SOME SAY we contain neurotic fixations and defensive structures. Others say we contain problematic inner family systems and dysfunctional patterns. While these approaches have their merits, they are flawed in that they turn us into problems to be solved. It seems to me that Walt Whitman got it right when he said we contain multitudes, but that's a bit much to deal with in our day-to-day life. I prefer to hone in on the parts of myself that appear on a regular basis and call it a village. The subpersonalities that take turns being in charge I call “the villagers.” 

There's wisdom in a strategic exaggeration of our villager's qualities. If we exaggerate, we know it's not really who we are. We can drop our crippling idealism and slip past the poison of shame by seeing our vexations as a shared human experience of foibles, blind spots and eccentricities. This practice has helped me lighten up and accept the inherent imperfections and limitations in human life while increasing my ability to witness without heavy judgments.

This approach is quite different than the “not knowing” approach, which has a precise and rigorous quality that can be too intense for many of our villagers. Even though relaxing with not knowing is something we could achieve one day, cultivating a gentle and humorous attitude might be more doable for now. 

We are moving toward “nondoing,” yet are still in the realm of doing. We could ask ourselves, If I’m still in the realm of doing, what should I be doing? How would I know? It requires an attitude of generosity toward ourselves, a willingness to make mistakes, to do little experiments and find out what is the best next step for us. What works best for me right now (at least for the villager now speaking) is bringing humor into my spiritual practice and everyday life —even when I’m just going to the grocery store or talking with others I see on the street. When I lighten up it gets pretty funny, what we humans do. 

We need to check in with ourselves: Which villager is running the show? Does this villager have the space to open to humor? Sometimes it isn’t possible and that’s okay. We can try later. For example, it took me a little while to acknowledge that I have a villager with the tendency to bloviate. Before, I wouldn’t have liked it much at all, but now I call that villager the "The Bloviater.” I notice when he shows up — just one villager in the village — catch him and exaggerate him. Relishing this exaggerated energetic dimension is a much more enjoyable (and hilarious) way to set myself free than, for example, primal scream therapy. 
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RECENTLY I began reading Aldous Huxley’s book The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment. Perhaps because I’ve been searching in many ways my entire adult life to discover how science can be in service of awakening, I was stunned to discover that Huxley’s words expressed something I have long believed but could not express in words. He wrote that developing clarity was crucial to deepening spiritual growth and, quite unexpectedly, he also wrote that a very specific working research hypothesis was needed to “motivate and guide this research.” Luckily for me, and for you I trust, Huxley has answered in the text below his own question of "what sort and how much of a working hypothesis do we need?"

From Huxley's The Divine Within:

For those of us who are not congenitally the members of an organized church, who have found that humanism and nature-worship are not enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of ignorance, the squalor of vice, or the other squalor of respectability, the minimum working hypothesis would seem to run to about this:

That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations.

That the Ground is at once transcendent and immanent.

That it is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become actually identical with the divine Ground.

That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence.

That there is a Law or Dharma which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final end.

That the more there is of self, the less there is of the Godhead; and that the Tao is therefore a way of humility and love, the Dharma a living Law of mortification and self-transcending awareness. This, of course, accounts for the facts of history.

People like their egos and do not wish to mortify them, get a bigger kick out of bullying and self-adulation than out of humility and compassion, are determined not to see why they shouldn't "do what they like" and "have a good time." They get their good time; but also and inevitably they get wars and syphilis, tyranny and alcoholism, revolution, and in default of an adequate religious hypothesis the choice between some lunatic idolatry, such as nationalism, and a sense of complete futility and despair. Unutterable miseries!

But throughout recorded history the great majority of men and women have preferred the risk—no, the positive certainty of such disasters to the tiresome whole-time job of seeking first the kingdom of God. In the long run, we get exactly what we ask for.

To begin with, I need some way to quiet the mind. An obstacle to inner guidance is a busy mind. A mind that worries. A mind that is running too fast. And there are many methods, both secular and spiritual, that say they can help with this obstacle of a too busy mind that feels jumpy and fragmenting. I’ve tried many of methods to calm my mind, and right now I want to share what I learned from Gendlin because I’ve found it to be especially valuable. 

Clearing the space
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First, I ask myself the question, “What is keeping me from feeling completely at one with everything right now? What obstacles are making my mind run fast?” Or “What is making my mind feel uncomfortable? Something feels out of balance, so what could be blocking my natural, peaceful mind?”

