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Embodiment, focusing and the full self: supplementary notes Layla Holguin-Messner What listening feels like Anna Hawkins An epistemology, or methodology, of the unconscious Richard Koenigsberg (?) Buddhism and embodiment Layla Holguin-Messner, What listening feels like What does listening feel like? Well, I cannot answer that for everybody, or perhaps for anybody other than myself in this particular moment. I can and will share an example that might give an idea of what it can be like. When I was working on this paper, one evening and I was feeling some resistance against writing, so I decided to attend to that but still continue to write. I thus recorded the following: I have the sudden urge to get up, walk around, go online. Staying seated I am stillness meeting motion. That impulse to move is a tingling in my arms, a lifting tension in my abdomen, a potential like a compressed spring. I am holding my breath about to jump up. I am staying [seated, with the feeling]. I am thinking of the novel in the drawer of my bedside table, [I] stopped [reading] at an exciting part. What chapter am I on? If I go and check I could write that here, but I am still sitting. My back, shoulders, and pelvis are relaxing down a bit. Now my mind is wandering from what I am writing. Tension is returning to my legs as I think of moving on to another section [of this paper] for now. Then the tension is releasing slightly again as I continue to write [this]. I am leaning my head back and taking a deep breath in, feeling my belly expand and push on my laptop. My shoulders, chest and hands tingle. I stretch out my legs. [The tingly feeling in my arms is almost an ache now, moving up into my shoulders.] [As I continue to sit and reflect] my arms and chest are becoming warm, sensation in motion, slight waves, and [a] nervous fear in my stomach too. I am sitting with that motion. Now my breath is quick and the fear has moved to feel fluttery in my chest. The left side of my jaw aches, as though it has been clenched. Has it? I am becoming aware of my feet, which are warming and tingly. I am taking a big breath and running my fingers through my hair. I am feeling a block in my chest moving, and focusing on allowing it to move. My breath is quickening, then slowing. I am pointing and flexing my feet. I am leaning my head back and closing my eyes to notice the flow of sensations. After five minutes of [sitting with my eyes closed and] tension in my arms and stomach, I am opening my eyes after finding my mind wander. I am feeling calmer. This calm feeling is in my stomach and the bowl of my pelvis. When I think of the bowl of my pelvis nervousness fills it. I am looking at the blue and white tablecloth over my television, the colors brighter and clearer than before, as if there is more light in the room [even though I have not turned on any more lights]. My fingers move much faster than they have moved thus far. In this example you can follow how acknowledging a momentary experience can cause that experience to shift, in the language of feelings to open up, to flow. This is the root of somatic processing, which I will discuss shortly. First, though, I am going to explore a practice that can be used to help us cultivate comfortable presence a practice that is called grounding and centering. Somatic Processing I consider somatic processing to be a life skill worth learning for anyone, one need not be having repressed experiences reassert themselves, like I was, in order to benefit. The root of somatic processing is sensing right now, regardless of whether our sensations are arising out of present circumstances only or have their roots in past experience, whether we are dealing with trauma or simply with day-to-day questions. Examples include Gendlin's "Focusing," which has general application, and Peter A. Levine's Somatic Experiencing®, which applies Gendlin's work specifically to trauma. Depending on our personal histories, needs, and resources some of us might learn somatic processing sufficiently well by reading one of the above books and practicing the techniques ourselves. Still others might need or want a friend to exchange facilitation with. Some of us will do best with professional facilitation. Ellie Epp suggests having backup while learning if one is traumatized, but asserts that after we "have learned how to complete the process, though see it through the cycle of completion it is highly comforting to have learned that one doesn't have to be afraid of oneself." I myself have mostly done somatic processing alone, having friends that I can call if I get upset. I recently sought out professional facilitation because I felt I had become a bit stuck. Even with facilitation, however, I do most of my processing alone, as most of my life is not spent in consultation. I have found being able to work alone very useful, and sometimes near overwhelming. I have benefited greatly from working even a little bit with an experienced facilitator, and my skills have grown. I am very wary of the idea that we should not go into our inner