Somatic_Semantic Shifting

8/10/2019 Somatic_Semantic Shifting

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Somatic - Semantic - Shifting: Clarifying Experienced Meaning

The Philosophy behind Focusing

Dr. Donata Schoeller

Presentation for the CEPC, Cambridge, Sept. 2014

1. Responsive Order

2. A Process Model

3. Roots

4. The Focusers Attention: Felt Sensing

5. Close Talking

6. Felt Sense and Somatic Marker

In my paper I will approach Eugene GendlinsPractice of Focusing, its philosophical

underpinnings, its roots and its consequences for a practice of thinking and articulation. In a

second step, I will compare and contrast the Felt Sense with Antonio Damasios 'Somatic

Markers', by showing how Gendlin makes conceivable that we do not have to react according

to embodied patterns of what we have experienced and learned. Bodily sense can unfold into

intricate steps of understanding through the practice of a certain kind of explicative

awareness. Articulating helps to stay in touch with a felt kind of meaning without handing it

over to some reaction, some story or analysis or becoming speechless in the face of too much

complexity or experienced meaningfulness.

Before I start. I want to invite you to feel how you sit, to feel how it is for you to be in this

room right now, to notice what is going on bodily wise while being in this place, this room,

with the people around you. Maybe you can feel the atmosphere of the room, notice your

body-posture and position, a bodily sense of pressure, or ease the noises from outside, my

voice .... Allow yourself to be with all of this too now and again, while I am speaking. Going

back and forth between different sorts of attention-modes: from attention towards what we

call outside, to attention towards what we call inside, from attention towards a conceptual

content, to attending the way you respond to it, is a part of the practice that is called

Focusing.

(I think this has also been an ideal in the monastic tradition: having one eye directed outward

and one eye directed inward.)

1. Responsive Order

To the people gathered here it is nothing new to hear that feeling is not a passive state but a

highly dynamic and complex process. But what is not yet widely shared is the concept of

words not just communicating information and to represent or construct ideas or intentional

states, but to carry experiential processes forward.

So before I focus on Focusing, I want to characterize the philosophical horizon it opens up.


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Focusing makes us directly aware, how our ways of experience are a constant crossingof vast

past experience and the present, how in a feeling, as fuzzy as it may be at the moment, there is

so much: What we experienced long ago, what went on this morning, what we may just have

read in newspaper, what someones said to us, just a glance while we passed someone, a

thought, a dream that is still with us, all this, not separate, but in a bodily senseof howwe are

doing, orto paraphrase Damasio, in a feeling for what happens. Intowhat Gendlin calls

an unseparated multiplicity (Gendlin, 19911) the present moment occursmaking the

situation diversely rich and multi-interpretational from individual to individual. By living in

situations, we carry a vast complexity along that is not inside of us like furniture inside a

house. Rather, it needs attentive development to lead to actions we can account for, to short-

term and long-term intentions that become clearer along the way.

To be attentive to your own situated experiencing process as a philosophical practice can be

considered as result of a different thinking. In a traditional kind of epistemology it is the

content of experience that counts, the judgement that can be formed. Its questions of interest

are, what sensory input is experienced, what category can be applied, with what cognitive

operation can it be ordered. The description of clear-cut cognitive elements and operations

thus characterizes a traditional epistemological way of thinking about thinking. Hermeneutics,

American Pragmatism and Phenomenology discovered a process. Intelligence came to be

conceived as a processual affair that constantly changes the results and systems it produces as

well as the concepts with which it proceeds, especially visible in science. Gendlins Focusing

cultivates this process on a micro scale. By being attentive towards subtle shifts happening on

a fine-grained experiential level while we articulate what we think, feel and experience, we

can feel and articulate our way more deeply intothe implying of beliefs, intentions, conceptsand feelings - thereby changing them.

Gendlins core philosophical interest is concerned with what he calls a responsive(instead

of a determinative) kind of order (Gendlin, 19972). It is characteristic for the open and yet

precise interaction of bodily process and environment, which on a human level also, includes

the symbolic environment. By environment Gendlin does not mean a world surrounding us,

but something which has become a constitutive part of the living process, parts of which have

been co-created by this very process (Gendlin 1997, 20123) One could try to say: How

breathing implies an interactive and inseparable process of lungs and air, meaning implies an

interactive and inseparable process of experiencing and symbols. The main characteristic of

this sort of processual relationship is responsiveness instead of a one-way determination.

