John,
if the mood strikes you, I'd love to know more about your experiences associated with the Goethean method in relation to accessing special needs......
This journal will be here and it says it has infinite patience!!!!!
Jeff
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Clarity in the field
For the sake of clarity, and before running us down several dark alleys, I would like to work on defining the issue that confronts me. At the moment I am not even sure if the whole thing is not a red herring, so this thread will definitely be thinking out loud.
I am writing about anthroposophical curative education that is informed by other work being developed in the professional field of offering additional support. Local politics and attitudes will determine what terminology is used, but that is an old journal that is fast asleep. I want to try to keep buzz words down to a minimum, so my explanations may veer too far into the abstract. Just tug at my coat-tails if that happens. It may be possible to lift the principle issues free of the context of curative education. I believe that would probably help weed out some distractions.
On the one hand, there are many useful and practical methods of assessment, which enable us to offer appropriate support to individuals with special needs.
On the other hand comes Goethean observation of the individual human being within its social and cultural habitat. Is this at odds with analytical approaches to assessment?
Not all the approaches are analytical in nature, but I suspect that the approach of phenomenological observation is at odds with the use of frameworks that are applied to individual assessment. For example, The Triad of Impairments is an approach to recognising possible autistic traits. If a person presents some of the listed issues, then it is likely that autism is a significant factor.
The aim of both hands is to understand, and to sensitively respond based on what is revealed in such understanding. There is nothing less than full respect for the individual as body, soul and spirit determined to realise unique potential in earthly existence.
The crux is the application of frameworks of reference to Goethean observation. Is there a clear issue here?
You showed that the first
You showed that the first hand is able to assess in ways that "enable us to offer appropriate support to the individual with special needs."
You said that the other hand has a way of observing the human being and asked if this way of observing is at odds with the first hands way of assessing."
The first hand uses an analytical approach, the second a phenomenological one. I'm assuming that you don't only see positive results coming from the first hand or where's the conflict....I'm assuming there is something you don't see coming from the second hand as well.
Your post brought me closer to what you are calling the "crux", John, but perhaps if you spoke from the crux a bit more, I'd say, "I'm now even closer!"
I'm wondering about "frameworks of reference to Goethean observation"....
Thanks much,
Jeff
Clouds of jargon
Thanks, Jeff, for persevering. I have, for the first time to translate into big world English from local terminology. Also the issue takes time to reveal itself clearly, and I am questioning my own grip on the Goethean method. It is not a catastrophic scenario, it is more a question of development and taking everything to a new level.
The reason that I am exploring this now is that the previous course, which lasted only a few weeks over 2 years has now been extended by a year and I wish to make a new start. The course has so far been relatively successful, yet ex-students are not always able to maintain or develop their observation skills in the years following graduation. This involves a number of other issues that do not need to be aired here. I am focussing on one principle aspect that may or may not be a factor.
The first hand - applying a framework of reference to observations: the example was the Traid of Impairments; another example would be a fourfold approach: physical, etheric, astral, ego. There are a whole range of these and they are relatively easy to learn once the principles are understood.
The second hand - Goethean phenomenological approach (it's just you) is more difficult to make fruitful as it seems to take most people so long to get it to light them up that they give up first. Potentially it leads to knowing in a very clear way how to support someone, but only after long experience. Ultimately it is a better approach in novel situations, and is a useful all-round skill as it is not specific to any one feature or combination of features.
Generally the learning observer observes and after observing, a framework of reference is selected to make a formative interpretation or analysis of observations. This means that pure observing is interrupted with a formed approach, such as the Triad where one is looking for specific signs. Further observations are categorised through the 'lens' of the Triad framework. With few exceptions, this takes place before the whole has revealed itself wholly.
Does this framed approach hinder the learning of Goethean observation? Observers may get caught up in questions of interpretation and understanding. The observing is sometimes even abandoned in favour of chasing up favoured questions that lead into abstract statements that are reproduced with little understanding of how to get deeper insights. Responses are then created out of 'tacit understanding' that appears almost instinctual at times. I am all for wise instinct when it includes self-awareness. Often this is not the case.