experience, especially if we are traumatized, without a psychologist on hand. On the other hand, some of us, like myself, may resist asking for help when we need it. When we need support it is essential that we find it. If you are going to practice somatic processing, I encourage you to find your own self-supportive balance with this. I cannot hope, and do not mean, to teach somatic processing here, as I am very much a student myself, but I do want to give a brief outline of Gendlin's "Focusing" in order to give you a general sense of the technique and of somatic processing in general. Please see Focusing for full instructions. According to Gendlin, this method "works for any sort of stuckness," and these are its steps: "Clearing a Space," in which you notice and acknowledge what you are feeling about your life without going into it, making a space between it and you. "Felt sense," in which you choose one problem and instead of trying to think of all the parts of it which you cannot feel the whole, including where you feel it. This is the "felt sense.' "Handle," in which you stay with that quality until a word, phrase or image comes up that fits just right. "Resonating," in which you go between the felt sense and the word, to see if they resonate. You are looking for a body-signal that tells you it is a perfect fit. The felt sense and word may change as you do this. If so, you let them and keep "resonating." "Asking," in which you get the felt sense back and ask it "What makes the problem so (whatever your word or image was)," until you get an answer that is accompanied by a light shift that may feel like a give or release. If you get a quick answer that doesn't stimulate a shift, let it go by and keep listening. "Receiving whatever comes with a shift in a friendly way," and staying with that a little while. You may stop for now, or continue with step 2. I work with a truncated form of this method quite often. I say truncated because the steps tend to flow together. I will feel and then I will talk to myself (out loud if I am alone) and so on in repetition until I have a "realization." This is something I seem to have always known how to do. Reading Focusing helped me to understand it better, and reminded me to sit with my feelings and allow them to move through me rather than to figure them out. The example that I shared in "what listening feels like," of me feeling through my resistance to writing this paper, is an example of how I apply this method. I frequently worked in a similar way with my resistance when I was writing snow & fire. Gendlin discovered "focusing" by outlining what it was that successful psychotherapy patients did. He says, We found that it was not the therapist's technique...Nor does the difference lie in what the patients talk about. The difference is in how they talk. And that is only an outward sign of the real difference: what the successful patients do inside themselves. The purpose of [Focusing] is to tell you what they do and how you can do it. Here he makes what I believe is a key point. Though somatic processing is considered focused on body-feeling, there is something that all of the methods I am familiar with Focusing, Somatic Experiencing®, and Hakomi share, they all involve not only experiencing, but also talking about that experience, or putting words to it. An Example Though in my writing of snow & fire, I did not incorporate renegotiation of events, but rather focused on attending to and attempting to put to words the exact experiences that I had, an opportunity to practice Somatic Experiencing® method did come out of the writing. I completed the stories "burn," in which I burnt myself quite severely, and "paintbrush burning," in which my house burnt down and I feared my mother was inside, early in the project. For several nights after I wrote them I dreamt that the gas fireplace in the living room of my current house was leaking propane and was going to explode. I would try to stop the explosion, and then run as fast as I could away from the house. I would wake up from each dream heart pounding, still terrified, and at the same time triumphantly relieved. After several nights of this, I woke up to have the following experience, as described in a letter the next day: I woke up with sensations I am familiar with of being about to feel something scary, this time [I knew it was going to be] about the cabin burning down incident. Having been reading Waking the Tiger and knowing the release of traumatic energy is helpful, even though it feels terrifying, I felt into it. I did this for probably over two hours (I did not move to look at the clock), receiving for the first time great success with Levine's Somatic Experiencing®. First, waves of sensation with sweating and shaking - very much the feeling of energy releasing. Then my left arm, and then both arms, contracted and seized up, fingers contracted into hard-claw-like things, back hunching over and pain moving through my arms, which I focused on. I wasn't sure what the arm pain was about, but thought perhaps the left, which stayed sore for much longer, was the hand