Bill Gayner
I love your words, Tom: “Quakers tend to be somewhat “universalist” in their approach; we are advised to be “open to new light, from whatever source.” Both reassuring and inspiring, coming alive to both physical and conceptual prehension.
What a rich, wonderful life you are living, Leslie! Blessed by love and work! Although none of this is easy terrain of course. Thank you for offering this course!
Do you have antique cards or cars? Both sound fascinating!
After leaving a Buddhist community after 10 years involvement due to the head teacher’s scandals, I was looking for new direction and took a test that matches your interests with people who love the work they do. The guidance counsellor showed me the results indicated I would be best suited as a religious minister. I laughed sadly, realizing how true that would have been, but that I no longer belonged to a faith community I could minister in. So I became a social worker and psychotherapist instead. What a process of surprising discovery vocation can be! How it cooks us!
I am looking forward to meeting you. Unfortunately, I work weekday evenings, so won’t be able to attend most classes, but am delighted that I had a cancelation this evening and can attend the first half of our first class this evening.
Thank you so much, Dr. Davis, for sharing books that were transformative for you, I have bought all but one and will try to figure out how to source that one as well. I find Buddhism and Whitehead’s panentheism and Christianity crossing for me in inspiring ways, fresh, open ended ways.
Thank you so much for this wonderful, life-altering a course and I look forward to watching you present at the conference on Easter weekend! I have only watched the beginning of your fifth lecture in this course, but am thoroughly enjoying it!
Hi Kathleen, Another thought — I expect Whitehead is trying to develop a metaphysics that supports and is accountable to “the facts”, including the phenomenology of spiritual experience, and in that sense his philosophy is trying to account for and support religious experience, rather than create a metaphysics that claims religious experience has no rational justification. Instead, religious experience affords a perspective on causal relations in fungi (I was listening to Merlin Sheldrake rhapsodizing on Whitehead last night).
Hi Kathleen,
My sense of those pages in Johnson is that he is weighing up a dialectical process of reflections on God by Whitehead and that the sentence, “Those who claim to have direct experience of a personal God are, in Whitehead’s opinion . . . open to the objection that they are without rational justification” (83), is just one aspect in a complex, many-sided multiply dialectial process that includes Whitehead also welcoming and valuing such experiences.
Imagine trying to live every step in our life fully armed with rational justifications, lol, let alone when we open ourself to the fresh, surprising always moreness of God’s ingression inspiring our becoming. It seems to me vital in encountering God that we leave behind all rational justifications, joining Meister Eckhart who prayed to God to free him from “God”. Imagine what we would miss if we armed ourselves with rational justifications before every new becoming! I am of course smiling along with you here, because I don’t imagine you as trying to do that.
I am curious when you write, “Let me say that I know he does not want us to think of God as a “person.”” I wonder if this is something you read from the younger Whitehead? Johnson writes:
True Christianity tends to bow before the ultimate mystery of the divine being and use what is admitted to be incomplete knowledge. Certainly, Whitehead does not offer what purports to be a dogmatically certain creed. He outlines a tentative, possible interpretation of available facts of religious experience. In dealing with the “”profound things”” of life, he advocates (in his more mature philosophical deliberations) the avoidance of too simple symbolism ( e.g., “”permanent rightness””). The symbolism of “”personality”” ( purged of theological corruptions) seems entirely appropriate to Whitehead, in his later writing
(p. 84)
I was listening to Matt Segall on Youtube saying that the younger students in his classes on Whitehead tend to be drawn to what Whitehead writes about the divine lure, but the older ones are more drawn to how Whitehead helps them discover God as a companion. I have to say that is what has opened more to me in this course, discovering what I imagine the Sufis mean by the Friend, someone who was my friend in childhood and whom I am meeting again freshly and coming to appreciate how this Friend has been with me every step of my life.
