Thursday 1 March 2012

What Can Meditation Teach us about Communication?



What Can Meditation Teach us about Communication?

(Or: Life with a Holiday Attitude!)
Surprising as it may seem, communication is not about using the right words at the right time. Communication is much more than this - it's about what goes on inside us when we interact with others.

While we're affected by what happens around us, it's the state of our own inner world that really defines our communication.

Since meditation and mindfulness is increasingly well-known, this month-following the UK's first Mindfulness at Work Conference-we explore one of the ways in which meditation and communication overlap.


 'Meditation' happens naturally  
It's a natural part of being human that, every now and then, we become aware of ourselves, uniquely in this very moment. We turn within, and check to see how the world looks and feels from our own, private perspective. Whatever we call it (and people have different words for this), it's something we all do. So what does it really mean to say we 'meditate'? And how can we be sure we're helping ourselves by doing it?  

What is meditation? 
'Meditation' usually means that we consciously give space to this natural impulse to pause and look within. The point is that in meditation, we're choosing to do this. Whatever approach we use to do it, we take a moment... moments ... minutes... the time we need to tune in, and pay attention to what's within us. 

Is meditation a 'working ground'? 
Sometimes people talk about meditation as a working ground-where we 'work on the mind with the mind'. We strive to become more focused, more mindful, more kind - we even strive to become more relaxed. But the idea of 'working' in meditation has its dangers. 

'Working' on our meditation implies that something needs to be worked upon; even that there's something wrong or lacking inside us; something that needs to be fixed. It may suggest we can tone up our embarrassing, flabby inner selves in much the same way as we tackle a work-out in the gym.  

When even relaxing is a chore 
This attitude springs from our efficient, competent, active self. Yet this mind-set has consequences. Sometimes, even the things we do to bring calm and well-being become something else to work at, to fit in, to do - or something to 'fail' at doing. 

If we're trying to relax, our ability to diagnose problems and drive outcomes are not the tools we need. In fact, they are the very tools we need to put down... No wonder people say they find it 'hard to relax'!     

Losing perspective in communication
The same is true in communication. A working attitude can cause difficulties. The impulse which sends us into solution mode may also get in the way. 

Before we've discovered what's going on more widely, we're making analyses and forming suggestions. Before we know what our feelings are telling us, or what our needs are, we're planning a solution. Instead of really listening to another person, our own ideas are spinning round our heads, and popping out of our mouths. When we do this, we communicate without having a full picture. That's when our words are least likely to land well.

Take a break! Have a holiday!
Meditation can improve both our well-being and our communication, because it gives us a way to include and accept all our inbuilt tendencies in a helpful way. 

The trick is to have a holiday attitude. What we need to do is to sit back - to listen, to watch, to sense, to feel - to be with whatever is there, just as it is.  By doing this, we gradually understand the conditions we need, uniquely and individually. We learn how to give time to ourselves, so that we can unfurl naturally into whatever our experience brings.

Enjoying what comes
This holiday attitude is worth cultivating! On holiday, we have space to meet what comes with interest and curiosity. This brings a natural kindness and warmth to our inner world. We're more organic, able to go with the flow; to open up to our experience as it unfolds around us - as it does, at every moment. 

And as we bring more gentleness and tolerance into our inner landscape, our communication changes too. 
  
On one hand, we communicate with ourselves in a different way. We're more able to welcome even the judgmental voices that come our way, telling us that we're 'doing it all wrong'. These voices have their own stories, their own reasons. On holiday, we have time to listen even to those. And when a critical voice is fully heard, it stops being critical. 

At the same time, we communicate less critically with others. 
When we can say, 'hello', fully, to whatever happens inside us - that's when we can say, 'hello', fully and effectively, to whatever goes on outside us. This is when meditation and communication truly blend. 

Tuesday 17 January 2012

How growth-direction happens

By Peter Kuklis (Viryakumara)

A personal account and reflections on my journey with Focusing


But how can I know the direction of my own growth and development? If I decide what growth to aim at, my decision springs from my feelings and attitudes, how I am now. When my friends hear my change-aim, they might say, “Yes he would choose that. That’s typical of him”. My own plan for my change will keep me basically unchanged. But no one else can decide for me, either. […] People decide to change according to their present values. [Let your body interpret your dreams, Gendlin]
Thus very caring people resolve to be even more caring. They tend to feel bad about whatever bit of self-assertion they posses and strive to eradicate that.
Already determined and organized people aspire to be even more effective and successful. This way they become bigger but of the same sort. Basically unchanged.