So, thinking again: is the learning of Goethean observation side by side with analytical observation counter productive?
touching the crux
Now I'm sixteen steps closer to the "crux" of which you speak, John.
This is what I got:
you are questioning your grip on the goethean method and you know that it takes time to reveal itself clearly. There is something regarding a new level that you are aware of and you feel ready to take it there. Although I wonder how your felt-sense responds to “ready” there.
And there is a question about the relationship between developing a goethean observation and enacting an analytical approach. You are wondering if acting interrupts the observing. Does it feel like the acting can come too soon? Like forcing a word into a poem before it naturally comes from cultivating the fluid sense of the poem’s action up to that point….As a therapist I am trying to observe the wholeness of my client but she just wants to be fixed. She wants a plan or a program to feel better. If I jump into her fear and start planning…I can lose the organically building felt-meaning of the situation that calls itself “her”….If I buy into her presumptions I lose the chance to let the meaning keep filling me in….If I try to enact a strategy that will “change” her I also can get lost…But action is being asked for…..How to act pragmatically without our action taking away our growing observation? Kind of like:
Can we speak from our bodily meanings without the speaking closing up the meaning? Can we find ways to use language so that it touches and open into and from the experiencing? As I try to understand my client’s particular way of suffering, I am aware that my interpretations can distance me from the “being with” of my observations….It helps me to remember that no matter what I explicate (a theory, a homework assignment, a technique, a practice) I can always refer to my body (not the mechanical mental picture we tend to call “body”) I can always lean back in my chair and shift my attention to that place where I start to know whole things…where I start to feel whole observations…I can gently let my attention rest there and say something like,
“All about Brad’s situation….All about that….” As I say “all” I can let that fill in with my sense of all that I’m knowing, wondering, liking, lovoing, worrying aobut…and I don’t have to clamp down on one explication..because I can let the meaning of the whole…be what I attend to…If I listen to brad only through one explication (mental picture, practice…)…I completely limit what the felt-sense is willing to give me about brad…So I try to act and suggest and help in a way that reminds me to go back into the sensed meaning that is always there doing it’s work (when I let it)…my form of psychotherapy is ultimately to help my client realize his or her constant opportunity to lean into their own bodily way of being….to see that his or her pain is a function of clamping down upon some particular explication of “self”…
I wonder what you are noticing about what you call “questioning” the method…What ever is in there doing that, I wonder what more it might want (need, have to, wish…) say…….I wonder what the qualities of “everything to a new level” might be like for you? I think you and I are sharing questions about process vs content….and I my hunch is that for each of us there is a certain kind of pain involved with this dynamic…lots of joy and intellectual curiosity too, of course! Thanks, John. Please keep exploring the “crux” outloud with me if you want….I’m very interested.
Jeff
Reflexivity
This is very helpful Jeff – thank you. Something else you wrote is relevant here: my experience is that our ongoing experiencing can absorb any schema/symbol/mental picture/conceptualization we bring to it. And our experiencing will respond in exact ways using the specific schema we bring into it and being changed by that schema via their particular interaction.
It is noticing that experiencing will respond in exact ways using the specific schema we bring into it which is my issue. Perhaps what I called ‘frameworks of reference’ are better represented as schemas. How to retain an open welcome mat without taking control: take off those muddy shoes; you won’t need your coat in here; what a nice new haircut; you look dreadful; we’ll have to take it apart to get it through there…
I decided to release the out there issue for the time being and look for the issue in here. If there is validity in outer perception it will be reflected and recognisable within. The same snark writhes wittily under observation. Some reflective writing unearthed internal sources of the questions about the two hands. Two issues have arisen and I am not quite sure how they fit with process vs content. Ploughing on may root out further treasures.
Firstly I discover that I perceive a gulf between analytical thinking and intuitive perception. Is this where lives the Guardian of the Threshold? Secondly, sources of violence and fear persist in me that undoubtedly colour my view of the intervention of schema based comprehension in the process of observation. The letting go and then sustaining the openness is really hard for me. I am ever ready to step forward with patterning moulds as containers for percepts. Once they are pressed into shape, it is hard graft to dissolve them into solvency again.
