Shona's Response to Lavender and our Class Synthesis

[Anonymous]

#655

Lavender elucidated Gendlin’s ideas on several different levels which may take us a step further in understanding what felt sense is and as she puts it “what it is not”. In this reading I realized again the degree to which felt sense may appear as an elusive term, as no one can predict, diagnose or categorize with any certainty another person’s sense of anything. Rather, this work offers a path of discovery; as it has been presented and discussed thus far by Professor Perl in terms of the unique relationship between embodied knowledge and the compositional process, and in Grendlin’s depiction of the wide open spaces for exercising language and possibilities for fresh thought and new knowing and meaning-making.

Several of Lavender’s distinctions struck me as useful for understanding Grendlin’s conceptions:

1) Interbeing: intra-action of human beings with other living beings, objects and situations. Rather than the fixed, internal containment of one human interacting with something outside itself.
2) Beyond the borders of self: Grendlin’s move to understand interbeing as our capacity for traversing the boundaries of our physical body. Felt sense carried beyond the borders of one physical body extrapolates the scope of this knowledge from within oneself, to an understanding of how one relates with all else.
3) Sea of language: with this interbeing sensibility in mind, language potential greater horizons in composition arise as a writer may create meaningfully by animating a far more expansive arena of expression. Therefore the confines of language are superseded with this understanding of interbeing.
4) Constellation: Lavender’s apt use of this word in the second article to impress upon the reader the idea that felt sense again is an assemblage of knowledge pieces, rather than one thing over or against another- it is not just this one aspect, yet, this aspect is also a part of it (ie; it is not only physical, but the physical is a part of it)
Such is the nature of a sense of anything – it is a sense. The seemingly non-definitive knowledge, yet the course toward understanding what this sense IS creates the expansion of meaning-making space within and about oneself.
Here is a synthesis of our classmates responses:
Hillarie
Hillarie Discusses what she terms the “false sensing” perpetrated by a dualism between mind and body, and that this may be a result of our being “too close to them to be able to perceive them”. She notes this false sensing relates with Lavender’s statement that that “the content [of felt sense] may be vague at first,” and thus difficult to conceptualize as real and perceptible.

As a way of navigating the meaning of the term interbeing, Hillarie pondered notions of “living-in the world, and living-with others” Further, she wonders whether the hyphenation in the term inter-being may privilege the preposition in a particular fashion and what the purpose of this might be?
Sean
Sean remarks “I guess I feel like felt sense names something that is already central for me. So, why am I impatient with more theory about it?”
He may have unknowingly offered a depiction of his own felt sense which occurred during his composition of this response, when he notes his strong feelings of impatience and disconnection from this work in a theoretical presentation. These were the sensations he undoubtedly intuited when he composed his response, whether he articulated them actively or passively in his own experience with the reading.
Sean did not extract a great deal of further elucidation on felt sense from Lavender’s articles, beyond what he has already apprehended from Professor Perl’s work.
Impatience seems an apt description of felt sense which influences the clarity and attention Sean exerts in his teaching and scholarship, which is clearly motivated by a strong commitment to the quality of both.
Sarah
Like Sean, Sarah was able to get more understanding of felt sense through Professor Perl’s explanation than from the Lavender pieces. However, in her difficulty with finding a concrete explication in Lavender’s work, Sarah observed a similar mechanism in the task of teaching writing to ESL students. As a part of her training, she was required to take a course in grammar, a process and skill which had become innate to her as someone who had used grammar for the entirety of her life. The ability to teach an innate, or internally felt process such as grammar relates with her understanding of how one might decipher what exactly is meant by felt sense as she says, “Having never really put words to the actual process of writing feels a lot like writing about felt sense.”
Robert
Robert explains his personal experience of felt sense in composition: “For the moment when I have the Felt Sense experience, I hold my breath and I try not to think. I know, without knowing in the words in my head, that once the words flood back into my mind, I’ll have lost the moment, the temporary understanding that I’ve gleamed.”
Robert’s recollection of this felt sense mechanism was sparked by Sill’s notion of “global perception” and the collection of the whole of all experience as one which characterizes this felt sense intuition.
Robert ponders how his work with teaching students to infuse their sense of self into the scholarly work at hand, in the discovery process of “voice” may connect with felt sense or as he puts it felt sense “those uber moments of felt sense, those get it moments. I think of those moments of perfect voice, a voice so pure it can’t be communicated, like Alanis Morissette at the end of Dogma.”
Alexis
Sills notion of “global perception” also struck a chord with Alexis who relates this to what she calls ‘“intuition,’ which is itself something I describe as an explanatory function rather than a function of its own.” However, she notes that using the term intuition to explain an ostensibly unexplainable entity may be a less functional way of terming that “sensing it all” notion described in the Lavender piece.This meaning making mechanism makes a more apt presentation for the classroom than the limited notion of “trusting your gut” as she puts it.
Alexis reflects on the term “interbeing” in a theoretical sense as it pertains to the sociopolitical relationship between citizen and government or the public at large. She suggests the invocation of interbeing in the study of “violence that is done to the aggressor by the act and encouragement of aggression”. Alexis correlates this with composition in her inquiry into “rhetoric that separates aggressor-act-victim into neat categories when our conversations suggest, in other contexts, that mutual exclusion, in the social world, is a fiction.”
Noting Lavender’s depiction of a focusing therapy session at the end of “Interaction First” Alexis observed the subtle correlation between this focusing session and the idea of “interbeing” in terms of how “mutual resonance of ‘manageable—unmanageable’ enabled the therapist to share the burden, through language/meaning, of a physical-emotional weight—something that would be harder to describe and defend if she’d tried to found such a claim on a common subject/object duality”
Further, Alexis extrapolates this into an inquiry on whether “interbeing” in the theoretical sense, could supplant the typical social science researching discipline, as a phenomenological tool that might offer more depth of understanding how “the present is being informed “freshly” by these resonances, experiences, meanings, and so on, all holistically shared.”

[Sondra Perl]

#676

Great synopsis. Thanks, Shona!

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