I came across this quote from Gendlin several years ago. I still remember the buzz and nervousness of the light-bulb switching moment in my head as I heard it. This is not what I’ve been taught at school, neither on any of the personal development courses I took. It runs quite contrary to all of what I’ve read, yet somehow feels right, natural and also true with my experience of Focusing. So is there another path that growth can take?

My upbringing background comes from sports where every bit of effort made is rewarded by growth. I studied to be an entrepreneur where effort and determination that I cultivated earlier came very handy. I definitely understood the value of single-mindedness and forward planning. Whether it was in my studies, work or sport I have been very to moderately successful in achieving what I wanted relying on directed effort and striving.

Naturally I brought the same mindset to my inner life. Having already dedicated many years to practising on a Buddhist path exerting effort and struggling towards awakening my understanding of how inner transformation happens and how to go about that transformation has turned the corner.

What I didn’t know, even though I had a very vague and murky sense of it, was that something of a very different order altogether was needed when it comes to relating to and transforming the inner life.

Why change?

Ever since I remember I have been pursuing the notion that I wasn’t ok. I couldn’t stand parts of myself and I wanted to be different. I didn’t want to experience lack of confidence, low self-esteem and lack of connection with others. I guess that I ascribed all of these to a weak part of myself and I would do anything to make them go. I wasn’t ok. I wanted to change. I wanted to be better.

So there wasn’t even much of a question for me to ponder about what way to change. It was going to be in the direction away from all those unwanted, embarrassing, unpleasant experiences - towards their right opposite. Buddhism provided me with a lofty image of what this ideal state would be. I was on a path and I put all my effort and skills into walking along it.
More difficulties were about to come.

How do we go about change?

Recently I came across an extended teaching on dealing with hindrances in meditation. It stipulates that if one has a predisposition to a particular ‘hindrance’, one will be the most likely to use a ‘remedy’ of the very same sort to counter it. Just like with someone that decided the direction of their growth from their present values, the hindrance and its remedy work on the same level. They will ultimately not make much of a difference, quite contrary.

If we are in the mind frame of restless-anxiety the ready available options for addressing it are likely to be of the sort-it-all-out, make-a-list kind.  Then we try our best to go though our lists and tick off the points, just to add more anxiety into our lives. If our hindrance is of the tired, inactive, sleepy sort we’ll be most prone just to sit with it.

In a similar way, the strategy that comes naturally to people with propensity to get overwhelmed with their experience is to ‘go into’ their difficult states in an attempt to deal with it. I’m one of them. I reckon that the people who find it difficult to engage with their experience will pursue the opposite path. They’ll tend to distance themselves even further from whatever is already present.

In this way, rather than helping ourselves out of the problem, we add to it. Just like the story about a man who found himself at the bottom of a pit, only to discover that his only tool in his handy toolkit was a shovel. Lacking perspective and already quite distressed he started to dig – digging himself even deeper.

A way out of this predicament is possible. Though it needs more understanding and a different tool.

Understanding ourselves - We are made of multiple ‘somethings’

So here we are, human beings composed internally of many different aspects, or voices, many different beings or ‘somethings’ as we call them in Focusing. Each one of these beings live in their own world and see everything outside of them from their own particular perspective (just as humans do). Each one of them has got its hopes, wishes, needs and fears and each one of them keeps on changing in time.
We, as heirs of this concoction of parts – sometimes also called life may recognize those particular voices and know these ‘somethings’ well. However, we are likely to have only a vague sense of who they are, or to know them only by their effect on us.

These aspects of ourselves know of each other, too. They have some sort of awareness of each other just as humans are aware of their close and distant family members, friends, acquaintances or neighbours. They can be in an amicable connection with each other, or lie in a dread of encountering each other (and anything on the scale in between).

What often happens is that one of those distinctive beings inside of us takes over the whole of ourselves (why this happens is another matter). When this happens, its particular view of the world becomes our view of the world, its hopes and fears become our most pressing hopes and fears. The way they would treat other parts of ourselves becomes the way we treat other parts of ourselves.
We identify the whole of ourselves with this particular aspect of us, in different words, we merge.

Moreover, we put our external and internal resources at the disposal of this part. We start acting upon its hopes, ideas and fears.

