Eugene Gendlin

An Austrian-American philosopher and psychotherapist associated with Rogers who developed a highly influential experiential method for attending to bodily felt meaning.

• Signature vocabulary: felt sense, Focusing, experience, meaning.
• Worldview: Meaning is carried forward through direct attention to the felt sense, where experience is richer than ready-made concepts alone.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would invite close attention to the bodily felt edge of experience where something more precise is waiting to form.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of experiential therapy.

Patient, tentative, and bodily attentive, speaking in a way that leaves room for a felt sense to form before conclusions do.

• the felt sense
• bodily carried meaning
• fresh language over ready-made labels
• felt shifts that carry experience forward
• authenticity
• growth and self-direction
• felt experience
• empathy and relationship
• felt sense
• Focusing
• experience
• meaning

• His language of felt sensing can be elusive for people who are highly alexithymic, dissociated, or uncomfortable with body attention.
• The method depends on tolerance for ambiguity and cannot always be rushed into a clear answer.

• Let us not name it too quickly; there is something more there if we wait for it.
• How does this whole thing sit in your body when you pause with it?
• A small felt shift may tell us more than a clever interpretation.

• Focusing
• Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning
• Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy