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Would you consider a chat on nature and focusing? ...Dr Adrian Harris?

Thank you! This is a welcome and very rich resource to return to and something of the kind I have wanted to see/hear for many years. I often felt a lone voice wanting to bring together the faculties and insights from Buddhism with the natural flow of a Focusing way to be which were unfolding in my life. Both gave the gift of silence, and permission to pause, but Focusing enabled meeting myself fully where communication, concepts or relational patterns in the Buddhist community (as with all areas of my encounters in life) could throw me off my own knowing if i was not careful. Training in Focusing companioning, with the regular practice of peer listening was a game changer for some and it was for me. It seems to me the perfect accompaniment to an interest in meditation or mindfulness for the relational accompaniment in unfolding aliveness. Since so many struggle with accessing a sense of groundedness and personal authority in todays fast pace, I wish it was more widely known about.

Also, Greg… dear to me is, “the loving universe” I come back to it now and then, is there more to say here also… well anyway thank you very much for it. 🙏🏼

I’m interested to hear more on the ‘intrapersonal’… Also, Greg says to para I come to this more, that life is living me. Yes… please I would like to hear more about this also.

such a wonderful conversation between these two men. Listening to their joined exploration of what it can bring when a human being connects with nature and wonders about his place in the bigger system, reinforced my sense of participating in a meaningful experiential journey. Thank you Peter and Greg for your authentic sharing.

Hey Peter. I'm really looking forward to reading your book. And exploring the practice with you again in the future.

...Is pride a part? At first I thought it wasn't, but starting to think it is...

“What is the self..?” Look forward to that.

Nothing felt like releasing, tryimg from 2 months, too many body sensation and thoughts, what i am doing wrong

So... Rupert Spira at some stage...?

oh boy, I welled up more than once, like the words to the tune I've been humming in my head for too long and just couldn't quite find. 🙏

The jotted notes I started at the beginning of this conversation ended up a transcription! I felt in very good company, raising and and speaking to some persistent questions and wonderings I have had about the intersection of 'field' and 'focus'. Thank you both for your clarity, kindness and generosity in engagement, I enjoyed marinating in that.

Such a beautiful interview!! I loved the evident pre-verbal multiplicity and I appreciated the precision of what formed for us to receive. Thank you, Nada Lou and Greg Madison!

Fantastic! It makes me want to go take a course, any of them! Having read the material, of course, beforehand, in English. Interaction first, we are not even alive without it.

Greg...interesting conversation few thoughts: in Gendlin's scheme of things ...he does not use the word awareness....probably the experiential dimension ( implicit) when it is fully functioning in conjunction with the symbolic/conceptual dimension, I suppose the sense of expanded self/space/awareness comes into foreground it would be helpful if you can do a conversation on how to use Mindfulness and yogic practices along with focusing to reinforce each other.

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I do want to compliment you on your quality of presence, both of you

I loved this conversation and much of it resonated with my work as a therapist. Authenticity is such an overused term currently, losing all meaning, so I appreciated the focus on that point. Loved the term ‘mental postures’ you used - very evocative of what I think you are referring to, and much more so than ‘stance’ or ‘position’. A posture implies a whole network of positions and relatedness-of-positions, a bit like a constellation of stars, as opposed to a location of one star. It speaks to the web of associations we take as our starting point, and how deeply knotted and rooted outside of conscious awareness so many of these assumptions can be. In this way, it is about making the frame visible while also acknowledging the complexity of that frame, at times. Thanks for sharing this one with the world.

What a fun interview. Being both a longtime Buddhist and a shorter-time Focuser and studier [sic] of Gendlin's philosophy, I frequently wanted to jump into the conversation! Perhaps I can share one little piece that came up when Christian was talking about...to simplify....the bias towards problem-solving vs resting in open awareness and acceptance of whatever is there. Being a sort of person who habitually goes to my head to figure things out (and has that worked out? ha ha) - what I have found with Focusing is not that any problem has ever been "solved" through Focusing - but there is a way that going in and touching the felt sense, the energy that is manifesting as something icky or worrisome or repetitive, etc. - just TOUCHING the energy directly - rather than avoiding or ruminating about it - makes a difference. A little difference that is worthwhile. Thank you Christian and Gregory!

