Hi Tasha,

I'll try.

I think my first encounter was though John and Kris Amodeo's book
'Being Intimate', which really is a book to practice -- but I dealt
with it very much through ideas and patterns rather than using it as a
way to learn focusing. It had connections to my experiencing and what
I was exploring in counselling (Rogerian) and therapy (post-Reichian)
at the time...

The next connections were through David Michael Levin's work, which I
was using in my PhD (on  theatre and its relationship to alternative
spiritual movements and practices between 1890 and 1916 - title:
Embodying the Spirit) and a proof text of an essay of Gendlin's that
was loaned to me by David Wood when he was at Warwick. I resonated
with what Gendlin was writing -- but I still wasn't practicing
focusing.

Some time later I was exploring the Process Work of Mindell et al and
found myself with a particular difficulty. So, intuitively, I decided
to explore Focusing to see if it would help with the difficulty. It
did and I eventually qualified as a Focusing trainer. I want to say
that there wasn't a problem with 'process work' but there was
something that I wasn't getting and Focusing helped me get to it.

The experience of practicing focusing was different from reading about
it. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? Like reading about a place and then
visting it -- no matter how much you 'know' through the reading, (and
I don't mean that simply logically as a list of facts, but also the
imagination, the bodily experience of this other place) the 'knowing'
through actually beng in the place is different...

I don't mean focusing is or leads to a place, of course...

For me, the practice of Focusing quickly brought into awareness a
particular atitude that I had towards myself that was quite
destructively critical, and that affected my relationship with myself
and with others. It really didn't matter how much I 'knew' about
supergos. cops in the head, inner fascists. judges or critics, top
dogs - there was a shift in awareness with Focusing, as if another
dimension had been added. That helped me allow things a little more
time to unfold in my body, to allow the felt sense to develop, and to
have a good sense of where the destructively critical attitude was
manifesting itself.

There are numerous ways in which this awareness shift might have
occurred but it occurred through focusing in me. That then fed back
into the other work I was doing, whether it was teaching performance,
or exploring process work, or underatking somatics training with
Sondra Fraleigh.

But I guess there are different things here

(i) the shift in attitude that occurred through the focusing process (content)

(ii) the 'doing' of focusing which becomes and embodied awareness of
the form as opposed to a theoretical awareness of ts shape.

So, I guess the shift in my relationship to focusing is that I am now
informed through the process of focusing rather than having
information about it.

This has implications for my understanding of Gendlin's philosophical
work, (or any philosophical work) because I read from a differently
informed perspective.

This probably holds for any kind of shift in awareness, any kind of
newly embodied knowledge, that it affects how we understand things -
but Gendlin is saying something about that..... Drawing attention to
it and thinking with it.

I hope that gives something of an answer to your question (and in the
process gives a little more information about me).

Both Focusing and Thinking at the Edge are practices which can be said
to emerge from Gendlin's Philosophy of the Implicit.

best wishes

Franc


On 16/10/06, Natasha Barlow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi Franc,
>
> Thanks. Is it possible to say  anything about the sense it made moving from
> your philiosophical understanding to the experiential?
> or suggest any reading in particular?
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Tasha
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Franc Chamberlain" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 5:00 PM
> Subject: Re: Mathias Dekeyser
>
>
> > Hi tasha,
> >
> > That's pretty close to my understanding of the development of focusing
> > in relation to therapy... I was wondering about Adrian's notion that
> > Gendlin's 'felt sense' emerged from psychoanalysis.
> >
> > I first encountered Gendlin's work as a student but as a philsophical
> > text rather than an embodied practice. I eventully learned Focusing --
> > and to assist others to learn it.
> >
> > best wishes
> >
> > Franc
> >
>