Your body knows the answers: Rome

Conceptual mind: Abstract, breaks things in bits, relates bits

Differences to embodied life which is our felt reality. Reality feel, abstraction thinks

Focussing as embodied thought as opposed to abstract thought, it focusses only wholes.

Chapter 1: Making friends in yourself

Negative capability=being able to sit with not knowing without irritably reaching for knowing and reason. This is used in creativity as well as focussing.

Exercise: Grounded awareness present

You may want to start by stretching your limbs, wiggling your toes, even loosening up your whole body with a refreshing shake-out. Then, find a comfortable seated position and simply become aware of your body. Sense its position, weight, and inner space. After a while, centre your attention at your base, your seat, where your body is supported by whatever you are sitting on. Feel the weight of your whole body and how it is planted on the earth. Trusting yourself to the earth’s solidity, let your body really settle and be at ease. Appreciate the simplicity of being bodily present, here and now. Say the word grounded softly to yourself. Next, bring your attention to the head region. Close your eyes, or lower your gaze. Concentrate your awareness on your sense of hearing. Be open and sensitive to any sound from the environment, especially the kinds of background noise that we usually don’t notice at all. You can note sounds with a simple mental label—bird singing,

traffic noise, refrigerator hum—but try not to enter into a discursive thought process. At the same time, try to notice the larger quality of silence that surrounds whatever you hear from moment to moment. Sense the whole space around you, extending even beyond the walls and what you can see from where you sit. Experience the vast, panoramic quality of awareness. Say to yourself softly aware. Now move your attention into the centre of your chest, place your hand gently over your heart, and experience the quality of presence. You are simply here, alive, breathing, feeling, experiencing your basic existence. It is happening right now, at this very moment. Softly repeat the word present. Finally, let your attention encompass your whole body and repeat to yourself, grounded aware presence. Rest there for a few seconds. Then, gently open your eyes, raise your gaze, and extend your grounded aware presence to include the environment around you.

Exercise 1.2 Friendly attending

1. Do a GAP

2. Now imagine that you are walking alone in a forest. Suddenly you feel something looking at you from behind some trees. You realize that it is a fawn. It is mostly hidden in the undergrowth, but you can make out its moist eyes, if you move too quickly it will leave. Soften your gaze and your body so that you don’t frighten it. Look without expecting anything particular to happen

Exercise 1.3 Noticing something

1. GAP

2. Ask yourself how am I

3. Say whatever comes up

4. Then ask yourself how am I really

5. Sense inside your body, allow a gap for friendly attending

6. Words may come but just notice them don’t go with them

7. Try this as well with

a. How am I

b. How am I feeling now?

c. What does it feel like being rob now

d. What’s most important for me right now

Chapter 2 Gateways into felt senses

Felt senses are not specific like thoughts, emotions and feelings, they seem to be embodied, whole rather than specific about now.

Felt sense as a direct experience, as an embodied experience, as holistic experience

Exercise 2.1 From Physical Sensations to Felt Senses Bring your attention to your body.

Start by noticing the physical sensations wherever your body is contacting the earth—the feel of your bottom against the chair, your feet on the ground, your hand resting on the desk. Take a few moments to really notice the immediate sensory qualities you are experiencing. Notice too any places where one part of your body is touching another. Now move your awareness all around your body and notice any kind of physical sensations: aches and pains, itches, tight spots, stiff joints. Include positive, negative, and neutral sensations. Take time to really experience each one.

Now gradually bring your awareness inside your torso—the whole area from your throat down to your bottom. First check again for any purely physical sensations anywhere in this area. Then soften your awareness and sense if there are also present some less obvious, less distinct sensations. They may not feel exactly physical, yet they are present in some way that can be felt inside the body. They will have a location, shape, texture, movement, or other tangible quality. A tight spot in the chest, a fluttery feeling in the belly, or a melting sensation around the heart are some examples, but felt senses come in endless variety and can be hard to describe in words at all.

Exercise 2.2 Dropping the Story Line Gather your attention and bring it into your body.