The sense of our growth-direction will come from this single aspect of ourselves, too. This part may have a very compelling vision, even an ideal towards which it wants us to develop. It may have a very sound reason to do that. Of course, it sounds very reasonable wanting to move away from selfishness or laziness and to be more caring or effective.

It sounds good. However, there is a catch! The part that we’ve merged with hasn’t brought more of our inner world on board with it. Right the opposite; somewhere in us there will be a vital part of our inner world that is going to feel under threat by this new development plan.
How can we know this is happening? Both of these two (or more) aspects of ourselves are now in conflict. And both of these aspects will let themselves be known to us and felt by us. We’ll hear an inner language of judgement or blame. Worlds like selfishness and laziness are good examples. We may hear ourselves speaking about throwing something out of ourselves. We are set on smoothing it out, transforming or purifying it, if you prefer. We may also have images and symbols of our inner life that convey a sense of conflict. We’ll feel anxiety, tension or their permutations in our body. And we may even have a clear notion of how all of this links to particular episodes in our own life.

So we set out to lead an inner war on an inner development front. It’s not difficult for this war eventually to turn into an entrenched one. We cherish the vision that one day we will be able to expel the enemy out of our territory.
I don’t believe that this kind of warfare could ever be won, even if the personal myth we follow suggests that it eventually will.

So how do we go about change in our life? How do we really change? Can we change by telling ourselves to be different from how we are? Can we really change into how we want to be?

Holistic growth

The body is a cosmic system rich in implications and directions beyond conception. In a life we develop only some of what we “are”.
A growth-direction is sensed with your body [Let your body interpret your dreams, Gendlin]

I believe that we may not actually know what next step is needed on our growth-path. However, we can still get a good sense of our growth-direction. We ‘only’ have to learn how to listen to ourselves without taking sides. There is something available in our wider experience that we can draw on. The key to listening without taking sides is to be present with whatever comes to us without merging with it.

This also requires us to change our understanding of our inner world. It may take time to develop the trust that anything that makes itself known to us in our inner world has a good wholesome reason to do that. No matter how it shows itself to us. 

The notion of ‘body’ in Focusing stretches far beyond the body that is enveloped by the skin. It is the body of our experience of the present moment that encompasses all our past experience and carries implications beyond our conception.

We can learn how to approach, and in time also to relate, to this rich cosmic system of all our known and implied aspects. If we can learn this way of being present with ourselves, listen and allow whatever needs to happen, it will manifest as a forward-moving step.

The result may be something that we would never be able to fathom merely by our logic. We would not be in position to orchestrate this kind of change by our mere will and effort. Somehow our bodies in themselves carry the wisdom of resolving the most tangled impasses. Somehow there is wisdom available to us on how to bridge opposing entrenched polarities inside us.

Presence

The key is to approach our inner lives from a vantage point where we don’t side with any of our multiple parts. That makes it possible to receive their various messages (using their felt sense in our bodies) without adding anything to their story or wanting them to be different. We receive them exactly as they are.

I find that there is an immense inherent kindness in listening to myself in this way. It has something to do with the willingness to give my full attention, and as much time as necessary, to whatever in me that is asking for it. With experience, I am learning to trust that I am able to keep anything company that comes up in my inner world. Be it a deep despair or the greatest overwhelm. Even parts claiming ‘what’s the point of this all’ are welcome. We can bear the unbearable in us, if we don’t merge with it.

I’m also learning how not to be tempted to act upon what I hear or feel. I’m learning how not to try to explain, justify, make it better, run away, give up or argue. I just listen.

And by listening, by just allowing what needs to be said or felt to be heard or sensed, something new and different emerges. A forward moving energy manifests. However, it may not give me the grand plan of how it is going to unfold, even though I may have sense of that. This process follows step by step.

"What is split off, not felt, remains the same. When it is felt, it changes. Most people don't know this. They think that by not permitting the feeling of their negative ways they make themselves good. On the contrary, that keeps these negatives static, the same from year to year. A few moments of feeling it in your body allows it to change. If there is in you something bad or sick or unsound, let it inwardly be, and breathe. That's the only way it can evolve and change into the form it needs." [Gendlin]

It knows what form it needs to take as its next step. You may not know it, even though you may think you know; and no one else in the world may know it either. We can support it to take the form it needs to take, but we cannot direct its change by our will alone.

