense of the situation
My is my bodily sense of living (planning, feeling,
being about to act ) in my situation.
'inward sentient living', 'inward receptivity of a
living body'
within experiencing lie the mysteries of all that we
are 15
'experiencing that flow of feeling, concretely, to
which you can every moment attend inwardly, if you wish"
b. speaking from
a "......"
When we speak or write or just silently think from a felt
sense, we generally have to pause to let the "" form. We wait
to let the "" itself suggest the language. There can be a sense
of groping. We disregard the language that comes too quickly and seems too
conventional and formulaic. We allow ourselves to be ready to be surprised
and new.
The ...... knows what we want to say.
It knows the language, since it understands and rejects
the lines that came. So it is not preverbal. Rather, it knows what must
be said, and it knows that these lines don't say that. 17
A ...... is very exact and precise To think from it you
must let new phrases come from it. comes to imply more and more an unseparated
multipliciy, a single .
When I had a point. I would pause to let words come. Interrupted
at that stage, I might forget what I was about to say. Then I would burrow
in some murky way to get "it" back. "Oh . . . yeah . . .
that's what I was about to say!" That had had implicit language, but
was not a set of words.
In casual speech "when the moves come smoothly,"
"a great deal functions implicitly We encounter some of what it was,
if we let a come, but of course that is not how it functioned without one."
c. carrying forward
Speaking from the intricacy carries it forward.
The process of letting felt sense form and suggest its
own language, which then changes the quality of felt sense further, which
then suggests new language, which then changes the quality of felt sense,
and so on and on, is what Gendlin means by "carrying forward."
Another name for this orderly sequence of sensing and saying is guess
what thinking.
When the body uses this process of going back and forth
between felt sense and language in order to understand something (or it
could be drawing, etc, rather than language), it is carrying itself forward
from one structural state of knowing to another it's thinking.
We can also let a ...... come at any juncture, and
think from it deliberately. We often want to do this, not just to rephrase,
but to think further.
This mode of language requires that we enter the ......
and constantly check, not for correspondence, but for carrying forward.
20
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.
Once one experiences this "speaking-from,"
the way it carries the body forward becomes utterly recognizable.
Experiencing... its articulation is itself a further
experiencing.
There is no way to say "all" of it, no sentence
that will be simply equal, no sentence which will simply "represent"
what is sensed. But what can happen is better than a perfect copy. One
strand emerges from the bodily sense, and then another and another. What
needs to be said expands! What we say doesn't represent the bodily sense.
Rather it carries the body forward.
d. "how they go on from it"
How can you tell whether someone got your point exactly?
You can tell only from how they go on from it.
Other people's language structures us when we read or hear
it. If we carry ourselves forward in the same way they do, we know we have
understood what they mean.
I asked what instances the man had given . If I heard
his instances and especially how he went on from them, I might
If we enter into the intricacy, we can move in many
further ways that do not involve what his general assumption would seem
to require . I want to hear from the much more precise . From it we could
go on. 19
e. expansion/elaboration/logic
We can endlessly differentiate it further.
Working something out logically, or laying it out in an
outline form, or explaining it in detail, is only dangerous if we are not
doing it in our own terms. If we are doing it by consulting felt sense at
every step, the effort will expand what we know, not freeze it or defeat
it. Articulating it can make it more more full, more rich, more subtle,
as well as more coherent.
given a entence or a situation, an observation or a
behavior, a person or a moment's speech by a person, or anything, we can
focus on our experiencing of it, and we can say what it means in a sentence,
in a paragraph, or in a book. 16
When we have retroactively filled in the logical steps,
we have done very much more than might appear. Each logical interpolation
is actually a further development of the whole mesh, and a sequence of
them can vastly expand the sense we are making. Not only can we then communicate
and build the world. Before that stage, the expansion
enables us to sense anything soggy, dishonest, or too easy. We can also
sense anything that is still opaque, or merely avoided. The process
of thinking has these and many other internal criteria which we employ
all the time, and can employ freshly when logical steps expand the sense
we made. 20
f. making or using a theory: "one can move in the
field created by these terms"
We can employ the ...... to let any theory speak from our
being here. Without this return, every theory is destructive.
If we use someone else's theoretical terms and relations
to evoke our own felt sense of things, those terms and relations
become our own and we can play fruitfully with them.
If we make our own theory with our own terms and relations
that come from and evoke our own felt sense, that theory helps us generate
always more understanding and comprehension.
When one has tried several words and found that each
of them fails to say what needs to be said, fresh sentences can say what
one wished the word to mean. Now it turns out that each of the rejected
words gives rise to very different fresh sentences. Each pulls out something
different from the felt sense. In this way, with some further developments,
what was one single fuzzy sense can engender six or seven terms. These terms bring their own interrelations, usually
a quite new patterning. This constitutes a whole new territory where previously
there was only a single implicit meaning. One can move in the field created
by these terms. Now one can enter further into the experiential sense of
each strand and generate even more precise terms. People find that never
again are they just unable to speak from this felt sense.
