NancyLebovitz comments on Teaching Introspection - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
This reminds me of something that happened in my early years of teaching mind hacking: I noticed that some people were way better at applying the techniques than others, and then began discovering that it was a function of lower-level introspection skills I didn't yet know how to teach. (For example, some people were just better at "shutting up and listening" or not adding interpretations onto their experiences.)
I certainly wish I had technology that specific: what I have now are mostly mnemonics, rules of thumb, and individual coaching feedback. Objective measures are particularly hard to come by, though I suppose I have a couple of them.
Gendlin's Focusing-- taking time to feel what comes to mind, then finding satisfying words to describe it, strikes me as quite powerful.
Interesting. That's the Litany of Gendlin Gendlin, isn't it? His Wikipedia page about levels of knowing sounds a heck of a lot like some of what I've been teaching.
The wikipedia description of "focusing" sounds like a subset of what I teach with respect to RMI, since it describes only a "felt" sense, and SEEDs usually involve more than just a feeling. Still, I'll agree with the part that describes there being a "something" that people do that is externally observable. I can certainly tell by a person's voice tone, and I've learned to do it from word choices as well, so that I can read what someone emails me or posts on a forum and tell whether they're doing it or not.
I'm definitely going to check out some of his work, as it sounds like there's overlap and perhaps he's found some things I missed. It also always helps to have other people's books I can recommend, instead of having to figure out how to write them myself. ;-)
Gendlin's Thinking at the Edge takes Focusing into cognitive work.