Eugene Gendlin

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Administrator

Writing a PhD thesis on embodied knowing was a tricky task and at times I doubted that I could research something so nebulous. My big breakthrough came when I read the work of contemporary philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin.

Eugene Gendlin - head shot

Eugene Gendlin

Gendlin describes a “bodily sensed knowledge” which he calls a “felt sense” (Gendlin, 1981). I’d bet you’ve often had a felt sense: They’re those fuzzy feelings that we don’t usually pay much attention to – a vague ‘gut feeling’ about something or that odd sense of unease we’re feeling when we say ‘I just got out of the wrong side of bed this morning’.

You need an intuitive understanding of the felt sense to really understand Gendlin’s work, so I’ll give a few more examples. Imagine you are at a party and you spot someone that you have ‘a bit of a history’ with. How might that feel? Maybe some butterflies; maybe some vague memories – A mixture of things. That whole mixture is a felt sense. On a lighter note, imagine you’re taking a walk on a beautiful fresh morning, just after a rain storm. You crest the brow of a hill to see a perfect rainbow on the horizon. As you stand gazing at it, you might feel your chest fill with an expansive, flowing, warm feeling. That feeling is a felt sense. So it’s familiar and simple enough: A felt sense is a physical feeling that carries some meaning for you.

It’s not always easy to say what that meaning might be, but it’s worth trying to find out because the felt sense often carries deep embodied wisdom. As Gendlin says, “your body knows much that you don’t know” (Gendlin, 1981). Anyone can learn to access and verbalise the embodied knowing of the felt sense using a simple technique called Focusing (Gendlin, 1981).

In common with many others I’ve mentioned on this blog, Gendlin thinks that the body extends beyond the skin into “a vastly larger system” (Gendlin, 1997). In fact the body “is an ongoing interaction with its environment” which means that the felt sense can access “a vast amount of environmental information” (Gendlin, 1992). Gendlin’s ideas are fundamental to my cognitive iceberg model and help make sense of the work of philosophers like Andy Clark and David Abram. Given all that, perhaps it’s no surprise that I consider Gendlin to be the most significant thinker I’ve ever read.

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Counselling and psychotherapy

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Administrator

One thread runs though the considerable diversity of my life; a fascination with the human condition. That fascination has never been purely theoretical and I’ve always been concerned with how our lives might be nurtured to fuller flowering. As this thread led me through philosophy, art, activism and academia, I often wondered what larger pattern might emerge. Was there some practice which could weave the threads together?

A path into the woods

Following the path

Several years ago I realized that a pattern was emerging. I was involved with two groups which were practically engaged in helping people towards deeper understanding: One is a training organization which specializes in an embodied approach (Integration Training) and the other is an informal ecopsychology group.

About a year ago the path took another turn. I’d began to realize how powerful my Nature Connection work could be and decided that to take it to the next level required counselling training. As a result, I’ve recently started an Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton. You can be sure that this new strand will add to the richness of this blog and the tapestry we weave together here.

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Thinking with place

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Administrator

I spend last week-end at an ecopsychology retreat in Lancashire. We were staying in a stone barn in the woods, very close to a peat stained river that surged over ancient rocks.

river flowing over rocks

On Saturday I paired up with a colleague for a ‘medicine walk’. This was a wander, wherever instinct led, but with senses awake to the potential for meaning in our surroundings. It was surprisingly powerful and it’s worth pondering why.

Natural places are rich in metaphor and humans are habitual makers of meaning, so perhaps it’s to be expected that a damp, dark grove might trigger a sense of fecund mystery.

While such an interpretation isn’t wrong, it misses the sophistication of the process of thinking with place. The ambiguity of that phrase is productive: While thinking with place can refer to how we use a place as a tool to think with, it also implies an animistic thinking together with place.

Previous posts argued that the subject/object distinction is largely artificial - the “organism and environment enfold into each other” (Varela et al. 1991). I have also described how the mind can reach beyond what Clark calls the “skin-bag body” (1997). It is, therefore, by no means clear where my mind ends and the spirit of place begins. To suggest that there’s a richly metaphorical natural world ‘out there’ and a human meaning maker ‘in here’ is far too simplistic.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote:

“As I contemplate the blue of the sky … I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me,’ I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue …”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962).

In conclusion, person and place are part of a single process; bodymind place.

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Nature Connection Workshops: Reflections

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Administrator

Back in the Spring I wrote about the new series of Nature Connection Workshops Karen and I had planned. Now I find myself in early Autumn preparing for the last workshop of the year.