Take a moment to notice any unclear felt senses that may be present there, trying not to give rise to discursive thinking. After a little while, choose a topic to think deliberately about. It can be a recent event, a relationship issue, a work challenge, something in the future. Now go ahead and think about this topic in the usual discursive way: recollecting what happened, ruminating, thinking about the future, and so forth (the word discursive literally means “running on about”). After about two minutes, simply let go of the whole thought process and bring your awareness into your torso. You are dropping the story line, the descriptive words and images of whatever topic you were thinking about and bringing your attention to how things feel in your body just now. If you find it challenging to shift gears directly from thinking to body-sensing, try first shifting your focus of attention from the story line to your breathing, noticing the physical sensations of your breath as it comes into your chest and abdomen and goes out again. Once you have moved from discursive thinking to the present-moment felt experience of breathing, you can relax the focus on your breathing and sense in the same internal space for subtle body feels. Remember, you are sensing for what is present in a nonverbal way in your experience right now. If you notice “something” try to stay with it for a while without giving rise to new thoughts. If thoughts do arise, recognize them as thinking and let them go, gently shifting your attention back to the felt sense. After spending time with one felt sense, take time to notice if there are any others present in different spots and with different textures, shapes, or energy.

Chapter 3 The feeling beneath the feeling

If you have an emotion as a combination of affect, interpretation and physiology then the felt sense beneath that is the historical underpinnings of this reaction, so the vague feeling in the body, are the unspoken influences, the powerful but quiet influences on the current reaction. The felt sense I guess can also be another emotional hue that is related the anger I feel that I am anxious about, the disassociated feeling, or it could be another aspect of engaging with situation.

Exercise 3.1 The Feeling beneath the Feeling

Start with the three GAP steps. Then, as in the previous exercise, begin by bringing to mind a situation in your life. This time, choose something that you know has an emotional charge to it—something that makes you angry is a good place to begin. However, a note of caution here: You want to bring to mind something that evokes anger but not so much that you become overwhelmed by it. If the emotion is too strong, you won’t be able to get enough distance to search underneath it for the felt sense. So, if you are prone to being flooded by strong emotions, instead of a situation that provokes anger, try starting with something that is merely irritating, annoying, or frustrating. Relive the situation in your mind. At the same time, be attentive to any physical changes—constriction, agitation, heat, rising or sinking sensations—that signal the presence of emotion. Depending on whether or not you are someone who easily becomes emotional, you may have to experiment to get enough felt emotion so that you can experience it in your body but not so much that it overwhelms you. Once the emotion is clearly present, take time to notice specifically where and how it is affecting your body. Next, invite into your awareness a subtler body sense of the situation. To do this, you have to both drop the story line and step outside of the raw energy of the emotion it has evoked. This is a question of getting the right distance: enough that you aren’t trapped inside the emotion but not so distant that it’s not there at all. See if you can find a region of experience that lies below the emotion. What is important here is your willingness to sense deeper in yourself by means of gentle, nonreactive friendly attending. After a while, a felt sense may emerge. It will have its own bodily felt qualities such as tightness or heat or “like a small ball in my belly,” but this body feel will be more subtle than a tight jaw, a pounding heart, or constricted breathing. The felt sense may also have an emotional tone like fear or sadness or vulnerability that is quite different from the emotion you started out with.

Chapter 4 Cultivating felt senses

Exercise 4.2 Noticing What Your Body Is Already Holding

1. Take time to really come into your body.

2. Go through the GAP steps to settle into a state of grounded aware presence.

3. Then shift your attention to your breath. Notice the feeling of air entering and leaving your lungs. Feel the sensations of your chest and abdomen expanding and contracting, from your throat all the way down to your lower belly.

4. Then shift attention from the sensations of breathing to the entire inner space where breathing happens.

a. Rest your awareness there gently with an attitude of friendly attending. Notice anything inside that space that is present in a felt-sense way

b. If nothing seems to be there at first, give it some time. When you notice any kind of unclear inner sensation, stay with it for a while. Keep it company. Explore and appreciate its felt qualities, noticing its shape, texture, movement, colour, or temperature. Welcome its presence and get to know it.

c. If you find yourself going off into thoughts or fantasies, gently bring your attention back to whatever is present in your body in an unclear but somatically felt way.

Exercise 4.3 “What Wants My Attention Just Now?”