Practicing to cultivate the responsive order in the movement from experiencing to

articulation is the core capacity of Focusing. (We will see what this means further on).

1Gendlin, E.T. (1991). Thinking beyond patterns: body, language and situations. In B.

den Ouden & M. Moen (Eds.), The presence of feeling in thought, pp. 25-151. New York:

Peter Lang.2Gendlin, E.T. (1997). The responsive order: A new empiricism. Man and World,30 (3),

383-411.3Gendlin, E.T. (1997). A Process Model. New York. Gendlin, E.T. (2012).Implicit

precision.In Z. Radman (Ed.), Knowing without thinking: The theory of the background in

philosophy of mind, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/pdf/gendlin_implicit_precision.pdfhttp://www.focusing.org/gendlin/pdf/gendlin_implicit_precision.pdfhttp://www.focusing.org/gendlin/pdf/gendlin_implicit_precision.pdfhttp://www.focusing.org/gendlin/pdf/gendlin_implicit_precision.pdfhttp://www.focusing.org/gendlin/pdf/gendlin_implicit_precision.pdfhttp://www.focusing.org/gendlin/pdf/gendlin_implicit_precision.pdf


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The challenge of the philosophy behind focusing is to conceive of a carrying forward

capacity of languagingthat surpasses the Cartesian split of mind and body. Gendlin

conceives of language not in representative and constructive terms but along the lines of a

productive continuity of body/environment interactions. In the centre of this work is a

phenomenological close up study of a kind of open implying we find trying to articulate what

we think and feel. The challenge in a meaningful exchange or in the attempt to develop what

we think or feel can be experienced on an everyday basis as well as in scientific or creative

work: we can get lost in the complexity of our thoughts and feelings, not being able to convey

them in ways that can account for the meaningfulness we sense. We can even destroy the

significance and subtlety of a meaningful question or dilemma by putting it in words. Thomas

Nagel captures this, when he says: We can feel a question apart from its verbal expression,

and the difficulty is to pose it without turning it into something superficial, or inviting

answers that may seem adequate to its verbal form but that dont really meet the problem

beneath the surface. (1986, p. 56)

Theories of representation or construction make this challenge disappear. Gendlins

philosophy of language opens a perspective to understand articulation as a sequence that

needs to actually occur for meaning to happen. This process neither involves the

representation or construction of experience, no one sided determinationbut the interaction

of experience and symbols implying each other to unfold meaningful processes.

In his bookIncomplete Nature, Terrence Deacon reflects in Chapter 0, that what matters in

our actions is not there as a materially and energetically present thing, that can be measuredand analysed into its components. He describes how the value and purpose even of a book is

what is not there in the way the book is there as an object. Concerning science and academic

activities he notices the same thing: what keeps it going, what keeps scientists working are not

the things, the buildings, the books, the machines, but the driving force of what he calls

absential features, as what is not describable and measurable in the scientific terms with

which scientist work. Absential featureswhat is lacking, absentis what constitutes the

fabric of purpose, aim, values, goals as the specific centre around which human lives,

activities and strivings evolve. Thus Deacon critically comments: If the most fundamental

features of human experience are considered somehow illusory and irrelevant to the physical

goings-on of the world, then we, along with our aspirations and values, are effectively

rendered unreal as well. (Deacon, 2011, 12)4.

2. A Process Model

Deaconspoint helps to demonstrate the specificity and significance of Gendlins approach.

One could say: absential featuresare the methodological centre around which Gendlins

4Deacon adds: No wonder the all-pervasive success of the sciences in the last century has been

paralleled by a rebirth of fundamentalist faith and deep distrust of secular determination ofhuman values. (Incomplete Nature. How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: Norton &Company, 2011)


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thinking evolves. What I mean by methodological is: Gendlin does not describe absential

featureshe chooses the kind of workingor functioning of something absential he calls

implyingas starting point of his thinking. He engages what is yet difficult to say, to

explicate the process of speakingfrom .... what is not yet rendered symbolically, but needed,

to be able to continue the thought and to formulate, what we have to say. By making this lack

methodologically operative he can reflect howhe can say more and more. His concepts

engage what is missing to conceive how he is able to develop these concepts. Every

occurring word, phrases, sentence, every found structure and connection, every new definition

happens into an open implying, that at the same time is very precise. Explicating this process

provides him with his basic concept: Occurring into implying. This concept again

carries forward (and does not represent) an implicit understanding that enables him to refine

this very concept, conceiving more and more of the special relationship of occurring and

implying. With his self-reflective methodology, an understanding of body, feeling, behaviour,

language becomes explicit which fills the blind spot, which Deacon (and others, among them

Drr 1988, Varela and Thompson 1993 etc.) spot at the centre of our scientific approach.