When I do this, it doesn’t take long for something to arise. For example, when I ask myself the question right now, I think, “Oh, I have to do my taxes.” I can’t wish it away. It is going to be there. So what to do?

First, I acknowledge this is there, and then I ask myself, “Aside from the pressure and resistance to doing taxes, if I put that aside, what else might be there?”

The movement of setting it aside is what matters. It’s not that I fixed it, but I acknowledged that yes, that is disquieting. It's making me nervous. I can’t do anything about it, but for right now, in order to open to inner guidance, I am going to set that aside temporarily to clear some space in my mind.

So then I notice, taxes are not the only thing. What else is there that is keeping me from feeling the natural peacefulness that I think is our birthright? 

It doesn’t take long for the next most pressing thing to come to mind. Finances. This is, of course, related to taxes. There’s that devil. The devil that worries me. And yes, that’s there. I can’t wish it away. I can’t wave my hand and make it vanish. I need to pay attention. And here’s the important thing: worrying is a good thing if it tells us what needs to be done. It’s good that I do my taxes. It’s good that I pay attention to my finances. That’s the gift of anxiety. There are things we should take care of. Once they’re taken care of, that worry leaves us.

Part of me wishes there was a time I would have no worries because I would complete everything that needs to be done. But when I ask myself, “Is this possible?” the answer is no, there is always something that needs to be done. But can I experience what needs to be done in a gentler way, in a way that doesn’t aggravate my mind? That is something inner guidance can help us with: How to be at peace with what needs to be done, and not fight with it or procrastinate.

So I set aside taxes and finances, and continue to ask the question: “Aside from these two things, what else is keeping me from peacefulness and a spacious mind?” Often for me there are five or six things. I go through each one, and at the end of the list, there is a strange sense of relief. Why should I feel relief? Because I realize the list is finite. Aside from all those things, I could be peaceful right now. I could experience a peaceful mind. And in some strange way, a little bit of peace comes just from doing this.

Sensing the felt sense

With this little bit of peacefulness, the next thing we do is turn our attention to the mysterious place inside where we can detect subtler levels of disquiet. What we did previously was to notice the obvious, loud kinds of disquiet.

So now we ask, “Is there still, in some deeper place, something that feels not quite right? Something that if it could shift and if it could open, I could find more peace?” 

Gendlin calls this, sensing the felt sense. He says there is a sense inside that is subtle, murky and mysterious. Unless we are quiet, we won’t even notice it. But if we clear space, it’s Something we can notice. Gendlin says, and I find this to be true, that this felt sense is somewhere in the belly or chest area. Sometimes it’s easier for me to sense it if I put my left palm on my belly, and the palm of my right hand over my heart. I sense in and ask, “What is there?”

Sometimes what is there is something murky that feels quite frightening to experience. For me, I notice that when my fear is too strong, it’s a sign for me to find what Gendlin calls a safe inner place. When that has happened to me, I have had to do additional preparation work before using focusing to open to what feels too frightening. But at this moment, I am not experiencing this level of fear.

When I sense into the murkiness at this moment, I feel something a little rough, a little jagged. My breathing is not smooth. There’s a little bit of tightness. I stay with this feeling. I breathe several times, and then I try to find words for it. Not a word like pain, but something more nuanced. Something specific, like, tight and gnawing. The feeling is not strong, but it’s a subtle, gnawing tightness. A tender tightness. If we can find a phrase like that, a phrase maybe we never used before, it helps us to feel into what this vague and quiet discomfort really is. 

Now I ask myself, “Is that the right phrase? Gnawing and tight? A little sharp maybe too? Yeah, that’s a little closer.” I pay attention to the sharpness, the gnawing, the tightness — and now I feel a sadness. I just caught my breath the way you might catch your breath before you cry. That little gasp does something to that place, what Gendlin calls the felt shift. It doesn’t remove it all, but it makes it different. There’s still soreness in my upper chest, but now it’s spreading a little bit. And my belly is looser. 

For some reason by feeling into this subtle place in the way I just did, it has transformed. This is moving toward something important. It is inner guidance expressed bodily. Gendlin says to welcome this and take it in. We don’t need to think about it — just receive it with gratitude. The next time we do this, it will be there. It won’t go away. Then we can go deeper. We can allow it to unfold more. 

