Eugene Gendlin Quotes

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it. —Eugene Gendlin

The bad feeling is the body knowing and pushing toward what good would be.

All the values we try to formulate are relative to the living process in us and should be measured against it.

Adopt a “split-level” approach to all instructions: On the one hand follow the instructions exactly, so that you can discover the experiences to which they point. On the other hand be sensitive to yourself and your own body. Assume that only sound expansive experiences are worth having. The moment doing it feels wrong in your body, stop following the instruction, and back up slightly. Stay there with your attention until you can sense exactly what is going wrong. These are very exact instructions for how not to follow instructions! And, of course, they apply to themselves, as well. In this way you will find your own body’s steps, either through the instructions, or through what is wrong with them.

It was American philosopher Eugene Gendlin who developed ways of working with embodied knowledge and the ‘philosophy of the implicit’, and who first coined the phrase ‘felt sense’ to mean the sense we have when we are accessing our ‘gut instinct’, the deeper part of ourselves, our ‘intuition’. That is what constellations enable access to.

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.’ – EUGENE GENDLIN

Adopt a “split-level” approach to all instructions: On the one hand follow the instructions exactly, so that you can discover the experiences to which they point. On the other hand be sensitive to yourself and your own body. Assume that only sound expansive experiences are worth having. The moment doing it feels wrong in your body, stop following the instruction, and back up slightly. Stay there with your attention until you can sense exactly what is going wrong. These are very exact instructions for how not to follow instructions! And, of course, they apply to themselves, as well. In this way you will find your own body’s steps, either through the instructions, or through what is wrong with them.

Chapter II shows how occurring and implying are more intricate than already specified in any patterns or concepts. What we bodily refer to comes before any specific forms. We are always already in a situation that we can bodily feel, even if we don’t know how to characterize it in words.