1. Take whatever time you need to bring awareness inside your body.

2. Then ask gently, “What wants my attention just now?”

3. If an answer comes right away, check whether your body sense confirms that this is really what needs attention at this moment or if there is something deeper or less obvious there.

4. If no answer comes right away, just wait and see if something bubbles up after a while.

5. If you get more than one answer to the question—you may be holding several concerns at the moment—let your body decide which one would feel right to spend time with.

6. If what comes is a problem needing a solution, instead of trying to jump to the solution right away, see if you can get a felt sense of the situation as a whole. How does it feel in your body?

Chapter 5 Working with situations

Exercise 5.1 Starting with a Situation

1. Decide on a situation to work with—anything that is alive for you right now.

2. Then let go of it completely while you take as much time as you need to come into grounded aware presence.

3. Then invite the chosen situation back into your awareness. Let different particulars of the situation come to mind, recollecting enough of the story line to make it vividly present, while at the same time staying gently aware of what’s happening in your body.

4. When the situation, problem, or challenge is clearly present in awareness, release the story line and notice what felt sense it has brought in your body. If there is no felt sense after a while, or if the felt sense disappears, you can go back to the story line and repeat the process.

Chapter 6 Bringing the felt sense into focus

Exercise 6.1 Describing the Felt Sense

1. Go through the preparatory steps of bringing awareness to the body and becoming present in yourself, taking as much time as feels right.

2. When you feel ready, find or invite a felt sense that you want to spend time with. You can do this by bringing awareness directly to your felt-sense zone, by starting with a known situation, or by asking gently inside, “What wants my attention just now?”

a. If you start with a situation, such as a relationship problem or work challenge, recollect enough of its specifics—the story line—to make it present in your experience right now. Then drop the story line, bring awareness inside, and attend to whatever felt sense your body is holding.

3. Be present with the felt sense and welcome it to be present with you.

4. Be gentle, don’t rush, don’t react judgmentally, and don’t get preoccupied with a train of thought. Just be there—friendly attending—with whatever unclear “something” you can sense right now.

5. After a while, try out a word, phrase, image, or gesture to capture how the felt sense appears or feels.

6. It is essential to keep the felt sense present as you check to see whether the word, image, or gesture really fits. If it isn’t quite right, keep adjusting the description until the felt sense lets you know, “Yes, that says it, that’s just how it feels!”

Chapter 7 Requesting insight from the felt sense

Exercise 7.1 Empathic Inquiry

1. Begin by simply asking yourself, “How am I?”

a. Say whatever comes to mind: fine, OK, tired, happy, sad, excited . . .

2. Now ask yourself, “But how am I really?”

a. This time ignore any words that come quickly. Instead, holding in mind the question “How am I really?” allow there to be a gap, and simply sense inside your body with an attitude of friendly attending.

b. If no felt sense comes, or if another verbal answer comes, repeat the question while attending to your inner body space.

c. Keep asking, “But how am I really?” until you notice a bodily response—something that stirs or forms freshly when you pose the question, or perhaps something that has been there all along unnoticed.

3. Welcome and be with whatever body sense is there.

4. After a while, see if you can come up with a simple description—adjective(s), image, metaphor, or gesture—that captures the felt sense.

a. Check if the description resonates with the felt sense itself. If the fit doesn’t feel quite right, adjust the description until it does. You can include an emotion word in your description if the felt sense resonates with it, but be specific. For example, if the felt sense brings the word sad, ask inside, “What kind of sad?” See if there is a modifier, an adjective or an image that tells what kind of sadness is there just now. You’ll know you’re on the right track if what comes is an unexpected or unusual combination of words like “jittery-sad,” “achy-sad,” “sad like an overstretched rubber band.”