Placing implying and its productive relation to every occurring, and also every occurring

concept, phrase or sentence in the centre, this thinking shows (and simultaneously reflects as

its own methodology) how this process builds itself its own environments (on organic as well

as behavioural levels). On a symbolic level it creates, in Wittgensteinian terms, its contexts -

by means of which terms become meaningful in specific ways, so they can work in precise

ways, becoming definable and systematically connectable by further thinking and articulating.

It is a productive kind of need, building its own environments (and contexts) that Gendlin

uncovers as continuity between bodily and symbolic process that can be experienced, even inabstract thinking! In chapter eight he thereby creates a language to explicate the immense

plasticity and informational richness of situated feeling, its precise and intricate kind of

implying and the continuous growth of meaning through further interaction of experience and

symbols.

In his Process Model Gendlin thus construes the emergence of symbolic processes in closest

relation to bodily/environmental interaction and behaviour sequences. In this way an already

complex and intricate behaviour space, in which one behavioural sequence implies many

others, is further developed by gestures and symbols that emerge as pauses in behaviour. In

these pauses behaviour is not carried out as usual, it is versioned through gestures and sounds.

Paused behaviour and the gestures at first are inseparable. The gesture meaning depends on

the behaviour and the way the body is and feels itself during this behaviour. Step by step

Gendlin makes conceivable, how by this process, symbolic interactions gradually take over,

finally becoming the new space inwhich we behave and interact. It is constituted by vast new

possibilities that emerge by crossing and versioning behavioural sequences in new ways,

creating a human space or what we call situations.

As symbols carry the vastness of newly versioned behaviour possibilities with them as well as

bodily process that is involved in these, an inside/outside split emerges. This means nothingmore than: much more happens in gesturing or speaking than can be observed as simple

gestures or sounds. The human space with its symbolic connections has become wider, has


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phylogenetic dimension that is conceived in continuity to basic body-environment interactions

discovered. But next to this he demonstrates something empirical as well as rationalistic

traditions have neglected as a starting point of thinking: he calls it the quality of a situation.

Dewey recognized that it is not conceptions on the one hand and perception on the other, but

the complexity and challenge of a situationfrom where we start to think. In a careful

phenomenological way Dewey describes how we have situations. He thereby reformulates the

notion of feeling. We do not perceive a situation as a list of objects that need to be

categorically ordered. But wefeelthe situation, and from this kind of feel we know what is

relevant to say or do. In this way he reformulates: feeling is not a subjective internal state, but

the way we can have situations. It functions necessary ineveryday living, but also for higher

and abstract operations. Dewey states: It is more or less a commonplace that it is possible to

carry on observations that amass facts tirelessly and yet the observed facts lead nowhere. On

the other hand, it is possible to have the work of observation so controlled by conceptual

framework fixed in advance that the very things which are genuinely decisive in the problem

in hand and its solution, are completely overlooked. Everything is forced into the

predetermined conceptual and theoretical theme. The way, and the only way, to escape these

two evils, is sensitivity to the quality of a situation as a whole. In ordinary language, a

problem must be felt before it can be stated. If the unique quality of the situation is had

immediately, then there is something that regulates the selection and the weighing of observed

facts and their conceptual ordering.(John Dewey, 1938, pp.70f.)

Dilthey analysis of Erleben, as the core absential featurein philosophic discourse, as well as

Merleau-Pontys articulate process and Deweys situational feeling, which is still more or less

ignored in epistemological discussions centring around the Conceptuality of Non-Conceptuality (see Jung 20095), are the roots of Gendlins notion of felt sense or more

preciselyfelt sensing. Because the felt sense is not an entity, not an internal state, it is

generated, as Gendlin shows carefully at the end of his Process Model, a highly dynamic,

interactive and responsive process. However, I should not forget to mention the

interdisciplinary horizon that helped Gendlin create this concept as well as the practice of

Focusing going along with it. In the 1960ies, Gendlin participated in Rogers first time project

to find ways to measure psychotherapeutic progress. Gendlin contributed one unquestionable

characteristic of progress. This finding won him many prizes, a lot of attention and quotation,

and finally also let him develop the method of focusing. To the disappointment of

psychotherapists, Gendlins research could proof, that it was not a matter of the therapists

competence and school, but a certain way of the client relating (experiencing, erleben) to his

or her felt situation now, that leads to movement and further development. No change was

brought about through more analysing or more intense feeling of emotions (Gendlin, 19646).

