Lynn Preston - “The feeling of knowing“

Synopsis:
In an interview with Lore Korbei in 1994, Gene Gendlin recounted the story of how his family escaped the Nazis when he was a young boy:
“Our first effort had to be successful immediately. In Cologne someone was selling an address in Belgium. My father took me with him to "the address.” There, my father went into a room with a man. When he came out, he was pale and said: "Let's go." He explained that he could not trust this man. He said his feeling had said "no" to him. We were in a strange city without any way out. We had put all our hopes on "the address," and now this hope was destroyed, only because of what he had “felt."
“I was surprised then and often asked myself later, what kind of feeling tells you something? I tried to find such a feeling within myself but couldn’t. But the fact that I started to look for it had its effect in the end. When I was asked how I could explain Focusing, remembered these circumstances.”
Years later, when Eugene Gendlin was a young philosophy student, he was asked what philosophers he wanted to study. He said it wasn’t the great philosophers he wanted to explore, but “the larger realm at the edge of thinking” from where they got their ideas.

This “edge of thinking,” which Gene later called the felt sense, was a lifelong mesmerizing pursuit for him. It held the power not only to generate new ideas, but to point one in the direction of a whole new way of entering the thinking process. It opened up a kind of knowing that comes to us through tuning into what is just beneath the words and thoughts of the known.

In this workshop presentation we will enter into our own experience of the kind of feeling that can tell us something. We will do this through presentation, discussion and brief experiential exercises. Together we will explore how the feeling of knowing can become a foundation for therapeutic unfolding.

Bio:
Lynn Preston, MA, MS, LP, a Focusing-oriented relational psychotherapist, teacher and
supervisor based in New York City. She has written and presented internationally on the
integration of Focusing and relational psychoanalysis. She has an abiding interest in the
exploration of the relationship between philosophy, theory and practice.