We are not used to things changing through being gentle and kind, thinking that we must take decisive action or discipline ourselves with harsh methods. […] There has to be some kind of faith or trust in efficacy of gentle intentions to produce changes, for it doesn’t make rational sense that by being kind and patient, and by essentially doing less, we will transform in significant ways. We tend to prefer direct approaches to change, such as working hard on one thing or taking a prescribed course of training. [Unlearning meditation, Jason Siff]




Felt sense and growth-direction

When we listen in Focusing, we listen out for any signs of what may be calling for attention in our wide sphere of awareness. Very often it can be something that we would otherwise not notice. It may manifest itself with murky or unclear atmosphere around it. We may sense it somewhere in our body but have no words for it. Its presence and purpose may not be obvious, just implicitly felt.

I’ve learned that giving attention to those unclear, unspecific melanges in me allows them to get in focus. Their contours become clearer and their message may transpire or something else, something new, may emerge.

[…] our felt experiences come in the way they need to come, in the place and at the intensity that they need to be felt, in order to be met and to carry forward to what is next for them. […] any attempt to change our felt experience from the way it is will simply delay the process of carrying forward and life-forward change. [Focusing Tip#302, Ann Weiser Cornell]

Conclusion

I remember a recurring message from somewhere in my inner world that was pertained to the sense of my growth-direction. It sometimes came as an image and I often felt it in a form of a bodily sensed experience.

It started with me standing on firm ground. I then had a sense of an area of difficulty in my life. It was quite murky, vague and I felt a dreadful anxious sense if I went anywhere near it. Then a sudden jump, or a fly-over, appeared. I was able to bypass the difficulties altogether without engaging with them and I was transported to the higher ground where all was resolved and fine. I also had a sense telling me that there’s something about this image that is not possible, that things just don’t work like that.

I guess I set out to practice on my Buddhist path like that. I was wishing and hoping for a moment of transformation that would come with my next realization about myself. Maybe on my next retreat! (I am well aware that there are many different Buddhist traditions to the one that I trained up in. I guess that they may emphasize a gradual unfolding change (as in a paradigm of lotus) more than the paradigm of a path when it comes to growth direction.)

I find this image very symbolic of the whole attitude to growth that I adopted. I wanted to be somewhere else, not where I was just now. I didn’t have a way of engaging with what’s difficult other than trying to overcome it by will.
I find it interesting that I had an inner notion of this process and that it even came to me as an image. If I only knew what to do with its message!

I hope that I have learnt something from all of this. I guess that nowadays what I’m searching for when it comes to growth-direction is a holistic sense. It usually comes from my body. It is a sense of what’s needed next.
I give space to various thoughts, images and ideas about how I’d like to change or develop and I also give space to the feelings that come with them. Just waiting, giving space. I am not trying to implement any of that.
I pay attention especially if there is something in me asking for a radical change.
I pay attention especially if it involves an attempt to change something that I find difficult to be with. I try my best to listen to the part which is proposing the change. I know it has got its concerns and its hopes. I try my best to listen to the part of me that is under attack. It certainly needs it.

Naturally, I don’t have a clear idea of where and how is all of this going to go. Just a felt sense in the moment. There is often something in me that wants to know more and needs more certainty. And I remember to give it a kind listening ear.


Thursday 5 January 2012

Explorations in Focusing and Buddhism: 2. Can we trust our experience?

Forthcoming article:


Explorations in Focusing and Buddhism: 
2. Can we trust our experience?

Once we have discovered the depths and delights of Focusing, it can be difficult to answer the seemingly simple question, ‘What is Focusing?’ How can we sum up the subtlety and range that Focusing brings to our experience?  How to easily express what it involves? Quite possibly, we’d need to explain a whole new, revolutionary relationship with ourselves. There may also be dramatic changes in the way we interact and engage with the world ‘out there’. Outlining how Focusing does all that can be challenging. After all, the felt-sense is by definition vague, fuzzy and hard to describe. That’s the whole point. We’re talking about something which does not yet have words, and which doesn’t even exist in the fully-formed way we normally relate to things. 


Funnily enough, as a Focuser who is a Buddhist, I have the same problem twice over. Buddhism, like Focusing, also highlights the importance of our inner world, and offers practices (such as meditation) which leads us on a journey to discover the heart of who we are, or who we can be. Perhaps the same is true for anyone describing their chosen path; its difficult to do justice to something whose riches and significance affect our lives deeply. Yet Focusing and Buddhism share particular problems. Neither has an easily explicable doctrine (although both have a complex underpinning philosophy that defy your average cup of late-night cocoa); and above all, both are primarily about a process, or practice. This alone makes them hard to define. The chief content is our own, raw experience, the whole mysterious range of it; where we encounter – and learn to embrace –  the highs and lows of being all-too-human in this ‘more-than-human’ world.