I have pressed hard on the sore spot that you noticed, Jeff. I have not eradicated violence from my soul, and so I bring its attendant instability into my actions. I cannot laugh it all off as tough love. My personal self-support system includes structured and conditioned schemas on which I am highly dependent. The grip of fear is unwilling to emancipate observation from reason for extended periods. Other learners may be radically different to me, but I assume they are also vulnerable in this area.
What is the healthy rhythmic balance between structured comprehension and the surrender to holistic observation? The wolf of comprehension often pounces in my thinking. I feel like Red Riding Hood blinking open-mouthed at bedridden Granny.
Can you still hear me, Jeff?
making PoF space for meaning
John, I'll start with the closing question of your beautiful post. I hear you well! Thanks for making these sounds..... What is the healthy rhythmic balance between structured comprehension and the surrender to holistic observation?
I’m thinking about a sea-saw. And balance. How there is one little point where it all happens, right? And what’s I’m thinking about how that point doesn’t do a darn thing but provide contact. Because of it the sea-saw can produce rhythm. Just the right point of contact. It’s still. It’s there. A point of contact that allows balance.
And so there’s your question about:
the healthy rhythmic balance between structured comprehension and the surrender to holistic observation
Is there a point that can be contacted between structuring and surrendering? It’s too easy and too quick to find conceptual “points” of balance. So where do we go? The only place I know to go is into your bodily sense of the whole situation; the very place you’ve been writing from.
Set these on the table of things you can feel the whole felt-sense of:
Say “all about the wolf-that-might-pounceing of intellect….”, let the whole felt-meaning of that form….say hello…..find what qualitative words that it says a bodily yes to (a pinching squirmingness, a hollow sad, a gripping around the stomache…) and then maybe just be with that….it may bring more of itself, it may open..it will show you what it wants next….for me often it simply wants to connect…..
In normal life when it comes it normally gets attacked by other parts….But in this process it has space to show up and just be….
If you are making bodily contact with this intuiting, the balance has begun.
Later, after this contact point has been lovingly cultivated…..the mind can be invited in to see what conceptual strands might carry this point forward; fresh words can be generated from this exact spot once it has been bodily allowed to be with you….
This is a truncated version of the way I use focusing…But the steps aren’t what matters. It’s the making contact with the felt-sense and letting it have center stage in whatever manner it needs……I’ve had a felt-sense that needed a week of me coming to it and letting it form before it trusted that I wouldn’t squash it with concepts upon arrival…then it opened up and showed me more of itself. That one had started as a subtle anxiety when picking up my daughter from school that had the qualities of a prickling swarm in my throat…..I acknowledged it(“hi there”) and stayed with it…..I then asked “what are you afraid will happen” into the middle of it….it opened (carried forward) and I realized (bodily knew) that I (it) was afraid I’d chosen her to the wrong school….I kept moving from there BUT only from IT, not from a schema….We want IT to be in charge of sorting the schemas…or asking for time to remain untouched….
You mention that “sore spot” and how you’ve pressed hard upon it. It could be very nice to find the qualities and pressing and let that open. As you continue making space for the part pressed...I imagine much will arise in regards to your question about balancing….
I typed this as I zig zagged between Shakespeare phone calls, so I imagine it might be unclear in the worst spots……..type back to me if you want…
Jeff
Blossoming Process Work
This is fascinating Jeff. I am following your description – and empathising to some extent – and recognising something that I have been actively doing somewhat dreamily for a while now. I am more familiar with Arnie Mindell’s language of Process Work but this does not matter greatly.
I will try to describe the what such processing feels like. I have conceptualised / imaginated / clothed this process in terms of a flower bud. I attend to the feeling or movement or image or sensation - often somatic sensation - as is described as Focusing a felt sense. How do I choose what to attend to? I don’t – it calls me to itself. Mindell calls this a flirt. So I flirt with what flirts with me and we become intimate. This feels like a loving warmth that causes the flirt to begin to blossom, opening itself up as words or further imagery: the bud becomes intricate flower. The flower fades once its message is received and the seeds do not sprout ‘true’ to the parent bloom. They are new and wise revelations. This is what I experience as living thinking.
