The Power of Silent Listening

Since publishing the book Sensations I have been introduced to Dr Eugene Gendlin's approach called Focusing (see an earlier post about some aspects of Focusing). In Focusing we are looking for a bodily felt sense that is in the background of emotions and behaviors. If you are listening quietly to your body or maybe even have the good fortune someone guiding you into it, you will explore this whole world of bodily felt inner experiencing. Dr Gendlin's work operates on this level. I believe there are many connections between the Sensation Method's vital sensation and Focusing's felt sense.
An interesting point I want to bring up now is regarding hand gestures. If you read my book, you know that working with the Sensation Method we pay special attention to one's hand gestures. As Dr Sankaran noted, often, during the interview, when we encourage someone to enter the sensation level, they pause. They are silent for a while. Then.... as they want to tell us what they found there... they motion with their hands. No sound is leaving their lips - unpronounced words hover there without being born into a voiced utterance. This is the moment that is the birth of the implicit into explicit. The inner sensation, the bodily felt sense is being formed into an uttarable unit. In his book Focusing (on page 97) Gendlin gives an example of a golfer to describe what the felt sense is like. He says that when golfers sense that they are ready to swing is not something they ask consciously; they feel it in their body. It is a whole body experience that translates into the swing. Right before the swing it is a felt sense. A something that is an implicit unit within the person's inner experience, waiting to be expressed. In homeopathic inquiry we are always looking for the inner experience. We are waiting to hear from our clients reference to something important in their experience that can be explored to a deeper degree. We are at the "edge" of the known, the expressed, the discussed and the lived experience where it meets the unknown, the unexpressed, the un-discussed, the not-yet-lived aspects of the same. The "edge" is also an expression used by Gendlin. It describes very well the place of inquiry that is so familiar to us in Sensation Method inquiry. We do not have much use for the explored, the understood aspects of one's inner experience, we can only find meaningful and helpful hints for our growth and better understanding of ourselves in the unexplored territories. And the pivot point in finding that edge is in those few seconds and moments when the implicit is forming into an utterance. This is the quiet zone, the time for silent listening inward. If we further stretch these moments, we find those precious moments of bringing up the implicit is followed by the bodily expressions, in most instances of the therapeutic setting when clients are sittin down, these form hand gestures. They show us the energy of the implicit meaning. In the Sensation Method we view this level of "energy" as the level that is feeding the sensations, their expression is not yet formed but only having shape, color, direction... The body is capable of expressing it with gestures, while the mind, the words still cannot formulate. Once the body has expressed the energy of the implicit, the language, the mind catches up ... and after that hand gesture the words come.
The process does not stop here, we have a lot to do with those words... but that is another story.