Informal autio clips/quotes
"when one first learns to fly an airplane" ...
“There are many quite fine ways in which we can say that body and situation are different. Such fine ways also let the word “difference” say a different kind of difference, no longer a difference between two things. Rather, the body can imply what has never yet happened in a situation, and a situation can exceed what the body feels. For instance, when one first learns to fly an airplane, high-up is scary and one relaxes near the ground where everything looks familiar. Later, one’s body has learned that it’s safe up there, and one feels in peril and most alert near the ground where crashes most easily occur. So, the situation has a bodily implying in it too, and it may be beyond my individual body’s implying.”
“You see how intricacy opens as soon as we think with it. Surely new distinctions do arise, but thinking in intricacy allows them to open into still further steps, which are again very exact but not equivalent to them. Some implied further steps also simplify into a new understanding of a whole. The steps do not always bring finer distinctions. The finer the new distinctions, the better, but there cannot be one consistent system comprising all of them. There is not one eternal or absolute system in which the body is first distinguished from the universe, so that finer distinctions then all fall on one side or the other. We let distinctions work to open an intricacy that is always more exact, and that can always be different.”
” Let us open another old distinction: it is not a question of trusting or not trusting the body. We cannot trust the result of any one step; we can, however, trust the kind of process of steps I am describing. It is also possible to discover a more exacting intricacy about the process itself: how to trust, think, and act with this bodily implying.”
FROM Pages 202-202 Gendlin, E.T. (1992). The wider role of bodily sense in thought and language, Chapter 10 in Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (Ed.), Giving the body its due, pp. 192-207-PDF
AUDIO:
"Our bodies carry our situations. We carry our life with us." Gendlin, E.T. (1992).
“Your own inner phenomenological sense of your own body is not only your sense of your muscles, your legs, the back of your head. It’s not only a sensing of things like the floor, the chair, or whatever you see or touch. The bodily sense is also your sense of your situations, your life. For example, I am now part of your situation. You have been permitting my words to have an effect on how your body feels to you right now. Our bodies carry our situations. We carry our life with us. Our bodies can total up years of all kinds of experience and at any moment give us something new, a new more intricate step.”
Gendlin 1992 The wider role of bodily sense in thought and language
Reference # 174 at http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/gol_primary_bibliography.htm
Gendlin, E.T. (1992). The wider role of bodily sense in thought and language. In M. Sheets-Johnstone (Ed.), Giving the body its due, pp. 192-207. Albany: State University of New York Press.
– Translated into German by H.J. Schneider: Die umfassende Rolle des Körpergefühls im Denken und Sprechen. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 1993, 41 (4), 693-706. This translation is reprinted in Brennpunkt, no. 63, 1995, 17, 13-25.
” Eugene Gendlin, well-known founder of the psychotherapeutic technique of focusing, examines ways in which a bodily felt sense operates in everyday life situations as well as in deeper self-understandings. In his essay, “The Wider Role of the Body in Thought and Language,” he shows us in new and distinctive ways how a bodily felt sense is fundamental to our acts of thinking and speaking. In particular, he invites us to consider how the body implies, and how, by listening to its ‘implyings’ we come to fresh awarenesses and create new meanings. Drawing both on the most common of daily human experiences and on his own clinical experience, Gendlin shows us that there is an intricacy to our bodily life that not only far exceeds the possibilities of any merely material substance or mere robot utterly wed to culturally-derivative fads and forms of experience, but that far exceeds the categories and distinctions we take to order our lives. He sees this bodily “excess” as itself an order, an order of meanings—bodily implyings. He furthermore sees this order of meanings as literally coming from the body in the same way that sleep, appetite, orgasm, and emotions come from the body. In a broader sense, his research demonstrates that there is indeed such a thing as human nature, and that what is necessary to its appreciation is an opening to the ways in which the body speaks to us, ways that are not part of the established cultural order but that break through to a different order.” — Maxine. Sheets-Johnstone (Ed.) (1992). The wider role of bodily sense in thought and language. In Giving the body its due, pp. 192-207. Albany: State University of New York Press.
(emphasis added Katarina Halm)
1. I often use a string of words instead of just one in a given slot. For
example, I might say you feel your life, you are, have, live.your life.
The five dots leave room for other possible words. After the string and the sequence of dots once appear, any one of the words can later say what is meant. But furthermore, when we let each of the words work, then each says the (.) that includes the others so that the (.) is more than any ingle scheme. In this way we are not limited by any one formulation.
2. Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, Outwork (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 3-43.
3. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and
to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Book I, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983).
4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E.
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 172-173.
5. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works), Vol. 26, The
Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (Following Leibnitz), trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984), 199.
6. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. and trans. D. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 148.
7. Eugene T. Gendlin, Experience and the Creation of Meaning, 2nd
ed. (New York: Free Press, 1970);
“Experiential Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, ed. M. Natanson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973);
“Two Phenomenologists Do Not Disagree,” in Phenomenology, Dialogues and Bridges, ed. R. Bruzina and B. Wilshire (New York: State University of New York Press, 1982);
“A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism,” in Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies, ed. D. M. Levin (New York: New York University Press, 1987);
“Thinking Beyond Patterns: Body, Language, and Situations,” in The Presence of Feeling in Thought, eds. B. den Ouden and M. Moen (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).