5. When the description fits the felt sense clearly, move on to the empathic inquiry stage by posing a friendly question to the felt sense.

a. You might simply ask, “What in my life is like this?” Or, more specifically, “Is there anything going on in my life that brings this kind of [jittery-sad, achy-sad, overstretched rubber band, etc.] feeling?”

b. If you already know that the felt sense relates to a particular situation, you can frame the question as “What about this situation makes it so [achy-sad, etc.]?” Use emotion words only if they really touch the quality of the felt sense. Otherwise, just ask directly, “What in my life feels like an overstretched rubber band?” or “What is it about this situation that makes me feel so overstretched?”

c. Remember that often there is a period of silence before an answer bubbles up from the felt sense.

d. A good question to pose when you’re working with a complex, uncomfortable situation is “What is the worst part of all this?” Allow a gap after the question and see what response comes from the felt sense.

e. Like a young child, the felt sense may not respond to the question at all. When this happens, try not to be frustrated or offended; just drop the question and go back to friendly attending. Then try a different question or a different way of asking the same question. For example, if there is no response to “What is the worst of all this?” try addressing the felt sense directly, as if it were a child: “Is there something you are fearful about?” Or “What is it that you are wanting?” Leave a gap and see if the felt sense itself responds with words, or if a fresh insight comes that you can put into words.

Chapter 8 Small Steps, Felt Shifts, and Appreciating What Came

Basic steps of Mindful Focusing. You can refer to it as you practice. However, it is only a guideline. Focusing is an organic, freshly occurring process; you can skip steps or parts of steps, or let them come in a different order. Your practice will evolve over time. Do what feels right for you!

1. Grounded Aware Presence (GAP)

a. centre attention at your base (grounded), head (aware), and heart (presence) (brief version)

b. settle your body, drop thinking, bring awareness inside your torso

2. Finding the felt sense

a. assume an attitude of friendly attending

b. notice what your body is holding—“something” or “something in me” (or)

c. ask, “What wants my attention just now?” (or)

d. start with a situation recollect the situation freshly for a minute or two drop the story line sense for the feeling beneath the feeling

3. Bringing the felt sense into focus

a. describe its felt qualities using a word, phrase, metaphor, image, or gesture

b. resonate—does the description fit? does the felt sense like it?

4. Empathic inquiry

a. pose a question and wait for the felt sense to respond

i. “What makes it [you, me] feel so ______?”

ii. “What is the worst part of all this?”

iii. “What is it [are you, am I] fearing?”

iv. “What is it [are you, am I] wanting?”

5. Appreciating what came

a. notice and receive any small steps, felt shifts, and insights

b. after receiving, ask inside, “Is there more?”

c. choose when to stop for now

d. journal (recommended)

e. thank your body

6. Transitioning back to the world

a. return to a sense of grounded aware presence

b. gently open your awareness outward;

c. notice and freshly appreciate your surroundings

d. sense your own presence within and as part of the larger environment

Chapter 9 Cultivating self empathy and defusing the inner critic

Self empathy=friendly attending (being gentle and accepting to whatever shows itself and by being empathic)

So a friendly attending to a difficult emotion and empathy as to why I might feel like that.

Exercise Self Empathy

1. Think about something you wish was different

2. Begin by noticing it in the usual way you do: notice how that makes you feel

3. Now imagine standing outside your body looking at yourself as if you were someone else

4. Now give them standing over there some compassion\comfort

Opposed to self empathy is the inner critic . The inner critic causes us to doubt ourselves, our opinions and talents and to feel shame and guilt about what we do. The critic can be loud=you idiot, or quiet, watch what you are doing, you better be careful(you’re going to make a mistake, so watch out. )

Effects of the inner critic

1. Become deflated and stop

2. Get into a struggle with it

However what you can do is to acknowledge it and get some distance from it. Don’t accept its authority at face value. Its part of you, possibly a part that is scared and uses punishment to try to protect you, but its not all of you.

3 Strategies to deal with inner critic

1. Acknowledge and dismiss

a. There you are, but I don’t have time\energy\interest for you

2. Acknowledge and reframe

a. Take the helpful part of the message and discard the unhelpful part. You’re such an idiot for doing x, helpful is to motivate yourself to do it better next time.

3. Acknowledge and befriend

a. There you are again, then talk things through, understand what the critic is concerned about and what the worst about that is. Then find out what it does want., so I want to protect to enable xyz. Then the critic becomes an ally

Exercise befriend the inner critic

1. Think of a place or voice in you that is often critical

a. E.g. I’m fat\stupid etc

2. Acknowledge that part of me says that I’m x

3. Allow this part of you to be present in you

4. Let this part of you be comfortable and that you want to hear it

5. Ask It what it is frightened of

6. Listen empathically to it, repeat back to it what you’ve heard

7. Then ask it what it needs

8. Then ask it what it wants

9. End by thanking the critic

Exercise reexperiencing painful feelings

1. Do GAP

2. Bring to in a painful experience

3. Offer this part of you kindness and empathy

Chapter 10 Mindful , awareness and the sovereign self

Mindfulness colloquially means staying present and focus and not distracted

Mindfulness: paying attention on purpose and non judgementally to the present moment.