Hi Jhenbao,
I also appreciate how you are pointing out how Whitehead’s cosmology focusing on “a process that is constantly evolving in the principle of creative novelty and leads to the development of so many colorful forms of life including the human being” contributes something that is not present in MBSR’s Buddhist roots, let alone the medical environment to which it is being adapted. I thoroughly agree with this.
Mind you, MBSR, may share some panentheistic themes with Whitehead via its Buddhist modernist romanticist, American vipassana, and American transcendentalist influences. I am remembering now that David McMahan’s Chapter 6, A Brief History of Interdependence in his (2009) The Making of Buddhist Modernism, goes into fascinating detail about the evolution of this doctrine in various phases of Buddhist history, into Buddhist Modernism, and its more recent developments in Western Buddhism. It could be that through these influences, MBSR is participating in the divine revelation in Western culture Griffin in Chapter 1 Panentheism: A Postmodern Revelation describes:
In this first chapter, I suggest that panentheism is the content of a divine revelation that has been occurring in the cultural life of the West–primarily through religious, moral, scientific, and philosophical experience—roughly over the past two centuries. It is “postmodern” in that it goes beyond, while incorporating the central truths of, the dominant worldviews of the early modern and late modern periods. as indicated in the introduction, this revelation has recently become widely spread.”
(p. 13)
Our conversation has piqued my curiosity and I look forward to rereading McMahan on this in the context of what I am learning about Whitehead’s panentheism. Perhaps a majority of the therapists and counsellors in my little Touching the Earth Mindfulness Ontario group are MBSR or MBCT teachers and some–as I was–are trainers.
Thank you, Jhenbao, yes, you are making a helpful point, about how the major Buddhist roots of MBSR in Zen and Chan Mahayana Buddhism are more “relational and changing, than as a process that is constantly evolving in the principle of creative novelty”.
Perhaps all forms of Buddhism agree that anicca (impermanence), dukkha (suffering), and anatta (no absolute, permanent, independent self to be found) are the three marks of existence, although they are going to differ on how they interpret these. But it seems to me, that “relational” probably applies better to Zen Buddhism than classical Theravada Buddhism, where dependent arising is viewed as functioning as the source of suffering, would you agree?
In contrast, most of my Buddhist teachers viewed dependent arising as a source of suffering only when accompanied by craving.
Could you say more about how Zen is “relational”? Does it refer to perspectives on the interconnectedness of all beings, what Thich Nhat Hanh refers to as “interbeing”? Also perhaps to an understanding that samsara and nirvana are not two? Whereas for classic Theravada Buddhists, nirvana is quite different from samsara, and the point is to escape samsara to nirvana? Can we make a case for progression on the path in classic Theravada practice as various fetters fall away, that is somehow quite different for Zen Buddhism?
Hi Chris,
On the one hand, focusing can be used in this intentional way that Cornell did, but for the most part it involves discovering what is there for us and coming alive to the felt sense free of a priori assumptions. What is there often surprises us and if it leads to transformations, is full of fresh realizations. So there is something lovely about not front end loading their experiencing, still I am interested in hearing more and understanding better what you are planning.
On the other, I would be careful about the assumption that “my students don’t have a troubling situation”. I have clients who are teachers and their classes are full of students who have all kinds of troubling situations such as learning disabilities, bullying, alcoholic or suicidal parents, isolation, challenges with dating, their sexuality, etc. Part of the challenge with these practices is that people are often shocked by the amount of challenging experiences they encounter when they drop into deeper experiencing. Gendlin developed Clearing a Space to help people acknowledge and put aside various stressors before selecting one to focus on. That might be a place to start first. As well as coaching for them in case they get triggered into emotional over arousal or dissociation.
Lots of kids see much more challenging things on the internet than Penfield’s experiment, but I would be careful about using a trigger warning. I am imagining you would start with the apple exercise before showing them this movie.
So, I am not sure about what you are describing, but I appreciate you are a teacher and probably have a good sense of your rationale for this and I look forward to hearing more about what you are hoping to do and its rationale.