And this is a body path to locating inner guidance. 

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Embodied Spirituality -Part 1

​I WANT to talk about my mentor Gene's exploration of the in-between and why I love so much what he's done. How he's inspired me, and how I feel he's given me permission to take what he's given to me and take it further into the spiritual domain.

I also want to talk about other people who have done this, working with the in-between, but I want to make it most about Eugene Gendlin, and how these other people have gone where he's gone, but how they weren't able to go as far as he went. I think that will help me understand Gendlin more and help me communicate what I feel is the breakthrough that Gendlin accomplished that created a breakthrough for me. He broke open a new trail for me and I only just now am seeing it—how I can follow his way but how I’m going to do it in my own way. What I think I can contribute comes through taking in my intuitive sense of what he's accomplished and putting it in new words that are more accessible to others, and also help me understand it more deeply. I have to take his words inside myself, metabolize what he's saying and come up with an easier way for me to think about it.

So what is this trail following? What is his embodied philosophy? His contribution is in psychology and in philosophy — I think I can use the word embodied here. His contributions in psychology are in psychotherapy, but it’s experiential. There's something about it being experiential that's really unique and unlike anything that anyone else has done. It’s even beyond what he did with Carl Rodgers. Rodgers never understood completely what Gendlin accomplished. Gendlin says this. 

It’s easy to underestimate Gendlin, mainly because of his little book, Focusing. It seems so simple on the one hand, what he's done in this book, and if he hadn't written so much about the philosophy behind what he's done, no one would ever have known what he did behind the scenes, because Gendlin is I think the first great embodied philosopher that we've ever had. He surpasses all the other philosophers that I've loved, because his philosophy is never grounded in theory, but always grounded in the moment. All he knows about this philosophy he's seen arise in the present moment. So it’s a philosophy that didn't start out in the realm of thinking, but arose out of the ground of experiencing. It’s the only grounded philosophy I have ever read. It’s a kind of miracle that he was able to do it. This is the hidden Gendlin and I want to show that this secretly underlies what focussing is. 

Because it’s an embodied philosophy, it can't be put into words. You have to follow his trail in experiencing to understand his philosophy, and that's amazing. He says most people think philosophy happens when you assemble concepts in unique ways, but that’s just playing with concepts, assembling them in the air disconnected from experience. His philosophy doesn't do that. 

Gendlin asked us to consider: where does thinking come from? Right now when I'm writing, he said, how do I know what comes next? Is it in my mind somewhere? As I write, I realize, I pause. As I pause, something arises in my mind. So it is step by step. Each arising leads to the next arising. If I pause and wait, something really amazing happens. If we think about writing in the usual way, we think we are figuring out what comes next. Gendlin says we are mistaken. If we try to have a thought and write it out, it is a constricted and awkward kind of thinking. Haven’t we all noticed that? But if we slow the process down and wait, the next thing that arises does fit. I was amazed what Gendlin had discovered, but Gendlin also says this is not his discovery. This has been known forever: Something happens next.

With thinking, when he calls it embodied, he means there's a relationship going on between you and me right now. We are experiencing something about thinking at this moment.  What I've learned and what I know is connected to what I imagine you have learned and know. The act of what comes next calls upon all of that. When we relax, then things arise that come from all of that. People locate thinking as if it’s in their mind, as if it's their thinking, but when the process slows down, it comes from a different place.

Another way of saying all of this is that Gendlin has a new way of thinking that's spontaneous. He spent enough time with this process in his own experience to know what gets in the way of it. One thing that gets in the way is having socially constructed ways of describing reality. If you plug those into your thinking, it’s the opposite of pausing and waiting.  So part of receiving his discovery is to be vigilant about how you're using words. Notice if you're grabbing conventional phrases. Gendlin's on guard. He doesn't let them come in. Instead he's just waiting and something always happens. It might be a detour somewhere else, but the way the mind works, it will find its way back spontaneously.

For me, in the beginning, Gendlin was very difficult to read, understand, and appreciate. And still it’s hard for me to express clearly why I love what Gendlin has accomplished. And most people I know also find Gendlin to be difficult, but I think he is trying hard to provide a way for us to know something that is profoundly important. 

RELATED ARTICLE:
Embodied Spirituality - Part 2