Breathing meditation can help the mind from impulsively jumping and obsessively thinking styles.

Awareness: you can be fully aware of the present.

Meta awareness: aware that you are aware

Meta meta aware: aware that you are aware of your awareness, panoramic awareness

The sovereign self

There are different selves, different parts of you that show up in different contexts. A healthy self co-ordinates the different parts.

Its like the sovereign who rules the subparts, is the meta awareness, the rules what does, what wants , more the primary responses, the sovereign then notices the desire , the conflicts and decides accordingly, they are the meta, the reflective, the freewill, cant believe I just said that, the executive, the awareness.

Chapter 11 The deep nature of life process

To stay yourself, you have to do the same things, i.e. eat, sleep, breathe. To do this each breath is different, so you have to change to stay the same.

Gendlin: we are processes, we interact with our environment, we shape our environment and our environment shapes us. We are very different from things.

Interaction first: the interaction is prior to the individuals having the relationship. Who we are is determined by what the other person brings out in us

Gendlin: carried forward. We don’t have needs but rather we can interact with the environment in certain ways that can either carry forward our desires, or can result in a stopped process.

We can feel hungry, eat, and this carries the process forward, or we can not and we have a stopped process.

Some stoppages are fatal, food, air, some can be worked around

Whereas Freud sees there being an unconscious where stopped process live. Gendlin saw the body as the store, and the implicit feelings we take around are where stopped processes live.

Felt sensing is about bring the subtle stopped processes that are implicit in all felt experience into awareness.

Chapter 12 From Insights to action steps

How do you translate felt sense into valued action.?

Well notice the part of you that presents, notice how it is and on the basis of that what it wants, I guess the idea is not to always go with the part that shouts loudest. So if you have a plan that gets thwarted feelings around the original plan and getting that back on track maybe loudest .

If you’re attached to something that cant happen, you need to acknowledge that felt sense before you can move on.

Exercise Finding a right next step

1. Bring awareness inside.

2. Think of a few situations in your life that are waiting for a next step from you.

3. Contemplate each situation briefly, then let your felt sense help you decide on one to go into more deeply—perhaps the most immediate or the one where you feel most stuck.

4. Take enough time to review the aspects of that situation in more detail, letting a felt sense of the whole of it form.

5. When you feel ready, ask gently inside:

6. What’s in the way of my making progress here?

7. What is this situation needing or wanting now?

8. What would be a right next step?

9. As possible next steps come to mind, check them against the felt sense of the whole situation.

10. Do they fit?

11. Do they leave any aspect of the situation unmet?

12. Is there anything in the way of your taking this action as the next step?

13. Does the step feel right in your body; does it bring fresh energy and inspiration?

14. Check is the step doable in the next two weeks

15. Finally, form an inner intention to take the action step. See yourself actually doing it, resonate with your felt sense a final time for a feeling of rightness, and commit to doing it.

Chapter 13 Deep Listening

Relationships need near side empathy with ourselves and farsighted empathy with the other. There is a process of rupture and re-attunement during relationships.

Attunement when our inner state can mirror that of another.

The most immediate part of attunement is by the body, after that it is listening.

Deep listening is from a deeper place in ourselves to a deeper place in the other.

Exercise Just Listening

1. Sit comfortably close, facing each other so the Listener can take in nonverbal signals like breathing, posture, and body language.

2. Decide who will speak first (the Focuser).

3. Let your partner know that when you are the Listener, you will just listen without responding or asking questions at all, and that they are also welcome to pause and be silent at any point.

4. Agree confidentiality

5. When it is your turn to be Focuser, try keeping your eyes closed or lowered: this disrupts the habitual mode of “I’m telling you something” and encourages a more introspective mood.