I'd burned, and that both might be sore from skiing away from the fire. [I don't think it could have been, because I am right-handed, so this remains a mystery.] At times I focused on the feeling of skiing/running really hard, away from the fire, or an avalanche, finally breathing very hard and my arms and torso shaking from side to side. Then I had to sit for the longest time, just with the feeling in my left hand and shoulder, until I was breathing much more deeply than I ever breathe and feeling very calm in my whole body, except for my hands, where the remaining "felt sense" had localized. [I sat with that feeling in my hands] for a while more. I did not feel as though I had completely finished releasing the energy from the experiences though I may have come closer had I had the time right then to continue to work with the sensations in my hands - but I did feel as though I had taken a large leap. This release was triggered by my writing practice because I was writing according to the principles of somatic processing, writing to allow my un-felt feelings to be felt, connections to be reestablished, mobilized energy to complete, to viscerally acknowledge my full experience. Anna Hawkins, An epistemology, or methodology, of the unconscious I read the introduction to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook the other day, and it echoes what I now understand is the way to conduct my own education. Any first semester student could get a lot out of reading this introduction; I'll give these lines as an example: "There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag - and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought ." I think this is important for the beginning of a Goddard education; "I need to read this to know that" can come in later and fill in the holes that have emerged. During the application process, or at the beginning of a study plan, it might be better to focus on the question "where do you want to begin?" and, "what does the first stepping stone look like?", rather than, "what does the whole journey look like?" and "where will the journey conclude?" For some people, the whole journey is important because they really want to arrive somewhere in particular, but for others it may be better to just focus on the first step, because in stepping they may either discover where they want to go, or just arrive there by taking very authentic strides. Lessing also implores the student to remember that the truth is not always written down; don't be dependent on the printed page. Students are indoctrinated by an educational system full of assumptions that go unquestioned, she says. Students are urged to look for their own opinions rather than adopting those of the critics or "authorities." The people able to be helpful in advising a student are likely to follow their own instinct when reading. Such a person "is nearly always someone right outside the literary machine, even outside the university system." Lessing declares that what one should really be learning, is how "to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need". This echoes what I have been learning myself, and really understanding more and more. A final and very important point that Lessing makes in her introduction to The Golden Notebook: "the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn't anything more to be got out of it." This would again place Lessing in the heart of intuitive process, of the unknown. This isn't what we're taught normally. We're taught that structure should be visible, clear, overt. I think Carol Gilligan's book fits into Lessing's description; The Birth of Pleasure doesn't offer its structure for examination, it just keeps tripping gaily from subject to subject along a common thread. Lessing reminds me in her statement that it is okay to rest in formlessness, the unknown, and a certain amount of chaos, because then you are still on fertile ground, the sparks of imagination are still flying and churning, much like what Woolf alluded to when she spoke of the union of masculine and feminine minds. Unconscious Process and the Felt Sense I've been thinking about this new process (new for me) that I'm using in this program. An unconscious epistemology. I've also been thinking about tone and style, and I remembered a book from last semester, John Welwood's Towards a Psychology of Awakening, a mellifluous read. It was deep and grounding and rich. I thought I might just look at it in relation to the other books I analysed for style, but I opened it to a page titled "Toward a New Understanding of Unconscious Process." Hmmm. What I found was that Welwood disagrees with the Jungian tendency to see the unconscious as a realm separate from conscious awareness. It is not some container parallel to conscious experience, full of submerged instincts, drives, repressed memories, and archetypes. Rather, the unconscious is a "holistic mode of organizing experience and responding to reality that operates outside the normal span of focal attention." Welwood bases this definition of unconscious process on the assumption that our basic experience