I shared this video on a Facebook group that I run for psychotherapists. Here us what I wrote about this talk: I enjoyed Christian Dillo and his approach. I normally don’t give Zen or Buddhism much attention these days, but Dillo’s take on it is refreshing. He combines Zen practice and the therapeutic practice called Focusing, developed by Eugene Gendlin. Dillo overcame his depression through these practices. He speaks about being unapologetically alive, overcoming internal resistances to various intense experiences, how “oneness is too much - are you going to pay my bills for me? Go to the bathroom for me?” He lands instead on what he calls “undivided activity.” He doesn’t seem to have a shred of the anti-individualism that I’m used to finding in Buddhism and in Zen. I love how freely he refers to personhood as a real thing, and how he sees himself as a phenomenologists studying attention and experience. He refers to all teachings as antidotal, and he is loath to speculate about metaphysics. Dillo speaks of his reservations about calling what he does a method, and he goes into what he sees as the spiritual dimension of things. He gestures towards the peace that is possible when awareness rests in an open field, accepting of everything, and not trying to solve any problems. He goes into how this is different from passivity. Cautioning against spiritual bypassing, Dillo says: “I don’t believe in skipping over the personal. There is something vital in the felt sense, and trying to transcend that is problematic.”

X willemjanvandenbrink 🙂

Thank you for this interview. I’m going to search for more of her work ❤

I love how Barbara puts it around 52:25, when she is talking about how 'parts learn stuff...they don't lose anything...' This motivates me to go back into chapter VIII of A Process Model and think about the Monading and Diafilling experiences in the context/schema of parts-work. If parts can be understood as protective-VII-sequences, Barbara's insights might point to what Gene is saying with his term "Perfect Feedback".

Wonderful conversation opening up in the middle about the nature of self-in-presence..... For me this self-in-presence is very expansive and yet, still, very distinct; in other words, when I am in presence, I am fully aware and be very curious about what experiences my dog, friends, family might be having right now; there is no confusion or blending with others. Yet, when I am in presence, I feel very open and flowy with all that might come into my awareness. I am interested in how distinct this self feels even though it is somehow much wider than any part-sequences that show up and, at times, take over.

A part might be thought of as an already formed protective sequence; as such, it can occur in some situations and function implicitly in others. I might have a part that protects me from feeling guilty by always having intellectual reasons why I am not at fault. This sequence-part might be occuring as I argue with my friend. It might be functioning implicitly as I listen to a client who tacitly reminds me of the guilty feelings I shove away, making it hard to really listen from a place of presence. Parts as already formed protective sequences. And a felt sense is a freshly forming patch of meaning, right now, as I 'stop' a sequence and allow it to bloom into a direct referent, opening up a new space in which it can 'speak' and 'do' itself in a new way. A part of me wants to push lightly back against her notion of 'a felt sense needs our attention.' This seems to imply that felt-senses are there in the background waiting to be noticed, which, for me, loses the way in which they are always a fresh forming of a VII space sequence. Even though I don't think parts are waiting in the background either, it makes more sense to think of them that way because they are already-formed protective sequences.

Excited to listen to this. I've been trying to cross Gendlin's APM with Parts work. The main thing that strikes me is that Gendlin's model can helps us see clearly why each part is intrinsically mutually implicit with all the others. Gendlin's principle of 'the law of occurance' also helps us see how parts can be active even when they are not the sequence of experience currently occuring. And I do think that Gendlin's work suggests that parts are rendered as such only when being worked with via a part's model. This might be where Gendlin would have other things to say than many of the teachers I'm currently reading who specialize in parts work. Many of them talk about parts as if the parts go on as such even when the person or another part is 'at the steering wheel.' I think Gendlin's work suggests that there are important differences between a part as such and what they are when implicitly functioning via eveving.

Thank you♥️Intersting conversation For example, if a flower would become (more) aware of itself it would also become (more) aware of its environment and of its (inter)connection to it. The same with people, when their (self)awareness rises, I would say from my understanding. I thing that our 'parts' belong to and are a survival mechanism of our ego/human self while our awareness belongs to our soul/consciousness which we all share in our essence.

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thank you for presenting Klaus Renn and his German Way of teaching Focusing. I was for many years part of this and I am happily surprised to watch your conversation. My big compliment goes to Klaus for frankly speaking out from his great experience with Gendlins work and for Greg for his appreciation, deep interest and gentle Voiceover help to let this approach become clear: it´s about Interaction first and a special kind of resonance the therapist is offering to a client. This Video gives a hint of how the precision and profoundness of Gendlins thinking can be taught.

'promosm'

Beautiful talk can’t wait to watch it all- what we have been using as our psychological survival strategies are the very strategies that now threaten our survival - from direct experience - we have been shaken into reality - we know nothing!! Not only as conceptual any longer but we are thrown into the experience of this void - may we keep being undone and in the undoing be fully redone- … - Our spirit can’t be tamed jailed or die - It’s up to us to create the reality our heart s ❤️ wishes - A fabulous insight I received - contraction BRINGS us into existence through t the life in utero- it IS our perfume yet we have been defending it Here s our invitation to fully embrace it - let it dance us - to experience the cause less joy !