4. critical implications
expansion enables us to sense anything soggy, dishonest,
or too easy. We can also sense anything that is still opaque, or merely
avoided. The process of thinking has these and many other internal criteria
which we employ all the time, and can employ freshly when logical steps
expand the sense we made. 20
If we understand that it is bodies and only bodies
that make and understand theoretical discourse, then it is critically
legitimate to ask what effect any discourse is having on our bodies.
If we keep checking in with our own felt sense both when
we are looking at our own work and at somebody else's, we can use focusing
to know important things about that work.
For instance, with some kinds of academic theory, we can
experience a felt sense of a sort of speedy paranoia.
With some kinds of 'poetic' or 'surrealist' writing, there
is a lofted, inflated feeling.
We can also, and easily, use felt sense to detect falsity,
pretention, carelessness, manipulative intent, lack of energy, or even subtle
and concealed kinds of fear or splitness. On the other hand, we can also
use it to detect relaxation, energy, and coherence.
Focusing on felt sense gives us a means of articulating
critical standards that we are in fact already using but that have been
kept semi-conscious because we believe we should be responding purely in
logical or abstract terms. Our true and excellent judgment may be that this
work makes us dull and cut off, or that this work gives us an energized
interested love for all the world. There is no way to say either of these
thing in purely logical terms, but if we give ourselves permission to speak
and write from felt sense, we can discover that we already do have critical
thoughts that are extremely incisive and very much our own.
5. political implications
Thinking and articulating is a socially vital practice.
A true democracy is possible only where people are able
to discover and articulate their own real experience. Human intimacy is
possible only where people are able to discover and articulate their own
real experience.
Thinking at the edge has a social purpose. We build
our inter-human world further.
We need to build new social patterns and new patterns
of thought and science.
This mode of language also has major political implications,
because it can free people to speak from how they are living, instead of
being silenced by the common categories.
On the other side there has been a great development
also in human experiencing, with therapeutic and interpersonal processes.
Where people used to be silent, now they have a developed vocabulary with
which to explore and express their experiential and relational intricacies.
The old community in which people related mostly in roles has broken down,
and new kinds of community are only just beginning to develop, in which
we can relate from our intricacy, from coming freshly into language. How
to think with all this is an exciting and still very open question.
Later I understood. During the ensuing year many people
wrote to us. They reported that they found themselves able to speak from
what they could not say before, and that they were now talking about it
all the time. And some of them also explained another excitement. Some
individuals had discovered that they could think! What "thinking"
had previously meant to many of them involved putting oneself aside and
rearranging remembered concepts. For some the fact that they could create
and derive ideas was the fulfillment of a need which they had despaired
of long ago.
Now after five American and four German Thinking at
the Edge meetings I am very aware of the deep political significance of
all this. People, especially intellectuals, believe that they cannot think!
They are trained to say what fits into a pre-existing public discourse.
They remain numb about what could arise from themselves in response to
the literature and the world. People live through a great deal which cannot
be said. They are forced to remain inarticulate about it because it cannot
be said in the common phrases. People are silenced! TAE can empower them
to speak from what they are living through.
People can be empowered to think and speak. We have
come to recognize that, along with Focusing, TAE is a practice for people
generally. They do not all need to build a theory with formal logically
linked terms. Thinking and articulating is a socially vital practice.
our forms of living 'gives so little specifying response
and interpersonal communion to our experiencng, so that we must much of
the time pretend that we are only what we seem externally, and that our
meanings are only the objective reference and the logical meanings of our
words. 15-16
6. Embodiment and the full self
The self is intelligent and interesting and bottomless
and fluid: the body is intelligent and interesting and bottomless and fluid.
- Quality in writing
- Quality in presence
- Effectiveness in therapy
- Originality and subtlety in thinking
Summary:
1. the act of focusing brings more energy, more
structure;
2. which increases connectivity;
3. which makes a wider more energized more widely
associated net;
4. which is increased intelligence and aliveness;
5. which is greater contact with the world both
human and other-than-human.
With Focusing we find that the human body is much more
finely ordered than the definitions of our various cultures and common
phrases. Behind the usual emotions, feelings, memories, images, perceptions,
and thoughts is the directly-sensed murky zone. When it opens we discover
that we and others are rich, intricate, finely organized and always imply
freshly emerging possibilities.
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.
Humans don't happen without culture and language, but
with and after language the body's next steps are always freshly here again,
and always implicitly more intricate than the common routines.
|