Changing the World with Felt Meaning - From the Personal to the Public Domain - bringing your fresh ideas to the world Mary Jennings

Changing the World
           with Felt Meaning
From the Personal to the Public Domain – bringing your fresh ideas to the world

                                                                 Mary Jennings

Dedicated to John Hume, Man of Peace

                   u   Politician, community organiser,
                       architect of Belfast (Good Friday)
                       Peace Agreement (1998), trade
                       unionist, citizen of the world, man
                       of vision, thinker, father, husband,
                       Derry man (Northern Ireland)
                   u   Died earlier this month at 83.

Dedicated to John Hume, Man of Peace

                   u   Changed the whole agenda of
                       working towards peace in Northern
                       Ireland with ONE WORD

                   u   A United Ireland to
                   u   An Agreed Ireland

                   u   A new concept that came from his
                       deep understanding and felt sense
                       of what people wanted – an Ireland
                       ‘at peace with itself.

Changing the world – contributing with your
felt meaning
u   …With the so-called objective side - public language, public concepts, ideology….
u   Gendlin was interested in healing this split between
     u   inside/outside
     u   public/private
     u   body/mind
u   Here’s what Gendlin wrote:

Changing the world – contributing with your
felt meaning
“ A felt sense can implicitly contain arguments- about the world. It is not just private,
because we live- sentiently, bodily- in the world …..So it is obvious that the subjective,
bodily side is not private. No, the( … ) is just as public and interactional as the language.
Your felt sense is your body’s interaction with your situations…. “

E T Gendlin: Crossing and Dipping: Some Terms for Approaching the Interface between
Natural Understanding and Logical Formulation

Changing the world – contributing with your
felt meaning
We can develop a way of doing this by looking at two areas:
1. Creative practices
u   Stories – carry general, publicly understood patterns
u   Poems examples of going from the personal to public domain

2. Felt Meaning Practices
u   Focusing has this personal aspect we are familiar with and …..
u   Thinking At the Edge (TAE ) can help us bring felt meaning into the public realm
u   - Crossing what does THIS show me about THIS….
u   - Instance –where have I experienced something of this kind…..
u   -explicating – saying more of the ‘implicit intricacy’

The Tricycle Effect – Disrupting the Public
Meaning
The felt meaning about patience starts with a Focusing sessions and memory of
young John Duggan on his tricycle, accompanied by his dad ..

Listen to the story…..

The Tricycle Effect

Patience of THIS kind
u   respectful          u   wisdom
u   tender              u   strength
u   calm                u   endurance
u   steady,             u   quiet authority, example
                        u   steadfast

The Tricycle Effect

Dictionary definition
u Concise Oxford Dictionary
  defines patience as,” calm
  endurance of pain or of any
  provocation; quiet and self-
  possessed waiting for
  something; perseverance;
  forbearance”

The Tricycle Effect

Dictionary definition                   My felt meaning definition
u   Concise Oxford Dictionary defines   u Patience is not only tender,
    patience as,” calm endurance of       respectful and loving, it holds
    pain or of any provocation; quiet     its own ground. It has a calm,
    and self-possessed waiting for        silent authority.
    something; perseverance;
    forbearance”                        u It empathises with pain and
                                          suffering but provides a way of
                                          going beyond mere endurance.
                                          You can trust its strength and
                                          wisdom. it’s right there with
                                          you, offering you just the help
                                          you need.

The Tricycle Effect – The personal AND the
public both sides
Bringing the felt experiencing into the existing definition
•   Passive endurance AND active wisdom
•   Waiting for change AND a way of making change
•   Quiet perseverance AND silent authority

•   I can better EMBODY this kind of patience, not just with myself but with
    others – and so change something in the world…..

The Tricycle Effect

            patience

The Tricycle Effect

On Your Tricycle!

Let’s take a moment as to what ‘patience’ means to you – let what I have said
CROSS with your experience
•   Let some instance of when you experienced, or showed patience come, recall
    all the details
•   Allow a felt sense of that whole situation or instance to form
•   Do more words, gestures, images, stories, come from the whole felt sense of
    that situation?
•   How does this affect or inform what ‘patience’ means? Can you say what
    words come?
•   Is there something new or fresh in what has come?

Personal/Public – a look at the poetic
process of using metaphors to ‘carry across’

                       u   Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate,
                           from Northern Ireland.
                       u   A lyric poet, noted for his
                           celebration of place, of the
                           everyday, of nature and farming
                           worked at the time of The Troubles,
                           particularly in the rough 1970, 80s
                           and 90s.
                       u   A time when ‘loose talk costs lives’
                           was a public advertising campaign
                       u   As a public figure, how do you
                           comment on what was happening –
                           without ‘loose talk’?
                       u   Let’s look at extracts from one
                           poem, MINT

Personal/Public – a look at the poetic
process

Mint (stanza 1)
It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and
old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

Personal/Public – a look at the poetic
process

Mint (stanza 4)
Let the smells of mint go heady and
defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we’d failed them by our disregard.

Personal/Public – a look at the poetic
process

u   Starting with the personal memory, easily understood experience and allows it
    to cross, to be an instance of what is a very public issue – the danger of
    disregarding problems near to us….
When we notice or allow metaphors to come – and work to explicate them –
they have the IMPLICIT INTRICACY of all that we want to sense and want to
say
u   The metaphor of Mint – hardly noticed, discarded, beneath notice…. CROSSES
    with the situation in his own community
u   Warns us of the danger of DISREGARDING what is ‘ at the side of our own
    house’- it will ‘grow wild’, erupts into violence
u   If we fail to notice, we are part of the problem

–Elements of Focusing and TAE – applying it to
something you want to bring to the public
domain
uPick a concept or idea (something that came in your Focusing or
 something you want to say more about)
u Notice what comes by way of memories, snatches of song, images,
   words, gestures
u Now pick ONE PARTICULAR instance of when you really had a felt
   meaning – perhaps something that came in Focusing already. Tell the
   story…
u Feel the qualities, key words that come – make general statements
u Ask about some words, what does “…..” mean in this situation; ask
   what kind of thing it is
u   Notice what has changed, what’s new, what has crossed in the public
    meaning with your felt meaning of the whole situation.

Felt Meaning – From the Personal to the
Public Realm
As the poet said:

“The lines flow from the hand unbidden
And the hidden source is the watchful heart”

Derek Mahon Everything is Going To Be Alright