as humans involves interaction. The unconscious "takes account of larger fields of interconnectedness without breaking them into linear, sequential units. What is unconscious, then, are the holistic ways in which the body-mind organism experiences its interconnectedness with reality, prior to the articulations of conscious thought." Welwood's explanation of the "felt sense" helps to show how he sees the unconscious process. He was profoundly affected by his training with Eugene Gendlin, teacher of the psychotherapeutic technique called focusing, which draws one's attention to a felt sense within one's experience. The felt sense is the pre-articulate fabric underneath a person's words and actions. It is responsible for most of the decisions we make. To be able to articulate this non-verbal felt sense, our attention needs to "shift to a more diffuse attention that allows a holistic scanning of experiential intricacy." The focusing method draws heavily on this felt sense, because Gendlin found that most forward changes happened when clients were able to tap into and speak from their felt experience of the moment. The felt sense is often diffused and blurry; it is preconscious. The challenge is to stay with the unknown of this felt sense in order to move authentically from it. Welwood describes psychological inquiry as an unfolding process, which may begin with this felt sense. We tend to talk about our felt sense, instead of speaking directly from it. The unfolding happens when we zig-zag back and forth between our pre-articulate felt sense and our speech. Unfolding in therapy has three main stages: widening into the felt sense of a situation, direct inquiry into this sense, and articulation from various angles until its crux is discovered, thereby relieving the stuckness. Welwood refers to Max Picard's suggestion that speech is powerful and affective when it originates from the large space beyond words; speech that moves "from silence into the word and then back again into the silence and so on, so that the word always comes from the center of silence . Mere verbal noise, on the other hand, moves uninterruptedly along the horizontal line of the sentence . Words that merely come from other words are hard and lonely." Welwood's tone feels quiet, warm, and unusually human and accepting. I think it must be that his connection to this felt sense makes the language seem to have a permeable impact on my consciousness. In fact, while reading his words, I become silent, still, grounded, and physically centered in my heart. Welwood comments on his process: "I started with a diffuse felt sense of what I wanted to say, which I have to keep referring back to along the way. I can't know exactly what I want to say except by letting it unfold word by word . At the end of this chapter I should have discovered the full range of my intent." As I reread the last sentence, I see that I spiral around, relearning this theme, that as I write, I will find out, and I don't need to have a clear idea of what twists and turns the path will contain. This is me learning that there is, in Welwood's terms, a holistic organizing principle that sees and comprehends a larger field than my conscious awareness. This also makes me think of a drawing I saw that was meant to describe the relation of conscious and unconscious knowing. It was a large circle with a tiny "x" in one part of it. The "x" is our conscious awareness, but we actually have access to the rest of the circle, we just don't know it. Becoming connected to one's felt sense is, I think, a critical component of engaging in education in this unconscious exploratory manner. This semester I am experiencing some kind of felt sense that offers a feeling of rightness, or aptness, to what I choose to read next. This is a different way of operating; it contrasts with the linear mind that has a clear path from point A to point B, and which may have a strong reason for doing so. But the felt sense, and unconscious process in general, make it possible for a non-linear path to emerge, one step at a time. Unconscious knowing and fiction I think a deeper understanding of this felt sense was something I was craving, and is what is transfixing, surprising, and shocking me as I read fiction this semester. I am amazed at the depth of emotional knowing that is conveyed in a glance, a gesture, a fidgeting. A character will suddenly have a deep insight into another character's intentions from the slightest detail, or the smallest unconscious yet observed grimace. I feel naïve when reading books like those of Woolf and Lessing. These authors convey emotional depth and perception in such a way that I am made to become aware, and I am made to admit that it is so, it is true what they say; if one is super-conscious and feeling in a situation, and observes acutely, one will understand those small clues which indicate a coming together of people, or of a pulling away. I feel as if I am studying emotional awareness, perspicacity, and am shedding some emotional naivete. Doris Lessing and Anita Brookner both write of characters who feel they are, in