The one factor that really seemed to matter was an awareness, a kind of referential closeness

to the present experienced situation, even if that was fuzzy, murky, at first quite unspeakable.

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M. Jung, J. Heilinger (Hg), Funktionen des Erlebens. Neue Perspektiven des qualitativenBewusstseins. Walter de Gruyter: Berlin 2009.6Gendlin, E.T. (1964). A theory of personality change. In P. Worchel & D. Byrne (eds.),Personality change, pp. 100-148. New York: John Wiley & Sons.


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Gendlin noticed: staying with this kind of murky feeling, (Gendlin 19617, 19638) developing

from there opens up connections and meanings, that affectthe experience one is talking

about: speakingfromthis not yet identifiable experiencing going on right now, affects this

very process. Even more, Gendlin noticed: this murky sense responds accurately to way it is

articulated. It closes down, feels more stuck and tense, or it moves aroundeven in the body

- , shift, opens up further, unfolds into pictures, situations, memories. These responsive shifts

can lead to measurable strong tension release9and together with thisnew ways of

experiencing the situation, or the issue, which gradually becomes clearer during the process.

New possibilities of action and communication can arise. This kind of responsive sense

Gendlin gave the famous name: felt sense and the dialogical kind of process that interacts

with it he called Focusing.

3. The Focusers attention: Felt Sensing

Focusing is a very misleading name. because it invites the idea of a kind of focused attention

we know from perception. But focusing does not mean to introspect and describe what is

there inside. Rather, it is far better to be explained with the words of Petitmengin and Bitpol,

as defocusing ofthe field of attention, that has also been called non-observational

awareness (Petitmengin, Bitpol, 2013). Both authors show, who Husserl already has become

very specific in characterizing phenomenological reduction, as giving access, not to the inner

world, but rather to the whole field of pure experiencebefore exclusive intentional focusing

has narrowed down the region of our full awareness. Phenomenological reduction, says

Husserl (Husserl, 2002, p.11), helps revealing the sides (or the margins) of our experience

that are overlooked as long as exclusive concern for objects prevails. On these lines,Petitmengin and Bitpol come up with their own characterisation, which can apply well to

Focusing far from being like a gaze on some object (be it focused or expanded), is

tantamount to (re) establish an intimate and close contact with what is to be explored (to wit

the field of lived experience) (Petitmengin & Bitbol, 2009). The metaphor of the sense of

touch (...) here replaces the metaphor of the sense of vision. (Petitmengin and Bitpol, 2013)

In Focusing this kind of attentive mode is practiced in a certain way, as it includes the

dimension of articulation. Very early on, already in the 60ies, Gendlin describes an

intertwined relation of thinking and feeling, which was a revolutionary conception in this

time. Damasio did something similar the 90s, emphasising then and today, how such a view is

still very much against-mainstream. Gendlin, in the 60es describes a continuous kind of

feeling, that is not identical with emotions and incorporates a vast sense of what had happened

and what is happening right now. Gendlin writes:

7Gendlin, E.T. (1961). Experiencing: A variable in the process of therapeutic change.American

Journal of Psychotherapy, 15(2), 233-245.8Gendlin, E.T. (1963, January). Process variables for psychotherapy research. Wisconsin

Psychiatric Institute Discussion Paper, 42.Madison: University of Wisconsin.9

Compare: Klein, M. H., Mathieu-Coughlan, P., Gendlin, E.T. & Kiesler, D. J. (1985). TheExperiencing Scales. In W. P. Pinsof & L. S. Greenberg (Eds.), The psychotherapeutic

process: A research handbook. New York: Guilford.


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Feeling is always a living texture of environmental interaction. (...) the flow of felt sense

implicitly contains the complex world we live in, the environment, our perceptions, the

context of all that has been done and said till now, what is being gotten at, the purpose, the

definitions, and a verygreat deal more. (1966, 45).