Deep Listening Protocol

1. Grounded Aware Presence centre attention at your base, head, and heart (or) settle your body, drop thinking, bring awareness inside your torso

2. Friendly Attending listen to your partner but don’t speak double empathy—open, empathic, non judgmental, in touch with your own felt sense as you sense for the inner source from which the other person is speaking note your own reactions as they arise clarity / confusion agreement / disagreement pleasure / discomfort wanting to help, solve, or fix accept your own reactions without self-judgment return to open, empathic, non-judgmental listening to your partner

3. Keep time “one more minute” “time”

4. Confidentiality

Chapter 14 Conflict

1. Get some awareness of your position in the conflict, and get some distance from it, so self awareness and self compassion As you have some distance from it, then you aren’t driven by it. Using the felt sense can be important here

2. Empathise with the other and try to understand their needs and wants.

3. Think about how you would reconcile these two positions, it can help as you have done work with the sovereign self who tries to look after the parts of you

Exercise Vicarious felt sense

1. GAP

2. Notice felt sense, recognise but don’t go into them

3. Think of a conflict. Tell the story of it until you get emotionally aroused

4. Drop the story line

5. Look for the feeling beneath the feeling

6. Give it some friendly attending and tell it you will return

7. Think of the others position

8. Notice the vicarious felt sense from this.

9. If nothing comes then ask into your body, what is the worst of all this for them.

10. Alternatively call them up in your imagination, ask you into your body, what it is they need.

Managing conflict

1. Clear your inner space (GAP)

2. Feel empathy for yourself and the other person (friendly attending)

3. Listen deeply, staying in touch with your felt sense

4. Reflect the other’s words and feelings

5. Affirm the other’s needs

6. Affirm areas of mutual agreement

7. Acknowledge mistakes and things you could have done differently

8. Use empathic inquiry to clarify and deepen understanding on both sides

9. Share your feelings and needs (not fixed positions)

10. Make requests rather than demands

NVC

1. Observe

2. Feel

3. Needs

4. Requests

Chapter 15 Making tough decisions

As you decide and act, you choose one thing and you have an effect. You are also choosing to not do something else, well many other things you could have done.

As you choose one, if you feel resentful to choose that as opposed to another choice, then you may end up doing your choice resentfully, so neither fully doing it, nor fully enjoying it.

You can focus on a decision to be made to find out more about what it means to you.

Social aspect of emotion

Sad=care seeking

Guilt and embarrassment= restore social hierarchy

Anger=restore social rules

We need to hang out long enough with emotions for them to be able to deliver their message.

Tough decisions

1. Notice parts of the decision

2. Felt sense to explore further

3. Think as the sovereign self to decide

4. Acknowledge the differing levels of satisfaction or otherwise each part will get

Aim for the most right outcome, that moves the whole situation forward

What is ready to die, what is ready to be born. Old beliefs may need to be let go, so old ways of protecting self may need to change to new ways of protecting self.

Exercise deciding from the felt sense

1. GAP

2. Bring to mind a decision you have to make

3. Engage with each stake holder part of you in the decision

4. Engage with the felt sense to find out more about each part

Felt-Sense Decision Protocol

1. Gather and understand relevant information.

a. external facts and factors that may limit or broaden my options

b. feelings, views, and interests of other people involved in or affected by the decision

2. Separate and listen to the sides. Let each side or part or point of view emerge fully and clearly. If there are other parties involved, consider their interests and try

to get a vicarious felt sense of what’s at stake for them.

a. Pause to spend time with felt senses as they arise.

i. What is the most important thing for this part or party?

ii. What is it [what are they] wanting or not wanting?

iii. Is something for this part or party ready to die or be let go?

iv. Is something new ready to be born, appear, or manifest?

3. Ask your sovereign self. Like a wise and caring parent who has heard each child’s needs and feelings, but knows she must find the best decision for all, centre

centre awareness in your sovereign self and evoke a felt sense of the situation as a whole.

a. What is most important in all this?

b. What’s truly at stake for me and for all?

c. What am I fearing?

d. What am I wanting?

e. Is something old (in the situation, in myself) ready to die?

f. Is something new ready to be born?

4. Contemplate options. Given all of the above, what feels like the “most right” course of action?

a. Invite novel possibilities, even ones that seem odd or outrageous.

outrageous.

b. What element of truth do they contain?

c. Can the deeper needs of all parts and parties be met?

d. If not, can plans be made for meeting needs in the future that won’t be met now?

e. Am I clear and at peace about needs or interests that won’t get met by this decision? Acknowledge positive sadness if it arises.