The issue is even embedded in the very word, Buddhism. The Buddhist term for Buddhism is Dharma, which points again to the primacy process, as it means Path. At the same time, Dharma means Truth, as in the truths contained in that path, or the truths we discover as we traverse it. Once again, this begs the question: what is that path, and what is that truth?

Trusting our own experience
In one well-known Buddhist episode dating back almost 2500 years, the Buddha was asked just this question by a group known as the Kalamas. Then, as now, there were many teachers around, each offering different approaches. The Kalamas told the Buddha that they were confused about what to believe or which method to follow. Going by his title alone, they were asking the right person. ‘Buddha’ is an adjectival title, meaning, ‘someone who has woken up’. It describes a person who has awakened, or become fully aware (by implication, anyone can become a buddha). Here, as we will see, is an overlap with Focusing. Both are practices based on increasing our awareness, or attention, with the result that different parts of ourselves ‘wake up’, or come alive, as we practice.

In answer, the Buddha tells the Kalamas that they should test everything against their own experience. ‘When you know for yourselves…’ that a practice or approach leads to harm and suffering, then don’t do it. ‘When you know for yourselves… that something is wholesome’, and leads to ‘welfare and happiness’, then do it. According to this, the Buddha’s definition is wide and inclusive. Similarly, on another occasion he explains: ‘Whatever conduces to positivity, to freedom, ... to simplicity, to contentment, to individuality, to energy, to delight in the good – that is my teaching.’

Is there a real basis for trust?
While I love these descriptions, I’m aware they come with a slight problem. To the Kalamas, the Buddha also added that one way of determining what to do, or which path to follow, is to notice whether ‘wise people’ blame or praise those approaches. So we still need to find some basis for trusting experience – either our own, or that of someone we find ‘wise’. And if we look for positivity, happiness, freedom (and so on) as the basis for following a particular method, it again raises the question of to what extent we can trust ourselves to know that is where the practice will lead.

For example, if I were a susceptible teenager, I might be persuaded by cool-dude peers that taking drugs is about freedom, individuality and energy. And that may be true on one level; it’s just that the implications of drug-taking are disastrously more than that. Similarly, we might decide to trust our bodies to know what to eat, or to get enough sleep – only to find we’re munching chocolate over late night movies. So how do we know when to believe our experience? How can I know for certain that something leads towards ‘delight in the good’; towards greater life, love and wisdom? These questions often emerge when we are learning Focusing. How can we be sure we are in touch with a felt-sense? How do we know that a felt-shift is leading us towards more wholeness and happiness? Wouldn’t a bomber feel a felt-shift of happiness when he or she has successfully released a bomb? So what, if anything, can I rely on?

Finding a touchstone
Both Focusing and Buddhism offer answers. Each suggests that we look within at our experience, and find a touchstone there that we can learn to trust. In Buddhism, this touchstone is described as a type of wisdom that may come first through hearing about something, then reflecting on it, and finally, from ‘becoming’. This third ‘wisdom of becoming’ means the way we develop as people. It’s not so much about what we do on the surface, but about becoming different underneath, in ourselves. In Buddhism, this ‘becoming’ refers to the root experience of being human, where we know we are interconnected with, and part of, the whole universe, mysteriously neither separate from it, nor merged and identified with it.

One reason we come to trust this ‘wisdom of becoming’ is because we begin to notice changes, perhaps subtle at first, in how we are affected by people and things. This gradually affects everything about us – our thoughts, feelings, behaviours, attitudes, responses, impulses and so on. Then our trust in our practice grows. This trust brings with it a sense of meaning, purpose and direction. It’s firm ground to stand on. We know, increasingly and instinctively, where we fit within the universe; we feel our intrinsic belonging in a world which is not really other than us. It’s a kind of coming home to ourselves.

A key Focusing tenet is that because we instinctively feel what’s wrong, painful or not-wanted, we therefore also know the direction towards what is good, right and life-giving. This direction is implicit, held in our wider being or body as a sort of knowing. If we are able to listen out for it and to follow it, we naturally move towards growth and expansion. Focusing practice involves finding this sense of rightness over and over again. We look for a fit, a resonance, a freshness – we listen to that wide, though infinitely accurate, bodily-held response to a situation to discover what’s needed, to know what our next step may be.