May be you want to take a moment and try to sense this kind of on-going felt sense

responding to what I am saying, manifesting in some kind of bodily sense right now, as an

interest, irritation, a fatigueas questions, thoughts, doubts or some kind of bodily

awareness. We are not trained to be aware of this constant on-going receptivity. Peirce writes:

It is extremely difficult to bring out attention to elements in experience which are continually

present. For we have nothing in experience with which to contrast them; and without contrast,

they cannot excite our attention... the result is that round-about devices have to be resorted to

in order to enable us to perceive what stares us in the face with a glare that, once noticed,

becomes almost oppressive with its insistency10.

4. Close Talking

The roundabout device, thatFocusing establishes, is not only to learn to defocus our field

of attention to become aware of experiential processes continually presentand thus most

difficult to notice, but also to try to articulate these. This again needs a certain training that I

want to call close talking. Very helpful for this process is a listener. Focusing is usually

done in a dyadic setting: the listener, by repeating what is said, helps to focus the attentiontoward something that is usually not in focus, because too present in a background-like way,

too fuzzy, too little an object (idea or emotion) to notice. By mirroring or saying back the

listener helps to holda referent-in-forming. In a daring analogy one could say, like on the

quantum-mechanic level, where a particle forms by being observed, what is being described

in Focusing forms as somethingby this very process of attending and speaking of it. This is

sharply to be contrasted from what we call construction. The speaking does not detach itself

from what is going on right now, by pursuing the conceptual or analytical implications of

what is said, however interesting that may be. Speaking from the experiential process means

to always go back and feel what has changed, attending to bodily response towhat has been

described. Speaking from it, as Gendlin says, constantly creates subtle experiential contrasts,

not as constructed or deconstructedbut because the feeling on this kind of level responds in

very precise and yet undeterminable ways. It shifts and changes in ways that cannot be

logically deduced, but only experienced. Even something that seems entirely somatic, like a

bolt in the neck, of pinch in the heart area or pressure in the stomach can step by step or

suddenly open up into meaningful incidents, clarifying our present situation by making more

meaningful what we felt in an unclear way. In this process something more intricate unfolds

than what we could or would have thought or said without listening/attending/feeling the felt-

sensing process going at the present moment.

10Quoted according to Dewey: Prefatory Remarks, in G.H. Mead, Philosophy of the

Present, Prometheus Books: Chicago, 2002, 33


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Responsive speaking, as I mentioned before, is in this way utterly different to determinative

speaking (categorizing). I would like also mentioning the importance of the friendliness in the

focusing process. What seems philosophically not much explored is friendliness as a

reflective mode enabling the unfolding of what we call self-insight. The friendliness is a kind

of attitudinal environment, I would like to say, in which this subtle and micro-genetic

sequence unfolds into a more conscious way of having it.

What, according to Peirce, glares us in the face concerning its insistency, in this way becomes

a resource for experiencing a felt situation in its rich connectedness to many more aspects, to

what Dilthey terms Lebenszusammenhnge. In this way Focusing cultivates the continuity

between feeling and thinking, the transitions between vaguely felt to more conscious ways of

experiencing and intending, valuing and being concerned.

A feeling, that in the beginning may only seem fuzzy and murky thus opens up in precise

aspects and correlations of a felt issue in its entanglement to many other situations, factors,

values, thoughts, that far outreaches the alphabet offered by the New Phenomenology of

Herman Schmitz that only accounts for narrowness of wideness. In Focusing on a felt-sense

vast alphabet of feeling opens up: one can feel empty boxes that hurt, knots, that push,

thick walls, that separate from aliveness, one feels the good feeling of not being alone, one

feels specific qualities of connectedness, of feels cutting pain, that is not bodily, one feels

the pressure of something grey..(...)

