I would also like to hear ChristianKl elaborate. My feeling about the Focusing book is that it’s like a set of instructions for solving a puzzle that is hidden inside a box. Many of the steps are things like “1. Open the box. 2. Locate the components of the puzzle with your hands. 3. Arrange the components together for convenience. 4. Pass your hands over the pieces to get a physical sense of their shapes.” The first three steps you really only need to be told once, after which you get it, and on subsequent puzzle-solving attempts you can generally do steps 1-3 implicitly and only really need to exert effort for step 4 and beyond.
Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m missing some nuance in how there are many subtly different ways of opening the puzzle box that yield different results.
In the book Gendlin says that the steps are really just to help people learn, they aren’t at all necessary to the process, so I think Gendlin would himself agree with that.
I would also like to hear ChristianKl elaborate. My feeling about the Focusing book is that it’s like a set of instructions for solving a puzzle that is hidden inside a box. Many of the steps are things like “1. Open the box. 2. Locate the components of the puzzle with your hands. 3. Arrange the components together for convenience. 4. Pass your hands over the pieces to get a physical sense of their shapes.” The first three steps you really only need to be told once, after which you get it, and on subsequent puzzle-solving attempts you can generally do steps 1-3 implicitly and only really need to exert effort for step 4 and beyond.
Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m missing some nuance in how there are many subtly different ways of opening the puzzle box that yield different results.
In the book Gendlin says that the steps are really just to help people learn, they aren’t at all necessary to the process, so I think Gendlin would himself agree with that.