Since that paper, I got some training in Gendlin’s thinking at the edge (TAE) and became a certified focusing trainer with an award in TAE. I am using TAE to thicken Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit in my approach as well as to explore and describe key principles in it. This fresh understanding afforded new possibilities such as helping me to develop new processes such as appreciating, befriending and rescuing protectors.
BTW, I am leading one of the International Focusing Institute’s monthly online highlights in a two-hour workshop on Saturday March 16 at 1 p.m. Eastern: https://focusing.org/event/touching-earth-focusing-and-meditation
I’ve just realized I have not answered your question about how I am integrating TAE and focusing into my approach, so I will explain that.
Basically, I teach meditation and exploring meditation experience in a way that welcomes all the processes of physical and mental prehension. The emphasis is on connecting with the body and opening into the felt sense. The emphasis is on going with whatever is happening whether it involves suffering or happiness, and deepening our experiencing. The emphasis is on opening to experiencing free of prior assumptions, and exploring that. We welcome reflecting on experiencing especially in the service of coming more alive to it and navigating it. The approach integrates emotion-focused therapy’s emotion theory as well.
Emotion theory is super helpful in navigating and deepening experiencing, but what I am going to describe extends beyond high school classroom processes, although of course is relevant, but more usefully dealt with in therapy or in contexts involving deeper levels of practitioner training. Opening into experiencing, and identifying when we are in secondary defensive emotional processes such as worry/anxiety, rumination/depressiveness, harsh self-criticism/self-anger, or rejecting anger, and dropping into and arriving in primary emotions. If they are helpful emotions, we carry them forward. All emotions can be secondary, primary adaptive (helpful), primary maladaptive or instrumental (emotions we are using to communicate something rather than feeling them). Helpful sadness, anger, shame, happiness etc just need to be made sense of, such emotions are full of implicit information, help us sort out what matters to us, and motivate us to act. Primary maladaptive emotions are too intense, carry secondary hopelessness and helpless and can be paralyzing (like drowning in sadness, feeling so ashamed I want to melt into the ground, or full of dread like an orphan in the storm). They are modes from the past that need to be transformed by finding the earliest most intense memories of them, exploring what our dilemma was and our unmet need (all emotions carry needs, motivations and actions tendencies (i.e., what our body wants to do), and finding and expressing helpful adult emotions that then transform the primary maladaptive emotions. This is called transforming emotion with emotion. We need helpful emotions to transform paralyzing primary maladaptive emotions because the emotional centres are the largest part of our brain and emotion organizes our whole neurophysiology. The neocortex is not richly connected enough with the emotional centres so it makes it hard to think our way out these kind of intense, compelling, severely conditioned emotions. This kind of work usually involves working with self-aspects like a critic, protector or an inner child. We potentially learn more about the past we each time we go there and if it transforms, it frees us to be able to return to the current stressor that triggered the primary maladaptive emotion with a fresh openness to discovering helpful emotions and the felt sense orienting and motivating us. That’s that richer participation in our world so that we are open to God’s values ingressing and orienting us.
The approach includes training in how to respond when we find ourselves outside of our window of tolerance whether through emotional arousal or dissociation. What often works is some kind of calming practice for emotional over-arousal and a grounding and gently stimulating (e.g., gently slapping the legs) for dissociation.
So friendliness deepens when it is willing to turn towards frozen suffering and resonate with it. Resonating with it and reflecting on it, finding words and imagery that help us deepen our experiencing of it, compassion and other helpful emotions emerge orienting us to taking in what is being implied and creating ripe conditions for transformation, which we can then carry forward. These processes include Gendlin’s focusing and emotion-focused therapy’s transforming emotions with emotions.