In this way the notion of the felt sense already anticipates in the 60ies what Ratcliffe criticises

in our days as a too simple juxtaposition of bodily feeling and emotional intentionality byintroducing Existential Feelings (2008). Ratcliffe notices that it is only through change that

these kinds of existential ground-feelings can come to awareness and become conscious. It is

Gendlins important contribution to think and show how awareness of this feeling-dimension

can also come about through a process that initializes change through articulation. The major

challenge his thinking faces it why this is so. Describing our feelings, which are processes in

themselves (and not internal states or entities), can come to be understood as activating

additional felt and experiential processes. In his first major work, Gendlin conceives of seven

functional relationshipsof experiencing and symbols (Gendlin, 1962). The first of these

relationships notices and conceives how feelingfunctionsin the coming of words. But words

also function in elicitating an experienced meaning. That is why we can explain or define

words in different ways, why we can say more or less (or more and more) about a concept, a

word. According to different experiential backgrounds, people can say very many different

things about the meaning of notions. Thus a word elicitates what Arne Naess calls a variable

depth of meaning (...). Gendlin adds, a word functions in calling forth the felt meaning

(Gendlin 1962, 101f.)

So when we articulate something, the felt meaningof the word interacts with the felt

meaning we try to explicate. Thereby a shift can happen that allows a fuzzy felt-sense to

unfold and become more differentiated by additional implicit (felt) aspects provided by ouruse of a phrase, contributing contrasts that enhance what we describe or help us to correct

what we said. The articulation clarifies the experiencing not by putting a label on it, but by


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allowing the feeling to unfold in ways that allows us to become aware of more and more of

what we feel and experience.

So Gendlinsphilosophy is training in understanding this process in a certain way. It is a

dead-end to thinkthis is the phrase that fitted, it represented correctly or it supplied aspects

and elements that where missing to clarify our feeling. The more promising way to think

about this process is: only after something unclear has been carried forwardin clarifying

ways, can we know what it was. Only after a feeling, a felt sense, an experience, a thought,

by being rendered symbolically, is actually carried forwardinto clarified meaning, can we

know what it was about. It is the occurring interaction of felt sensing and symbolizing, which

creates a meaning that can somatically and semantically unfold, so that we can experience and

feel further, and then again say more. The emphasis is on the interaction, on the process the

clearness is a result that is unforeseeable before the process. With this very very short hint at

the dynamic conception of language according to Gendlinsphilosophy of language, I want to

compare felt sense and somatic markers.

6. Felt Sense and Somatic Marker

What Gendlin depicts as a felt meaning or felt sensetoday seems rediscovered by

Damasio making a point to differentiate between emotion and feeling. Emotions, as Damasio

suggests, are not just the classical joy, anger, sadness etc. For Damasio Emotions are

complex bodily (bio-chemical, neuronal, organic, muscular) responsesthat help the

organism to lead it`s life.

Damasio writes: Emotions are aboutthe life in an organism, its body to be precise, and

their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life. (Damasio, 1991, 51).

Changes caused by emotions in the brain, in the biochemical homeostasis of the body, the

visceral and muscular states we can feel. And the changes, which these changes trigger, we

can feel. There is a complex happening auf resonance between Emotion, Feeling and Feeling

of the Feeling that Damasio describes as following:

We can feel our emotions consistently and we know we feel them. The fabric of our minds

and of our behaviour is woven around continuous cycles of emotions followed by feelings

that become known and beget new emotions, a running polyphony that underscores and

punctuates specific thoughts in our mind and actions in our behaviour. (Damasio, 1999, 43).

Feeling according to Damasio is the very threshold between being and conscious being. It is

this processual approach of transitions from feeling to consciousness that importantly relates

Damasios ands perspectives. It applies on a phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic level. The

conception of feeling does not know a rigid separation between unconscious, inattentive and

attentive feeling and from there to more conscious stateswhich, as Gendlinspractices and

philosophy demonstrates vividly, continues and is enhanced by the symbolization of feeling

and experiencing.According to Damasio, feeling is a kind of informative shadow of the cognitive process,

which contains further bodily information to be experienced and to be considered. Damasio


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writes about the constant co-happening of a cognitive and felt process, which he emphasizes

against the stream of dominant conceptions in the cognitive science:

Feeling is just as cognitive as any other perceptual image, and just as dependent on cerebral-

cortex processing as any other image. (...) Feeling let us mind the body, attentively, as during

an emotional state, or faintly, as during a background state. They let us mind the body live,

when they give us perceptual images of the body, or rebroadcast, when they give us

recalled images of the body state appropriate to certain circumstances, in as if feelings.

Feelings offer us a glimpse of what goes on in our flesh, as a momentary image of that flesh

in juxtaposed to the images of other objects and situations; in so doing, feelings modify our

comprehensive notion of those other objects and situations. (Damasio, 1994, 159).

