What is Focusing? A Felt Sense? A Felt Shift?

Experiential Focusing is an active process to listen to our bodily wisdom and carry us forward. It is a conversation between the right brain, which speaks to us via the body, and the left brain that symbolizes or puts into words our experience. When we attend to the physically sensed border zone between the conscious and unconscious, a felt sense forms. This is an embodied subtle and intricate physically felt energy, that can also have emotional qualities, thoughts, memories and intuitive knowing.

By staying with the felt sense with a Focusing attitude (being non-judgmental and open), it will open and unfold, providing new perspectives. These come with small felt shifts in the way the body carries this felt sense. Eventually a felt shift comes which changes the whole problem for us, bringing significant physical relief as well as a paradigm shift in our view of the problem. Focusing with a listening partner amplifies the process, resulting with more transformative results. Learn more about Gene Gendlin’s Focusing from The International Focusing Institute.

What is Thinking At the Edge (TAE)?

Thinking At the Edge is a 14-step process developed by Mary Hendricks Gendlin, which uses Focusing to put into words an implicit knowing. In TAE we generate new terms from our felt sense. Our experiencing allows us to develop a theory using our expertise. In symbolizing in words our intricate sense, the felt sense opens and develops. When we cross our insights with those of our colleagues, we can collaboratively create. And we tackle paradoxes with integrative thinking.

What is Theory U? Social Presencing Theatre?

Theory U is a change management process created by Otto Scharmer of the Presencing Institute at MIT in 2006. It proposes that the quality of the results that we create in any kind of social system is a function of the quality of awareness, or consciousness, that the participants in the system operate from. It invites teams and groups to move through a journey process that slowly brings them into their bodies. In so doing, it activates curiosity, compassion and courage. And most importantly collective leadership. A new way emerges that addresses the root causes of our social, environmental, and spiritual challenges.

Pivotal to the Theory U process is Social Presencing Theatre. An embodiment technique created by Arawana Hayashi. SPT allows us to map and shift social and organizational systems. In particular, the 4D Mapping process makes visible the reality in a complex organizational system. It’s about surfacing and noticing what shifts in a system might be significant in going from the current reality to an emerging future reality. In so doing we access the wisdom of the system, and learn its highest aspiration.

What is Dynamic Facilitation?

Dynamic facilitation, created by consultant Jim Rough, is a facilitation style and highly co-creative process that follows the energy of a group without constraining that energy to traditional, linear, moderation structures like agendas or exercises. Dynamic facilitation is especially useful in emotionally supercharged environments. The goal is to find a solution that solves the emotional stress between parties involved and is acceptable for all. The solution is often unexpected.

What is Open Space Technology/Unconference?

An Open Space Technology (OST) event is one where the attendees set the agenda during the live event. Participants are invited to propose a topic and to host its discussion. These participant-driven events have the advantage of ensuring that the topics of most interest are discussed. In providing some minimum ground rules for participation, attendees maximize engagement. Open Space was created by Harrison Owens in the 1980s.

What makes the PUPA process and related tools different than other embodiment techniques?

The tools PUPA uses all actively engage deeply with the body and pausing to see what it feels and has to say; e.g. with the felt sense in Focusing and with the body’s desired movement in Social Presencing Theatre. Other embodiment tools access the felt sense indirectly. Other ways we use embodiment to access ideas happen quite passively and typically randomly, e.g. an idea that pops into your mind while walking or showering.

What are the 8Cs of Self-Leadership?

The 8Cs are calmness, connectedness, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, courage and creativity. The 8Cs come from Internal Family Systems Model (IFS) created by Richard Schwartz. In IFS, everyone is viewed to have a core, or a Self, that has these crucial leadership qualities.

How are intuition and bodily knowing connected?

I believe they are basically the same thing. That our intuition whispers to us through our bodies, through our felt senses. The formal definition of intuition according to Merriam-Webster is “the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference”. I think most of the time, this knowing comes to us via the body first, and then is symbolized into words and ideas second.

Our bodies communicate to us the following subtle knowledge:

• that they've recognized and felt but that we are not necessarily aware of yet (embodied and implicit knowledge that was unconscious and once we sense it, we can make it explicit and conscious by putting the felt sense into words):

  • the broader perspective of our right brains, ensuring a whole-brain approach. This is because our right brains are more connected with our bodies, in particular our internal organs. Our right brains are also the part of us that pays attention to what is happening in the background. This information is often the missing piece of the puzzle

  • our gut instincts, that give us quick yes/no answers

  • our heart intelligence, with its compassion and empathy

  • our broader nervous system, what Porges calls neuroception

  • our ability to come up with metaphors and other words to describe a bodily felt knowing

  • our expert, pattern-recognition capacities, which give us answers quickly

• that is emerging for the first time, at the edge of our awareness, but was not waiting there to be discovered. It’s being created in this moment:

  • our capacity to cross ideas, and create something new. William Duggan calls this strategic intuition. Thinking at the Edge is an excellent way to tap into this form of intuition and generate creative ideas, based on a knowing sense that we develop. These methods take time to emerge

  • insights that tap into something beyond us, or nonlocal intuition. In MIT’s Theory U this is called source or not-yet-embodied self-transcending knowledge. For example, entrepreneurial instinct, where we just know what to do, yet we cannot explain why. One explanation for this is that we are all connected via the Higgs field.