Carrying this forward, we are more likely to find ourself in more coherent states and experiencing adaptive emotions. Deepening our experiencing of this, exploring it, coming fully alive to the felt sense of our participating in it and explicating this, appreciation (experiencing, valuing, understanding, the world disclosing itself) emerges, which may be carried forward into effective, confident engagement in situations and life (such as what I am going to cook the kids for dinner tonight? or reflecting on how to deal with that difficult situation at work) or appreciation may afford ways of discovering fresh ways of experiencing self, other and world, emerging from the whole of what present experiencing is implying now, transforming how we experience our life world. For example, separation between self and world falling away, experiencing everything interaffecting everything, vast spaciousness, finding our whole being and the world singing with deep values, deep feelings of coming home into a fluid world of becoming, etc.
Thinking at the edge integrates nicely into these processes of appreciating and transformative contemplation. We can find ourself reflecting on processes we know well and explicating them freshly so that our understanding of our path transforms as we transform. I have found this can include reflecting on processes we know well based on previous experiences of transformation or it may include learning from processes that are occurring freshly now. Of course, these two kinds of processes are also deeply interrelated, since we can’t reflect on prior transformations without coming alive to them freshly now, which also ways reveals fresh perspectives, changing everything. Journalling after meditation helps with all of these processes as does sharing and exploring with fellow practitioners.
You might notice that this is a fresh carrying forward of the traditional Buddhist brahmaviharas, normally translated as loving kindness or friendliness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity, but carrying it forward by orienting practice to Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit and EFT emotion theory, discovering what emerges from that, and trying to explicate that. I find Whitehead is helping with this.
Hi Chris,
Here’s a link to the pre-print of my 2019 paper on Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Therapy: https://mindfulfeeling.ca/paper-on-emotion-focused-mindfulness-therapy/
It describes some of the technicalities of integrating focusing and emotion-focused transformational processes into mindfulness as well as some of the Buddhist background to this.
Hi Chris,
Here’s the link on my website to five handouts I use in emotion-focused mindfulness therapy: https://mindfulfeeling.ca/about-emotion-focused-therapy/orientation-to-efmt-meditation/
There is a link to a page on experiential focusing and towards the bottom of that you will find a link to a wonderful Youtube video of Cornell speaking her focusing practice out loud for our benefit on the anniversary of her sister’s death.
Hi Chris, How exciting! Yes, you are totally on the right track! What a wonderfully appropriate quotation from Gendlin to select, so salient to our conversation and your project. And, yes, I love your idea of using an apple exercise. Your question came to my mind for me in a session this morning introducing a client to emotion-focused mindfulness practice and he described how in his wine-tasting course, he had had great difficulty describing the tastes (he tends to cut his feelings off, so it makes sense he would have difficulty not only identifying but symbolizing and expressing experiencing), and the teacher recommended he go to the supermarket and buy different fruits and vegetables and taste them and compare the different flavours to each other. How developing a palette of flavours linked to words is so helpful for describing any particular flavour. Interesting, eh? How words and images can help us deepen, more deeply appreciate (experiencing, valuing and understanding), and carry forward experiencing as well as to share our experiencing with each other.
Part of what makes experiential focusing so valuable is that Gendlin shared how to use it for philosophy, for cultivating our own lives as practitioners, and in therapy. The book you have ordered is full of useful tips for how to integrate focusing into processing with clients, and yes I am sure you will enjoy it, but it may not be her best work for teaching it in a classroom. Although I have integrated and been influenced by her work, I have not delved deeply into it, but I checked out her website just now which has lots of courses and a books and manuals section. I expect you might find her work on sharing this in classrooms for practitioners more useful. She is one of the outstanding figures in the focusing community, has a PhD in linguistics and got trained by Gendlin both as a focusing-oriented therapist and focusing practitioner trainer, and then studied how to use more accessible language for introducing this to students and clients and also carried it forward with a colleague based on their own inner work. Looking at her website, there is a page on her books and manuals: https://focusingresources.com/products/. I wonder if you would find one of her manuals useful for applying this in classrooms?