some way, naïve. I feel this way as well. I think the naivete comes not from not-knowing, but from a refusal to know the depth of things, a sort of chosen ignorance. Perhaps it comes from a clinging to childishness on some level, to avoid the responsibility that deeply knowing brings. Or perhaps naivete is a natural state that we slowly move out of into awareness. I watched with humor recently how I knew and perceived, but avoided knowing that I knew. My mother, when visiting Maui, had asked about my boyfriend, "what is John's last name?" I said, "Palicki", and she said, "what kind of a name is that?" "Its Polish." Sparks of unsaid questions, doubts - Poland?? Hoping that going closer to Britain would provide reassurance to my parents, I offered, "the other side of his family is Irish with some name like O'Hare." There was a flash of a pause, where my mother's gears of averting possible harm turned, and then she tensely advanced, with just the slightest trace of nastiness, "does he have any bad habits?" Now I knew what she was asking, but I initially went literal, just for a few seconds, before I realized that my first instinct, does he drink like an Irish slob? was what she really was asking! Perhaps I have made a practice of some measure of emotional denseness, at least around my mother, to either annoy her by not getting her point, or to go directly counter to her somewhat paranoic and overtime machine geared to avert future harm. I will play the naïve light-hearted child to her habitual tense seriousness. Actually, on returning to this area of my packet later, I don't think that I am emotionally naïve at all, yet these books provide a kind of a template for understanding and recording all the minute emotional details that surround me. I think books that portray an acute inner emotional awareness help me to become more aware, they help me become faster with this type of understanding. And they introduce me to all kinds of feelings that are out of my typical daily spectrum. I suspect that they will help me in the future with the identification of a particular feeling, if I want to go deeper into understanding of some inner movement. This "emotional template" that these books provide is similar to the "inner dialogue template" that Virginia Woolf so expertly offers. I remember how I left the library just before noon several months back, after I had been reading Mrs. Dalloway for a couple of hours. During my short walk to my car, I became vividly aware, as if in meditation, of the nature and style of my inner chatter, Mrs. Dalloway style. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is full of tiny potent moments of taut emotion. I'm in suspense and tense as personal relations play themselves out in her book, and I'm enlightened by her female character's grasp of the rich knowledge of the unsaid. I'm also shocked at the moments of twisted hate, the convulsions of a desire to hurt another, that her characters go through, and which she acknowledges. And Lessing directly refers to what I now understand is the felt sense, when she speaks of the "nostalgia for death", the feeling from which the main character Anna's book is written. This also reminds me of Woolf, in Room of one's own, who talks of novels built of squares, or domed, or like a pagoda; their shape "starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it." As I mentioned before, Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac certainly had a felt sense to it; I've never before read a book that felt so consistently grey. This book was, I think, the first book where I fully felt an emotional theme like this. I wonder if the use of the felt sense is something that may distinguish female and male writers, or rather writers who are two-gendered, versus writers whose masculine and feminine brains do not inform each other. Lack of a felt sense might be akin to what Virginia Woolf calls lack of "suggestive power," which lets writing be a vital sparkling fire capable of igniting thousands of new sparks nearby. "When a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within," as when she reads a critic on the art of poetry and finds that his comments were intelligent but "his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated into different chambers, not a sound carried from one to the other." Richard Koenigsberg, Buddhism and embodiment Buddhism does not conceive of language or symbolic systems as constituting the essence of the self; rather seeks to discover or uncover the self at the place of concrete experience. Buddhism encourages us to embrace our presence within the current moment, immerse ourselves within this moment and become a witness to what is occurring right now. Buddhism seeks to concentrate upon and cultivate the current moment as the doorway to existence, reality and the self. Whereas many currents in contemporary thought emphasize the embeddedness of the subject within culture, Buddhism focuses on that part of the self that is not bound to the symbolic order. Buddhism constitutes a method or practice for separating, detaching from culture. Buddhism embraces