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I am beset by uncertainties, but what I want to say is simple, for I am a simple man. I want to ask: Is there anything new under the sun? I want to say: I don’t believe in methods. Can any method, even the best, even ours, be more than poor, thin, schematic and […]
Dear Friends,
I feel very squeamish about the word reflect. To me it seems that the point is not to be a mirror, but to be (in the other sense) reflective: to take in what is given, to be touched by it and to reflect inwardly - like Mary, who “kept all these things in her […]
Dear Friends
When I am teaching Focusing to anybody now, I have four things in my mind:
1 Respect
By respect, I mean that I want to follow, not to lead.
2 Tenderness
By tenderness, I mean that I want to remember that everybody is vulnerable, even when we are hiding it.
3 Phrasing
By phrasing, I mean that I want to […]
Hello everybody !
I finally understood something which has caused me endless anguish.
Gene Gendlin did not AT ALL come up with Focusing. That has always been clear. There is for example a beautiful (and famous) description of Focusing in William James.
So what did Gene do?
It seems to me that what he grasped so clearly, which James […]
A friend asked for advice. Well, who am I to advise? Still, I can always listen, and say what comes to me.
It was about somebody with a deep and genuine desire to learn Focusing. He had read Gene Gendlin’s book, “Focusing”, felt a need for some pointers, and came for one or two guided Focusing […]
Truly, I don’t know where we can begin.
It seems there is a basic flaw in the human response. We seem (in general) unable to take in, in any adequate way, what is far away or out of view. Even when the suffering of others presses upon us, is right there, and we are tangled up […]
A friend writes, in a lovely phrase, that natural language “is always flowing and helping us to understand”. To say that is a matter of description, wouldn’t you say? The phrase describes a certain fluid power in natural language, which lets us say many things.
Another friend worries about “the propagation of unlimited original terms”. It […]
My friend Nada wonders whether, when we Focusers use the phrase “emotional intelligence”, we use it as part of the common language; or whether we are suggesting that Gene Gendlin and Dan Goleman are somehow in the same boat.
To my mind, this question is spot on. Daniel made a big mistake, one which Gene has […]
I’m just back from a Greek and Latin summer school at the University of Wales, and ought to be doing something else (sleeping, perhaps), but shall not resist writing a few thoughts here about Herakleitos, by way of homecoming.
“Everything flows; nothing remains. Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.” - These are […]
This will be about remembering and tracking my own story of reading philosophy.
I may risk a few tentative suggestions, born out of what I did and what then happened; and because I’ve had chances to watch how quite a number of people have gone about starting to read the philosophy of Gene Gendlin. Mostly, though, […]