5. Reflect and resonate.

a. How would it feel in my body to do this?

b. Does it fit with my deepest values?

c. Is there still some hidden bias?

i. To check for bias, imagine making a different decision and notice if any unexpected new insight or energy appears.

ii. Does this decision reflect the attributes of the sovereign self: clarity, confidence, accountability, caring, and skill?

6. Seal your intention. Some decisions can be fully settled in a single session and enacted with a simple action step—making a flight reservation or a telephone call, or speaking up in a meeting. If this is the case, end your session either by taking the required action right away or by inwardly committing yourself to

Chapter 16 Under-Standing

To understand things you have to digest them, to allow the idea to be incorporated in your body by the combination of attachments that happen in REM sleep

Exercise 16.1 Reading with the Felt Sense

Read the poem several times, silently and aloud, slower and faster, letting the images fall into your memory, as T. S. Eliot advises. Savour it, be intimate with it, “follow it down” into the mystery of its own special resonance. (Later do the same with a poem of your choosing, or a work of art or piece of music.)

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks BY JANEK ENYON

I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . .

When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me. . . .

I am food on the prisoner’s plate. . . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I am the stone step, the latch, and the working hinge. . . .

I am the heart contracted by joy. . . . the longest hair, white before the rest. . . .

I am there in the basket of fruit presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .

I am the one whose love overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name. . . .

Chapter 17 First thought best thought The felt sense in creative process

In movement where does that movement arise from, in creativity where is the first dot of an idea? As you do anything where is the origin of that doing, or that being? Where do we start? There doesn’t always seem a large gap between the start, the seed and then the composition.

Exercise 17.1 Composing a haiku

1. Initial observation

2. Elaborating the observation

3. A leap or fresh perception

5-7-5 syllable count

For each check the felt sense against the line

Chapter 18 Enlarging Space

Exercise 18.1 Enlarging space

1. Go outside somewhere with some nature and a skyline

2. Sit directly on the earth or on a log a part of nature

3. Pay attention to your support and say grounded on the earth

4. Focus on some nature close to you as if you’d never seen it before, then further and further, until you get to the sky. Return to this attention if you are distracted

5. Now become aware of all of it, the near, further and furthest

6. Bring in the other senses

7. Say aware of it all

8. Pay attention to all of it and return to this on distraction

9. Become aware of your awareness and your body

10. Say Present in the world

Exercise 18.2 Wandering with wonder

1. Go into nature

2. GAP

a. Grounded aware of nature supporting you

b. Awareness sound and sight

c. Present in your body and in the wider space

3. Notice where your attention focuses on nature

a. See as if you have never seen this flower before make it vivid

4. Without losing sight of the object, notice if there an inner sense as well

5. Repeat allowing different objects to catch your attention

Chapter 19 Contemplation: sensing for the more

More than I: community, culture, those not yet born.

Exercise 19.1 Sensing for the more

1. Say each of these seven senses wait for a felt sense, something may come, or nothing, but wait

2. Something in my sense of identity no longer fits

3. Something is ready to die

4. Something is ready to be born

Mindful focusing protocol

1. Grounded Aware Presence (GAP) centre attention at your base (grounded), head (aware), and heart (presence)

a. Settle your thinking, drop thinking bring your attention into your torso

2. Finding the felt sense

a. Friendly attending

b. Notice what your body is holding

i. Ask who wants my attention

ii. Start with a situation then drop the story into the body

iii. Sense for the feeling beneath the feeling

3. Bringing the felt sense into focus

a. Describe the felt sense, using word, phrase or metaphor

b. Resonate does the phrase fit the felt sense

4. Empathic enquiry

a. Pose a question and wait for response

i. What makes you so?

ii. What is the worst part of all of this

iii. What is it you fear

iv. What is it you desire

3. Appreciating what came

a. Notice any small step\insights

b. Ask is there more

c. Ask if you’d like to stop

d. Thank you body

4. Transition back to the world

a. Return to GAP

b. Open your awareness into your whole body

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Sunday, 10 May 2020

Your body knows the answers: Rome