But I don’t think she has integrated it into meditation. And I think it may have taken her some time to take a deeper dive into Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit and its thinking at the edge method (there are these various distinct worlds within the Focusing community).
I would also be delighted to help you in any way way, such as talking on a Zoom call. If you are interested, I will share my email with you here or you can contact me on my contact page on my website — I’m going to share a page from my website below with links to handouts I provide in groups on emotion-focused mindfulness. Just to be clear, I wouldn’t charge for talking, it would just be fun for me. I’ll also probably be able to attend our group discussion on Sunday.
Hi Dr. Davis,
It strikes me such mass movements require such a mix of carefully balanced characteristics in their leaders and followers. I do find the concept of divine persuasion here inspiring, and feel such deep respect for the combination of deeply principled, wise leadership, highly disciplined movements and their willingness to give everything required to pull off what Gandhi and Martin Luther King and their followers did as long as they were able. I am reminded of Gotama’s dying words to his closest remaining monks, “Things fall apart, tread the path with care.” Such loving words, that we can still tread the path with care even when things are falling apart. All three of these leaders were assassinated. Gandhi was unable to prevent the partition of his country along religious lines and the Buddha unable to prevent the genocide of his homeland. And yet all three such outstanding success stories.
I am reminded of one of the oldest Buddhist manuscripts, the Rhinocerous Sutta, which advises that if there is not a community to practice with, cultivate contentment in wandering and practicing alone, like a rhinocerous.
We need to take care about focusing a movement on a highly idealized leader or leaders, how that can be so unbalanced for both the leader and the movement. It strikes me that part of wisdom is understanding as humans we can only lean into the light and never presume on our righteousness. But I am so grateful for the light, that divine persuasion.
The two Buddhist teachers I followed for years and from whom I received training as a teacher both had scandals that rocked their respective communities that were not properly addressed by them or their communities and led me to cut ties with them. What I learned in the failures of the first community benefitted me in the disaster in the second community.
I feel humility about all of this. I also love and am so grateful for the little sangha I cofounded, Touching the Earth Mindfulness Ontario.
Hi Dr. Davis,
I look forward to exploring these resources, thank you so much!
You can find a lot of Gendlin’s published articles here: https://focusing.org/articles/articles. Their old journal, The Folio, is stored there as well and can also find Gendlin’s and other’s papers introducing Thinking at the Edge in edition (2000-2004), Vol. 19, No. 1.
Here’s a list of some of his books. For an intro on Focusing, a lot of people find Ann Weiser Cornell’s (1996) better than Gendlin’s classic on Focusing, but I haven’t read it myself. I imagine you might enjoy starting with Gendlin’s (1962, 2018b) books.
Cornell, A.W. (1996). The power of focusing: A practical guide to emotional self-healing. New York: MJ Books.
**Gendlin, E. (1962). Experiencing and the creation of meaning: A philosophical and psychological approach to the subjective. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
Gendlin, E. T. (1981). Focusing (2nd ed.). New York: Bantam Books.
Gendlin, E.T. (2018a). A Process Model. (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. His master work, but a challenging place to start with his philosophy.
**Gendlin, Eugene. (2018b). Saying What We Mean: Implicit Precision and the Responsive Order (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy). Selected Works by Eugene T. Gendlin. Edited by Edward S. Casey and Donata M. Schoeller. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Hi Dr. Davis, I thoroughly enjoyed your video on Whitehead and McGilchrist, thank you so much! Great! Interesting also to hear the two points you made at the end where deepening McGilchrist’s engagement with Whitehead would deepen his approach and afford new areas of research. If I recall, your first point was about McGilchrist not picking up on Whitehead’s distinction between primary perception (is that the phrase?) and causal efficacy. This distinction seems key to me in reflecting the limits in McGilchrist using Teasdale’s mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) form of mainstream mindfulness to exemplify presencing, and how much more can be integrated into mindfulness when it orients more to Whitehead’s and Gendlin’s philosophies rather than the philosophical assumptions underlying MBCT.