Nature Connection workshop at Hawkwood

Nature Connection workshop at Hawkwood

The more I do of this work the more amazed I am at the power of it. Several of my posts have commented on research into nature connection: We’re happier in natural environments than in cities and people heal faster when they can see trees. There’s more and more of this research available now and I’ve been collecting links to some of it on my website.

Some of what the research is saying is apparent in the feedback we get about the workshops: “I returned home, feeling alive and inspired, exhilarated by the beauty around me“, “I left with a renewed sense of the slow ebb and flow of my own life“, “we came away relaxed but revitalised (participant’s feedback from my website).

As I noted back in the Spring, it’s the place that does the real work; we provide ways to connect and then the natural magic takes over. The final workshop for this year takes place on Sunday 18th at the Hawkwood food growing site in North London.

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Being disembodied

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Administrator

Sociologist Ian Burkitt comments that our experience of the self has become “essentially disembodied” (Burkitt, 1999). In truth, we can’t be disembodied – unless you share Descartes’ weird belief in an incorporeal self – but many people experience life as if they were.

I love Mark Walsh’s passionate video on The Disembodied Mess We’re In.

People since at least Wilhelm Reich (d. 1957) have been saying something similar, notably perhaps Morris Berman  and Gregory Bateson. But amidst all the theory, Mark’s video is especially valuable; it’s direct and poetic and can speak to the majority.

Mark is a trainer who grounds his work in embodiment and one of the strengths of the video is that speaks from that practical experience. We occasionally work together and it’s inspiring to hear him talk with such passion about something that is so central to my life. As the man says, staying in the “grey comatose wasteland of disembodiment” is not OK. ”We’re sacred, we’re sane – and embodied, we could sort this mess out.”

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Eco-Paganism and place

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Administrator

I recently posted a guest blog on Adventures in Animism called ‘Eco-Paganism 101′. Eco-Paganism exemplifies several themes that I’ve been exploring here, so I want to flag them up.

Eco-Pagans are animists, “people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others” (Harvey, 2006). Animism thus entails a very special relationship to place: If the world is full of other-than-human persons, and you care for them, then you’d better be fully engaged with where you are.

Animism not only requires an enhanced sensory acuity; it also emerges from it. Abram suggests that “at the level of our spontaneous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists” (Abram, 1996). An indigenous tribal lifestyle typically requires a high level of sensory awareness to survive. The Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, for example, live in dense rainforest and rely on a highly developed sense of sound to know the time of day, season of the year and their location in space (Feld, 2005). It’s no coincidence that indigenous tribal people are generally animists: Heightened sensory awareness reveals the interconnectedness of the world.

Group of activist at Twyford Down

Eco-Pagans at a Twyford Down protest

The special relationship that Eco-Pagans have with place relies on a “somatic, physical knowing” (Harris, 1996). Alisha Little Tree spoke of the ”knowledge in our bodies that tell us what’s right” (Taylor, 2005), while Gordon writes of how the physical ecstasy of dance connects him to a “world that thinks” (MacLellan, 1996) and Barry explains that a “conversation with a tree is first and foremost a feeling in your body” (Patterson, 2005).  I could give you many more examples, but I trust the principle is clear.

I realise I’ve just summed up my PhD, The Wisdom of the Body: Embodied Knowing in Eco-Paganism. A more detailed summary, and indeed the whole thesis, is online.

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The pelican in the park

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Administrator

My sit spot is in my local park, so I go there pretty much every day. I usually take my binoculars and enjoy 20 minutes or so watching the park wildlife. Even though I live in south London, our local park has a pretty rich ecology.

A pond surrounded by trees in a park

Where's that pelican?

Just as I was leaving, a couple of young lads strolled over. “What ‘cha looking at?” Asked one of them. I felt myself tense and withdraw slightly as I replied, “I’ve been watching the birds”. Perhaps you can imagine the narrative in my head: ‘He’s going to make some crass comment and ruin my visit.‘

Actually, he didn’t say much at all; he just nodded and wandered off, leaving me feeling slightly chastened at my stupid assumptions. Then his slightly older mate came towards me, and pitched another question: “Have ya seen the pelican today?’

To the best of my knowledge there isn’t a pelican in my local park, but there is a good sized heron. ”No – I think you mean the heron? I haven’t seen it for a day or so”, I replied, aiming for a tone that didn’t sound like I was correcting him.

“Right”, he said, wandering off, and then, turning back to me, added “I jus’ thought yer man would know where ‘e is.”

I learnt some good lessons from our brief conversation. First, don’t let the media hype about ‘wayward feral youth’ stop you from seeing kids for who they really are. Second, youngsters are as fascinated by the creatures they see in the park as they ever were. I also like to think that our little local park is a place of growth for those two lads. As I’ve said here more than once, green spaces are profoundly healing and essential for commuity cohesion.