In Focusing, trust in our experience grows as we discover how the felt-sense not only applies to our inner world, but implicitly knows and takes account of our wider situation and those around us. A felt-sense is our felt-response to the fact that we are utterly relational and interconnected. In this way, a felt-sense is never purely personal. It moves us naturally from a self-referential perspective into a transpersonal realm. As I see it, ‘if a felt-sense is right for me; it’s right for the world’; that distinction itself dissolves. Through regular Focusing, we learn to trust that sense of life direction and forward movement. It’s like discovering our own inner compass.

Awareness and presence
Whether meditating or Focusing, the key to these insights lies in our awareness or presence. When I am simply aware of what I contain and experience – when I am present with it – I begin to feel the extraordinary responsiveness of a living being (me) to my whole environment. Both practices throw into relief the way in which everything is constantly shifting; how the minute I interact with something, it changes and I change. Just by being present with what is here, we stumble upon the truth, so well-described in both Focusing and Buddhism, that everything follows a process; everything is in-process.

In Buddhism this is known as conditionality (or ‘dependent arising’ – pratityasamutpada). It means one thing follows another; events flow from each other, a result always follows from (is contained in) a cause. With awareness, we discover the freedom to create different causes, and experience different outcomes. In Focusing, Gendlin describes something similar in his ‘Philosophy of the Implicit’. He shows how one single moment ‘contains’ the past, present and future, in that are all implied and known in that moment in ‘a unique implicit intricacy’.

Change happens anyway
The idea here is that change happens anyway. Our inner path or journey is simply what follows when we choose to influence the direction of change. Exactly how that change happens is a major question within both Buddhism and Focusing. Buddhism has developed a complex array of answers, varying from ethical precepts, to study, to mantra and prayer, to many different types of meditation, based sometimes on quite different inner premises. In Focusing, as in some Buddhist approaches, we see change as something that happens when we can be present with (aware of) what is happening, without asking it to change. Presence itself is enough; just as in the presence of sunshine, moisture and oxygen, a plant grows naturally healthy.   

In a recent article, Gendlin was asked whether we can always trust this. ‘Is this process always moving toward the good?’ His reply is: ‘Definitely. It is always trustworthy.’ But this comes with a caution. Since this is a living process, it’s not something we can determine in advance. He adds: ‘What “trustworthy” means, though, depends here: it is your living forward, that it moves toward. It moves toward being able to breathe if you can’t breathe. It moves toward relaxing when you’re tense. … It moves toward more life. And yet—what that means varies.’

It varies, this movement towards life, because we are never the same person in the same situation (as Heraclitus said: you can never step into the same river twice). And perhaps here’s the key to how or why we can trust our experience. Trust grows with practice; with the safety to get it wrong, to experiment, to find what works for us. Gradually, we learn to feel, follow and trust our inner compass in every new landscape.

As a Buddhist-Focuser, my practice is to understand the natural order of things more fully. I may think (as a Buddhist) in terms of a dependently-arising flow of reality, or (as a Focuser) of living forward – and there are no doubt other equally relevant frameworks and approaches, which are meaningful to people in different traditions. However we frame it, the point for me is to experience it more completely – to gradually align myself with it. To be alive in the very moment to whatever is implied in that moment. Then, following that living forward energy becomes a natural, joyful and spontaneous response to living. Perhaps one day, the whole of life will feel like that. In the meantime, I’m happy to experience just tiny moments; those small, precious steps which Focusing, meditation – and just being alive – so gracefully grants me.


References:

Eugene T. Gendlin. 2011. Eugene T. Gendlin, founder of an innovative self-actualization technique with transformative potential, talks with Linda Heuman.’ In Tricyle Magazine. Fall 2011. http://www.focusing.org/spirituality/2011_sep_tricycle_interview_gendlin.pdf
http://www.tricycle.com/feature/focusing?page=0,0
Buddhist References: The Kalama Sutta (A.3:65); The Teaching in Brief to Gotami (A.8:53 (iv.280),  Vin ii.259); The ‘Three Wisdoms’ (e.g. Dīgha Nikāya sutta 33)
Heraclitus. Fragment 41; Quoted by Plato in Cratylus  See: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Heraclitus