Notes on the Focusing movement, and the philosophy and writing of Gene Gendlin

The Focusing movement has an expansive, world-making vision.

What Id like to point out here is both obvious and easy to overlook:
o the expansiveness of the vision for Focusing flows from the philosophy of the
implicit, and
o how it helps us recognize and explicate living persons in worldly situations.

As living persons in worldly situations, we are so lucky to have concept-making tools, and the
benefit of Gendlins example of ways we deepen and carry forward our knowing of these
worldly situations.

Certainly there is much to be done to make room for this grounded understanding of
living human persons in our social institutions, linguistic practices, and intimate lives.
And these examples of how we help each other realize the in-dwelling power and truth
we carrythese examples are cause for celebration.
o By taking them in fully, by feeling into them as complex and knowable
opportunities to carry forward, each of us can practice making imaginative space
for how living can thrive in specific situations.

The word imaginative can stand in here for the palpably real felt sensing that comes when we
experience how another lives with felt complexity. Each narrator in each piece in this newsletter
calls forth an understanding that Focusing always moves into and through lived situations, real
situations that we may not have a user-friendly way of navigating without Focusing.
With the power of the living processes comprehended in the philosophy, every situation opens
into the fuller living that we each call forth by virtue of being a living person with understanding
and imagination.

How to spread this understanding for people who dont have the explicit, named practice
of Focusing is a puzzle of sorts.
o On the one hand, the philosophy of the implicit explicates the human condition
of being a person, so to speak, and, as such,

can be used to explicate processes of living forward that are implicit for
any of us in the situations we find ourselves.

Felt sensing works outside of the explicit Focusing forms, of course

you can cook by guiding yourself with it, play jazz, speak from
experience, manage emotions, think new thoughtson and on.
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o On the other hand, Focusing as an approach to how we can live in open conscious
relation with felt sensing consists of actions and forms that are to some extent
explicitly taught, learned, used, adapted, elaborated, sequenced.

It is a cultural form* that we use to open and bring forward what may
remain latent, unrecognized, suppressed, misread in our living.
*Developed in the West, reflecting a therapeutic perspective on the
conscious self- development of individual persons, and not explicitly
addressing political, economic, or social conditions that impact the
development of persons in situations.

Our living, like the philosophy, is bigger, reflexive, more intricate than a single or dominant
method of Focusing could contain.

Our living is always within the worldly situations that the articles in this newsletter
describe. To get the most out of these or any examples of Focusing in worldly situations,
o Im suggesting that we carry into them a sense of the expansiveness of the
philosophy that gave birth to the practice.

Id like to quote some sentences from Genes philosophy, and invite the
reader to her sense of language,

to soften focus to include peripheral glimpses of the edges and margins

where the carrying forward is happening.

Above all, to remember that living processes and language co-exist in an

ongoing dynamic relation, and that the written word on the page is at
least once removed from this dynamic relation.

Each of us uses language and the conventional concepts it offers to make

things out of processes; that is surely why The Process Model starts with
the idea of interaction first:

From Gendlins writings:

The very word "interaction" sounds as if first there are two, and only then is there
an "inter." We seem to need two nouns first. We think of two people living
separately into adulthood; then they meet. A good deal of their interaction is
explained by their antecedent lives. But not all of it. To an important extent it is
their interaction which determines how each acts.

It is commonly said that each of our relationships "brings out" different traits in
us, as if all possible traits were already in us, waiting only to be "brought out."
But actually you affect me. And with me you are not just yourself as usual, either.
You and I happening together makes us immediately different than we usually are.
Just as my foot cannot be the walking kind of foot-pressure in water, we occur
differently when we are the environment of each other. How you are when you
affect me is already affected by me, and not by me as I usually am, but by me as I
occur with you.
We want to devise concepts to capture this exact aspect of "interaction first":
What each is within an interaction is already affected by the other.

This passage invites us to consider the exquisitely social, interpersonal, intimate situation of each
of us in relation with persons.

We are inherently social beings, equipped with the capacity to be touched and shaped by
the situation of social life.

The philosophy does not readily support a notion that each of us carries a pure essential
self, untouched and undefined by rules or experience, waiting to spring forward in
ultimate freedom and power.
o That sort of a self is not the living person who carries forward in worldly
situations.

Similarly, a notion that the living individual person is defined as the ultimate reality, over
against a plethora of inherently restrictive cultural routines is nonsensical.
o That notion is a cultural artifact we owe in part to 30 plus years of libertarian and
market fundamentalism that is itself a widespread reaction to the mass liberation
movements of the sixties.
o Individualistic philosophies that ignore the social, political, and economic realities
impacting human development support the status quo of societies.
o Liberation philosophies, social change movements, and critiques of the inequities
of social orders threaten the structures of power and wealth in societies.

We invent, shape, enact, sequence, adapt, respond in culturally-informed ways in worldly

situations, and as living beings we are more than the cultural routines, even as we use them
to our purposes.
The body that figures as the ground of our felt sensing is more inclusive and embedded in
situations than our individualistic language might suggest, as Gendlin notes:
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The body is an environment in which body-process goes on further what we

call "the body" is a vastly larger system. "The body" is not only what is inside
the skin-envelope.
The philosophy of the implicit is in conversation with views of human nature that depend on
persons being primarily understood as products of social rules or discourses, of being artifacts of
the past, texts or mechanical things explained away by patterns. Gendlin quite viscerally and
simply explores the more than [] that the living person in worldly situations knows:
Since we humans are here, we can be certain that we are not impossible. A
conceptual model of "reality" that makes us seem impossible has to have
something wrong with it.
Human meanings and symbols seem impossible in the spectators space and time
within which we have been taught to think about anything. Therefore, currently,
the human world seems to float disconnectedly; human meanings seem added on
to a "reality" that makes us seem unreal.
We can devise an alternative, if we fashion the "basic" terms from the living
bodies that we have (are, act from, speak from .....). We can speak from living,
and we can make rudimentary concepts from speaking-from, and especially from
focusing and from the process of explication. Since these are possible in reality,
they can lead us to an alternative set of "basic" concepts of a "reality" in which
we would not seem impossible.
We want a reality that supports and recognizes our world-making, and we reject a model of
reality that makes the living person seem impossible, no more than a thing explained away.

Focusing, Gendlins philosophy, and the experiential psychotherapy movement came

from the human potential movement, in a time in the West when personal fulfillment
and development and the political and social change that make room for such
development were clearly linked.

For complex reasons, support for such a grand project ebbs and flows in worldly places
and situations.
o People may be cautioned against living for this better world, may be instructed to
be realistic, to accept austerity, surveillance, endless war.

By: John Harvey

harveyjohnr@gmail.com
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