Next time I hope I have enough savvy to engage in a less defensive exchange. Clearly, I need to get out more!

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Twyford Down

Posted on August 22, 2011 by Administrator

Although my chapter in ‘The Wanton Green’ tells of life on recent protest sites, the spirit of an older campaign hovers in the background like a ghost.

Twyford Down was an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a Site of Special Scientific Interest, but in 1989 the UK Government decided a new road was needed; a 250 metre wide and 40 metre deep cutting now slices through the chalk downland. The protest was intense and involved hundreds of activists, some of whom – the Eco-Pagan Donga Tribe – lived at various camps on the Down.

The Donga Tribe – who were were named after the Iron Age trackways that criss-crossed the land - practised an earthy animist Paganism that honoured the spirits of place. I commented earlier that anthropologists often wrongly assume that only ancient indigenous peoples can sense the spirit of place (Spirit of place: What lies beneath). In fact, that kind of sensitivity is available us all if we choose to be open to it.

black and white photo of trees with dramatic sky

St. Catherine's Hill

St. Catherine’s Hill, which still rises above what’s left of the Down, was the site of many fire-lit rituals. We danced to celebrate the land and the cycles of Sun and Moon; we danced to call the spirits of place; and we danced for courage to defend the Down.

Although the road was built, Twyford Down inspired hundreds of anti-road campaigns that in turn merged into the ‘anti-globalization’ protests of the Global Justice Movement. The spirit of Twyford now whispers to all who call for land rights, look to live ‘off-grid’ or celebrate a sense of place.

There are many factors in this process but the power of place is more fundamental than almost anyone realises. The land not only inspires us – it is part of who we are. Philosopher Christopher Preston puts it more precisely; “people craft some of their very cognitive identity in communion with a landscape” (Preston, 2003).

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Merleau-Ponty

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Administrator

This is the first of a series of posts that introduce thinkers who have been especially influential on my work. I begin with the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), who was a pioneer in the study of embodiment.

Portrait of Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty

Merleau-Ponty was fascinated by our ‘being-in-the-world’ – the way our consciousness is incarnate in the world. Our awareness doesn’t emerge from a disembodied mind floating somewhere beyond physical reality, but is part of an active relationship between us and the world.

He concluded that the process by which we come to understand the world emerges from a unity between subjects and objects that is the direct result of our embodiment. As he rather beautifully puts it, “[m]y body is the fabric into which all objects are woven” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Though his primary concern was with perception as an embodied process, he understood our entire being-in-the-world in the same way:

“As I contemplate the blue of the sky … I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me,’ I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself; my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue … ”
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962).

Practical, embodied knowing is difficult – if not impossible - to express in words and quite different from the theoretical knowledge we can talk about. Think about the last time you used your computer keyboard: If you have any familiarity with it, you didn’t need to think about where the keys were. In an odd sense you don’t know; if I asked you to draw the keyboard layout for me, you would probably find it impossible. This is a “knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). This upsets the Cartesian world-view, because it’s a form of knowing that transcends subject/object dualism: The ‘I’ that knows is tangled with what is known.

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Bodymind and Earth

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Administrator

A video I posted recently discussed ‘What is the body?’  It starts with Mark Walsh saying that the body is ‘not a brain taxi’, but that’s pretty much how many people experience their embodiment. There are many reasons for this dislocation of ‘self’ from ‘body’; sometimes it’s cultural and sometimes it’s due to physical trauma. In general, threats, stress and violence encourage withdrawal and alienation from the body and the world.

In her powerful TED talk, the poet Eve Ensler describes her sense of disconnection from her body and how her awareness slowly developed.

It’s a provocative talk and there’s lots to say, but I want to focus on what I see as her central insight: When you split the body from the mind you often loose the connection between self and the world.

This disconnected mind-self is often fear driven and seeks control: Eve recounts how she “lived in the city, because, to be honest, I was afraid of trees”.

When the breakthrough came and Eve came to live fully in her body, that fear disappeared: “Now I make a daily pilgrimage to visit a particular weeping willow by the Seine, and I hunger for the green fields in the bush outside Bukavu”.

If we have an embodied sense of self, it’s much easier to have a rich sensual connection with the other-than-human world and to enjoy empathetic engagement. This makes the subject/object distinction less rigid: Our sense of ‘body’ can shift from a perspective that’s enclosed inside the skin-bag to a more fluid, open appreciation of bodymind/self as integrated within the world. We thus come to know ourselves as a single point of awareness within a vast matrix of being.

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