rather than shies away from the encounter with emptiness or non-being. Within the space of emptiness, language and the symbolic order dissolve, allowing one to return to silence-the essence of being. Buddhism compares the self to a vast, empty sky. Ideas and thoughts are like clouds. Why cling to each passing cloud? From the space of the empty sky one may observe ideas and beliefs that inhabit the self without declaring that these ideas and beliefs are the essence of self. From within the space of emptiness, one may examine the nature and structure of the ideas and objects with which one had become identified. Buddhism represents a psychological method whose purpose is to facilitate disidentification with the symbolic order. Buddhism nurtures a place within the mind where ideologies and the discourses of society lose their power. Buddhism embraces physical experience or proprioception as the source of self. The practice of Buddhism revolves around "sitting" and "breathing." One's body is the infrastructure or foundation of existence. "Sitting" involves the continual act of being aware of one's body in relationship to the ground and one's immediate physical surroundings. Sitting, one concentrates on the muscles of one's diaphragm as they generate breathe after breathe after breathe after breathe. According to Buddhism, the self comes into being, not by virtue of one's status as a "speaking being," but to the extent that one pays close attention to one's posture and breathing. One focuses on the immediate moment-one's thoughts and feelings as they occur in the immediate moment-and gradually becomes aware of one's existence. Self derives from mindfulness. French philosophers with their emphasis upon language and symbolic processes descend from Descartes who declared, "I think, therefore I am." Far greater numbers of people in the civilized world believe it is more accurate to state, "I am, therefore I think." Buddhism proposes that it is not possible to separate the mind from its organic source. Mind is contained, present within the body. If there is no separation between body and mind, how is it possible to speak of a 'de-centered self'? Buddhism suggest that one becomes de-centered to the extent that one identifies with objects that are outside the self; objects that-fundamentally-are not the self. Lacanians often state that in the absence of a capacity to bond with or bind to the symbolic order, the subject would become lost in a void, psychotic. Placing the void at the heart of its psychology, Buddhism conceives of emptiness as a state-of-being to be sought rather than shunned or feared. Buddhism asserts that emptiness is our true self or fundamental nature. Achievement of a state of emptiness allows one to let go of "sticky attachments." Living comfortably within the space of emptiness, it is possible to release the symbolic objects that dwell within the self. Emptiness is conceived as spaciousness. Where ideas and words were, there shalt nothing be. Where nothing is, one can receive something new; what was not there before. People attach to ideas and ideologies as if they were solid, substantial things. However, narratives (those grand and not so grand) collapse and crumble. The symbolic order appears disorderly and incoherent; even bizarre. Buddhist practice enhances the capacity to "abide where there is no abiding;" to maintain stability and self-constancy even as the house burns down. Buddhism is the practice of non-attachment: learning to let go of that with which one had been identified. Buddhism is a method of releasing the symbolic order from within the self; learning to live in the empty space. Ideas and thoughts are like clouds passing through the sky. When one cloud disappears, another comes to take its place. There is no need to become attached, cling to, or become excited by each passing cloud. To analyze ideologies of destruction and self-destruction, it is necessary to become capable of dis-identifying with them; of experiencing them as separate from the self. It is not productive to "fight" an ideology. In waging war against an ideology, one becomes part of it. War against the ideology becomes a struggle against part of the self. One's Buddha nature is the silent observer; that part of the self that has not-cannot-become colonized by the symbolic order. Buddhism means throwing away passionate attachments, learning to observe and empathize without becoming identified. As the world and its ideologies "scream bloody murder," one tunes into one's original nature: the "unmoved" within the constantly moving. It is necessary to distance oneself from "good" ideologies (those that one believes in) as well as from "evil" ideologies. Just because everyone else in society attaches to an ideology doesn't mean one has to do so oneself. Just because everyone believes that something is true, this doesn't mean it is true. Just because everyone believes that there is no truth, this doesn't mean that truth doesn't exist. Before Galileo, most people believed that the sun revolved around the earth.
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