excerpt from an interview with Dr. Eugene Gendlin in Tricycle magazine online (Sept 2011)
As a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s, Gendlin was grappling with the relationship between symbols and lived experience. Curious about whether the process of psychotherapy might shed light on the matter, he got accepted in a therapy practicum taught by Carl Rogers, now legendary as a founder of humanistic psychology and the originator of client-centered therapy. The two began a research collaboration that would continue for eleven years.
Examination of hundreds of hours of recorded therapy sessions showed that certain clients were doomed to fail and that you could pick out those clients from the get-go. Listening to these recordings, Gendlin observed that when a therapy client turned inward in a particular way, he or she moved forward; clients who didn’t do this turning inward remained stuck. “The wisdom of the time said to separate those people who were good prospects for therapy from those who weren’t and just take those who could succeed,” he recalls, “but we couldn’t stand that.”
Gendlin began to look for a method to teach the stuck clients how to get unstuck.
How to “find your inner contact” later became the technique of Focusing. Therapy clients learned to get in touch with an at first vague, bodily-felt meaning (what Gendlin calls a felt sense) and to draw that experience into articulation.
Linda Heuman: Back in the late 1950s, when you were studying recordings of clients in therapy, what exactly did you see successful clients doing that the unsuccessful ones weren’t doing?
They speak from and about their inside experiencing. They often pause, then use phrases like, “No, not quite what I said. More like…uh….” They check inside.
The therapist would say back what the client tried to say. Then the client would correct, “No, I meant it more like that...” Then the therapist would accept the correction and say back, “Oh, I see, more like that....” Therapists speak from feeling what the client wants to convey. They repeat only a few main words. The client would say, “Yes, but another thing is this and this about it.” The therapist would say, “Oh, there’s this and this about it.” Then maybe they would say once more, “Well, there’s still this.” The therapist would say this back. And then the client would exhale and say, “Ah.” [Sighs]
At this point there is always this characteristic little silence there, because they’ve finished saying what they wanted to say and they got heard, more deeply than ever. That makes one feel more connected inside. For the moment they don’t know what they’re going to say next. The people who do come from inside naturally go deeper at that point, but we needed to teach this also to the others.
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"The essence of Focusing involves bringing gentle, mindful awareness to a subtle level of bodily experiencing known as the "felt sense." Felt senses, which lie somewhere between physical sensations and emotional feelings, represent a distinct kind of experience. When attended to with friendly but dispassionate attention, felt senses that start out seeming vague and unnameable can show up with greater clarity and precision--hence the name, Focusing.
Felt senses show as bodily-felt places, textures, shapes or inner movements, with distinct physical qulaities that may be described with words like hard, soft, jittery, sinking, thick, tight, warm, or cold.
It is at this point that Focusing departs from traditional mindfulness practice. Instead of noting these internal sensations and returning to the breath, the focuser chooses to be with the felt sense, gently keeping it company--as one might do with a child or a friend in a state of distress or excitement. " from David Rome in "Focusing & Meditating". Tricycle. Fall 2011
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LEARNING TO BE in your body, “...as it is felt from inside,” is something you cannot make happen with your mind. Information helps you understand what you’re doing. But information in the mind is never a process in your body! Hearing a classroom lecture on driver training won’t give you a feel for the road. Information alone can never communicate the entire message.
A whole new world lies sleeping inside your body’s knowing. Resources for inner healing, creativity, and the vast riches of our human spirit lie waiting to come alive in you. It’s all in the linking, the connecting, the relating!
Our worst fears and tears can become trusted teachers and healers when we learn to “notice and nurture” important feelings from inside our body’s knowing.
Seven Fundamentals about
Body Knowing and Learning
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- We all know we have feelings. What most of us don’t realize is that more than 50% of human knowledge is learned from our body’s ability to know, rather than through our mind’s ability to think. This is another way of saying that we actually use about 10% of our knowing potential throughout life. As a species, we have barely yet begun to recognize the depth and hidden potential in what our bodies can teach us--if we are prepared to listen and learn!
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- Every good coach knows that students learn swimming or any sport, typing, singing, dance, or carpentry from the body-feel of doing it correctly. They need more than outside information. They must enter directly into the process of learning from “inside” their own bodies. It is this “how-in-the-bones” that enables each generation to pass special ways of body knowing on to the next, but in a manner quite different from communicating information through concepts and ideas that our minds can grasp.
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- The human body has a unique way of felt-knowing which is different from thinking, analyzing, and reasoning. Your body spontaneously recognizes the whole of a situation, the whole of a relationship, the whole of an experience, together with the interacting web of complex connections that goes along with each of them. Your body knows in a great gulp, while your mind must systematically chew its way through each individual piece. Our human species has been blessed with two entirely different ways of knowing. The challenge is to learn how to use both of them. An even greater challenge is to discover and implement a simple, effective way to teach our children how to connect with and learn from the important stories in their feelings.
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- The ancient Greeks recognized at least five different kinds of knowledge: scientific knowing, wisdom, opinion, faith, and an esoteric knowledge called “gnosis.” Among the five, however, only scientific knowing referred to informational knowledge in the mind. The other four pointed to special ways of knowing in the body. This is the world of hunch, intuition, creativity, inspiration, revelation. Wisdom is always more than information. It is living from inside the actual experience of our body-connections.
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- Everyday feelings, emotions, and physical sensations represent an important first step into the world of felt body connections. Such body-links bring their own special meaning into our lives, a meaning that is felt rather than thought. ALL FEELINGS, whether positive or negative, are an important part of our body’s intelligence because they introduce us to these deeper felt meanings. “Noticing” and “Nurturing” feelings represents a first step into a process of learning from inside our bodies.
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- Feelings are like the phone ringing. A message is trying to get through. We don’t have phones in our offices or homes just to make noise. They ring to alert us that some information is waiting. The problem for many, however, is that when the phone of their feelings rings, trying to get a message through, a habit of blocking the message kicks in. People respond to their feeling “ring” by turning on the TV or pouring themselves a drink. They go to the refrigerator, pick up a magazine, daydream, go shopping, etc.. They escape, they numb, they avoid, or substitute something they like in place of what is perceived to be a fearful or hurting attack and threat. The neural response in their brain stimulates and reenforces their particular “habit” of avoidance.
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- Most people don’t realize that values, basic human goodness, and a positive sense of self are all learned in the body! Such valuing doesn’t grow in us because we follow an external list of do’s and don’ts. It is not discovered through various religious or ethical interpretations. Rather, it is given to us through our body’s ability to be aware of its connections as well as the further invitation that lies in such linking. Since the body knows through felt connections, it also knows we are each part of some Greater Whole.
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excerpted from www.BioSpiritual.org
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