**\#️⃣ Tags:** #Person #Psychology ![[Eugene Gendlin.png|280]] --- Eugene Gendlin was a philosopher and psychologist whose work centred on the relationship between conceptual thinking and bodily experience. While working and researching alongside Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago, Gendlin realised an important insight on what makes therapy successful—the clients who really saw transformation weren't necessarily the ones who analysed their experience, they were the ones who could drop the need to analyse in favour of looking inward to something they were feeling, but couldn't quite name (see: [[Transformation takes place when we can give up knowing for experiencing]]). That's what led him to develop the Focusing method. He taught people to pause and sense into their bodies, to notice the fuzzy, hard-to-describe feelings that carry meaning. "What's the feel of this whole thing?" he might ask. And in that gentle invitation, something would often shift. Gendlin believed we carry knowing in our bodies that runs deeper than what we can easily put into words—what he called the "[[The way we experience ourselves is through the Felt Sense|Felt Sense]]"—that whole murky bodily awareness of a situation or problem. What I like most about Gendlin is he didn't develop some method that was theoretical and abstract in nature, and therefore disconnected from reality. He saw how we get stuck when we try to think our way through everything, and so the method instead grew organically from watching real people struggle, transform and heal. He also didn't position himself as the expert with all the answers—he instead trusted that people already know, with the intelligence and wisdom of their being—what they need for their next steps in life. # Library - [[Focusing by Eugene Gendlin]]