I have done this process with the words and phrases that you picked out as significant in my previous posts and there has been considerable growth of understanding that I have not posted as it was transitional movement towards the flowerings that I wrote about. The knack seems to be to invite and welcome what is to come, and to guard it delicately. Sometimes the flowering happens in ‘real time’ and I can be with it throughout. More often than not, the process needs to be ‘lifted up’ while I get on with life. At some point it flirts at me and a matured plant emerges, with buds inviting me to open them. Alongside all this comes life and social interaction – and this website – and corroborating blossoms float in to be noticed, which offer a kind of synchrony of triangulation. When such synchronicity has happened I put the ideas that have formed themselves to work in life or writing, and observe if they fade into autumn or thrive into spring.
More on the original theme next time…
Wolf in Grandmother’s Nightcap
Jeff, you clearly have a full life! You suggested: Say “all about the wolf-that-might-pouncing of intellect….”. I want to link to what is currently developing from this PoF quote.
6-7{12}
Thinking is the element through which we take part in the universal cosmic process; feeling is that through which we can withdraw ourselves into the narrow confines of our own being. Our thinking links us to the world; our feeling leads us back into ourselves and thus makes us individuals.
The image of wolfy masquerading as the wise old woman is my creation in thinking that attempts to graphically represent an activity observed internally. If I go into the feeling, then I definitely relate this thread’s pilgrimage to personal context. If I go into dialogue with the image or with its father, I go into thinking which is as impersonal as I am able to allow it to be itself. The way of thinking shows that feelings contain living truths and if I monitor feelings that accompany the process it remains anchored in the personal.
I want to turn away from the feelings at this point because wolfy is a graphic schema of my own making. The main conscious reason for this choice is that I have learned to trust the way of the Greater Guardian towards the cosmos, having searched and found agreement with Steiner’s assertion that this is the healthy way for our time to approach the spirit realms. I am delighted to read your tale of your daughter, Jeff. She shows that we have evolved to increased ‘instinctual’ self-awareness. I also have personal evidence of this in myself and students 30 years my junior. Such anecdotes bring real experience to Steiner’s tale that humanity has crossed the threshold.
So the issue of two hands has transmuted itself into the approach of the wolf and the approach of the wise old woman. This graphic schema is looking good because it holds all the feelings that I struggled through to get to it. I can back-track to the earlier work, which shows that the journey of transmutation retains integrity. This may mean that it can be reproduced… The current imagery reveals the presence of impressions of much earlier conversations about Michael and the dragon. The context has not shifted in essence, only in graphic form. The way of Michael has evolved into the image of Granny, ill in bed. The way of the dragon has evolved into the hunger of the wolf.
Shall we get the woodcutter in to decapitate the wolf or can we roll back the story and find medicine for Granny? Red Riding Hood is the cosmic key of wonder, reverence, generosity, courage for facing the wolf, and love. So suppose Little Red does not tell wolfy about Granny’s indisposition, and leaves wolfy to range for food in its natural habitat? Red already has all Granny needs in her karmic basket of goodies. If she can get to Granny without wolfy jumping in bed first, then we shall receive Granny’s wisdom first hand. How shall we deal with wolfy? Will there be a natural role for a transformed wolf if the story runs in this way. I believe that such mythical consideration of images constitutes a real path of thinking as long as the integrity of the characters drives the storyline.
What do I feel in the body at this point? There is a more clearly defined ache just where the old confusion used to live. It feels recognised, softens again and shifts. It asks for patience for now, to engage again later…
You are a wonder, Jeff!
Next crossing point
Today I am learning that Gendlin's crossings have a family resemblance to the gesture in eurythmy of E as in HEY!
The current questioning process has shifted to a thread initiated by jennyren. There is a feeling of expansion with much less tension than yesterday.
Tomorrow I leave the comfort of my desk for a week. I will report back from any relevant developments on my return, but today is not over yet...
Common interest
Earlier, Jeff, you wrote: I think you and I are sharing questions about process vs content….
We have not really explored this. Would you like to lead into your area of intrigue?
There are questions about the content of consciousness. I would rather say that consciousness is the content of what is being thought about. Does your concern lie elsewhere, Jeff?