Absolutely essential to dis identify to experience openness , so what s here that becomes aware of sensing and perceiving ? I d use the word “surrendering “ “melting into awareness”… it’s a kind of openness that doesn’t involve a doing nor non- doing, closer to letting go only there s nothing to let go or hold onto… it’s a sweet space in between 😍🔥❤️

Thank you both, Greg and Yehudith firstly for who you are and pursuing meeting us authentically! Secondly I found it so exciting and warming to see and hear the effect of touch in therapy. My teacher of body psychotherapy (the late Bill Bowen who named his work Pyscho-Physical Therapy) would often say that touch immediately brings a person into direct experiencing, focused on present moment embodied experience. And Yehudith gave a beautiful example as one of the steps that opened a whole stream of social oriented focusing. I feel like saying that Focusing is all about the practice of learning how to touch.

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In all my searching in the writing of Gendlin, and in my own thoughts, the crucial element to evoke healing is the quality of attention. As therapists we develop this by developing that capacity within ourselves. For me the key moment (along with a few others such as a deep trust in the wisdom of life available for us to learn through nature), occurs at 55mins. I hear in that a growing awareness of attentional capacities to more subtle experiences as they occur.

For me, as a woman, it is beautiful to hear two men talk to each other as you do. Ain't happening that often in this world (-:

I love the warm and sincere way Leslie is working in dreamland. If I were the master who is responsible for sending dreams to dreamers, I would prefer sending to people who I know are in contact with Leslie

Very much looking forward to this. Will there be video and podcast versions of each episode, or will this series be podcast from here on out. Wonderful either way.

Looking forward to this.

Thank you so much !

Thanks Greg and Leslie. Such a rich landscape...

I'm only half way through this but felt compelled to write as your conversation has not only re-evoked memories and feelings of what the Covid years were like. But (more importantly for me personally) has enabled me to begin clarifying and distinguishing between the impact of Covid and the impact of a cancer diagnosis, treatment and surgery. I was already in my own personal lockdown due to my compromised immune system. So for me the two events have always been conflated and thereby I have found it hard to separate out what where Covid ends and the impact of cancer begins. This is an ongoing process but your discussion has really helped to articulate much that was previously implicit and undefined for me. Thank you so much, I look forward to the rest of the video.

Oh, this is already big. The moment they began talking within this Covid context, I was brought back to all of it. In my body. Right there. The way everything those days felt both scary and alive, new and dangerous and vaguely hopeful. I'm at the 15-minute mark. They are talking about the way our pre-Covid routines could be seen as defenses against feeling what is deeper and hard. Greg pointed out that, then, in early Covid, shopping has changed. In Gendlin's terms, I realize that everything about our routine-world (shopping, driving, getting a coffee, looking into the sky at the planes...) was now occurring differently, and this differently occurring routine-world implied the fears we were feeling suddenly and could not so easily avoid. So, for me, the newly forming lines outside of the grocery store (where people over 65 were allowed in first), implied my sense of isolation at home, my fear for my family, and my worry that this was about to get much worse. The sparse traffic on the highway occurred into my body as a symbol of all these worries. And, as I said, oddly, a new hope was also immediately implied in my body-en#2. The line in front of the grocery store also implied new ways of this community acting, new values, more sensitivity.

Great conversation. Time to check out Dr. Ellis's book :)

One of my favorite movies is Antonia's Line. When I am in a certain relationship with a felt-sense of a situation, I can ask myself, "What does Antonia's Line have to say about this sense/feeling/situation?" This can be such an interesting experience, to cross the wisdom of the movie with our unspecified meanings...

I appreciate how Ken described the 'lifting' that can happen, how we can then be with these tight patterns as they reveal their desire to uncoil. And I love that he acknowledged that our habit patterns will almost certainly bring them back, that they require other kinds of work, too. There is something very beautiful in realizing that we can sometimes meet our tensions/depressions/anxieties and give them air, so to speak, not to heal them or make them go away; just to realize that there is another space in which they can be known/felt/allowed. Wonderful stuff.

It's really great hearing you two sink into the felt sense versus the larger space. Gene obviously spoke about it long before A Process Model, but there is something so special about the way he develops Direct-Referant-Formation in VIII. A new self is born each time a felt-sense is being witnessed. Greg's observation made me begin to wonder if that self is slightly different when this new self is witnessed as such versus remaining implicit. In re-reading my last two sentences, I can feel why 'self' won't always be the right word here. As Gene lays out in APM, as VII space (linguistic space) becomes more highly elaborated, experience become more intricate but also more often flattened. Full bodily carrying forward happens less often. The experience of direct referent formation is a new and (probably) necessary cultural development. Finally, Gene gave us the wonderful verb "monad" (to monad out from a direct referent). This conversation was a wonderful instance of monading A Process Model.