I received a really interesting workbook from my boyfriend this Christmas.
He reads really old books sometimes, like Aristotle and John Milton, but he’ll also read obscure scientific works from the 1960’s, for example, that have since been overshadowed by more famous synthesizers of information in their field. One such book was by Dr. Gene Gendlin, a 20th century American philosopher: Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning. It wasn’t even one of his more famous books where he talks about the power of focusing. In this book, he was laying the philosophical groundwork for his later works that percolated into the public conversation.
One day a couple months ago, my guy randomly told me something he read in Gendlin’s book, and it piqued my interest so much so that I googled him. It was about how psychotherapy clients have a more successful outcome if they can name or even just feel a physical feeling around what brought them into therapy and get a “felt sense” around it. He says, “… all forms of therapy consist of a person’s efforts to experience more deeply and to come to grips with and symbolize his own felt experience for himself.” (Experience and the Creation of Meaning, pg. 78)
I was like, “This guy was bringing mindfulness to America and he didn’t know it!” (It’s funny and heartbreaking seeing two philosophies emerge at the same time, and one gets all the recognition while the other falls into relative obscurity. If memory serves me correctly, Buddhist mindfulness arrived in the US in the 1970’s through Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work with pain at the University of Massachussettes, but Gendlin was maybe providing more of a locally-grown ontology for it.)
His PhD was in philosophy, but because of his close collaboration with Dr. Carl Rogers, the father of humanistic psychology, one might say he ended up contributing more to psychology. Here is what Wikipedia says about his work:
Gendlin is best known for Focusing, a psychotherapy technique, and for “Thinking at the Edge”, a general procedure for “thinking with more than patterns”.[3] In the 1950s and 60s, under the guidance of Rogers, Gendlin did research demonstrating that a client’s ability to realize lasting positive change in psychotherapy depended on their ability to access a nonverbal, bodily feel of the issues that brought them into therapy. Gendlin gave the name “felt sense” to this intuitive body-feel for unresolved issues. Realizing that people could be taught this skill, in 1978 Gendlin published his best-selling book Focusing, which presented a six step method for discovering one’s felt sense and drawing on it for personal development….. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Gendlin
Knowing that I believe in this methodology, but am not very consistent at putting it into practice, my guy contacted a Focusing workshop leader in Canada and bought a workbook for me! Random but awesome! The workbook’s aim isn’t therapeutic so much as artistic- I have been wanting to write a book for the last few years, and I have been unable to articulate even some of the basic concepts I’m conceiving of that exist in my mind like unformed blobs. I’m hoping the exercises in here will help me get in touch with the felt sense of my book and help give birth to it.
The first exercise is a check-in with a mostly-blank page. No pressure to make my thoughts make sense, just an instruction to explore the felt sense of the book and write some relevant words down. Yay, this will be fun.