Damasios powerful notion of minding the bodyexpresses, how in fine visceral and

musculoskeletal adjustments sit informative responses to a situation thatas cerebral patterns

echo cerebral patterns of thought, memories, decisions. He is well known in showing the

importance of these functions in situations of decision. When the felt feed back loops are

damaged, it becomes hardly possible to navigate through the boundlessness of all things to be

considered, to be able to live efficiently on a daily basis. This is where Damasios somatic

marker comes into play. In most situations in which something has to be decided, the

components needing consideration unfold in extraordinary speed, even if only like glimpses,

not completely thought through, so fast, that not everything can be considered. In this process

Damasio discovers the role of what he calls gut feeling (Damasio, 1994, 173). The

possibility of which he conceives as a kind of automated signal, which formed out of situative

trainings, learned sequences, punishment and reward-procedures as embodied patterns.

Somatic Markers contain complex information and they change with further livingexperience. He writes Somatic markers are thus acquired by experience, under the control of

an internal preference system and under the influence of an external set of circumstances

which include not only entities and events with which the organism must interact, but also

social conventions and ethical rules (Damasio, 1994, 179). As they are products of

situational learning, the programmed patterns are individually different. They support

decision-processes concerning the plenitude of scenarios, concerns, risks, innumerable

thought, which need considering, by reducing the effort to go through all these details:

because they provide an automated detection of the scenario components which are more

likely to be relevant. (1994,175).

Although Damasio describes the intricate kind of relations and complex information

contained by these markers, his language for the signal effect emphasises a dual character:

happy orsad feeling, danger or go for it, painful, not-painful. Noticing this dual

kind of responsethis kind of definite answer from the body is what the popularizing

literature to somatic markers further propagates and which you find transformed in seminars

and exercises for managers etc. (Maya Storch, Weiterbildung UZH).

Like the somatic marker, the felt sensedenotes a mesh of preferences, circumstances,

events, habits, conventions and rules. But the big difference is, that Gendlin conceives anddemonstrates the possibility of a responsive referring to this complex-unclear sense. He also

shows that that this kind of sensebecomes a referent only through the act of referring to it,


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staying with it, interacting with it, not just acting (deciding) from it. In attending to this felt

mesh, which lets us experience a situation or the challenge of deciding in a situation in a

certain way, its connections to other situations open an up and make new ways of deciding

and approaching available:

From a felt sense we can obtain much more intricate and better information about the

situation, and how we are living in it. The great amount of pre-separated information I

mentioned earlier is implicit in the felt sense. But at first, when a felt sense comes, it is an

unclear, murky sense, and seems quite unpromising. One does not know what it is one feels.

To spend time attending to such a concrete sense of something, without quite knowing what it

is, that is what we call focusing (1991, 258)11.

One could put it this way: what Damasio describes as the complex conditions of the

possibilities of a somatic marker(all the situations in which it forms) manifesting in dual

possibilities, are potential information which can open up by attending the felt sense. What

thereby opens up is a more conscious way of understanding ourselves in our situation. In

other words, what Damasio conceives as the complex conditions of the possibility of somatic

markers concerning the distinctness of their signalling, (being all the situations that

participated forming these markers), Gendlin demonstrates as a gradually accessible content,

which has the potential to unfold step by step into a more conscious way of being in the

situation12.

Thereby we can become aware of an arena of further differentiations and connections. By

becoming more conscious by realizing how this somatic signal has to do with a mesh of

situations that play out inthis situation, we better understand why we feel and think the waywe do. Furthermore: feeling in this gradually understanding way changes the feeling we feel.

Thus a space is created in which experiencing functions withoutdetermining our spectrum of

possible actions and reactions. Responding to the somatic sense in this careful ways allows a

movement that carries old patterns and what is learned forward so that they need not stay the

same. Finally, understanding and cultivating the intricacy of our own experiencing in this way

enables a more unfolding interaction with the complexity of others. This is the ethical edge of

Focusing and its philosophy: opening up social awareness for the complexity of todays living

that needs responsive skills, granting individuals a space (and thereby the freedom) to make

sense.

11From Emotion in Therapy.12As I quoted above: we must take care not to forget that one can specify highly

detailed aspects of (this kind of feeling), each of which can be referred to veryspecifically by our attention, each of which can be employed to give rise to very many

specific meanings. (Gendlin, 1962, 14f.)

Somatic_Semantic Shifting

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