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2-DAY INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOPS
in Oakland/Berkeley, California
or
as long distance study courses via phone and web support
scheduled upon request
FREE INDIVIDUAL 20 MINUTES PHONE CONSULTATION
to help you know more about TAE and this workshop in relationship to your
needs. Contact us.
Cost:
$250 by sending a deposit at least 2 weeks before the start of the workshop,
or $300 thereafter. How to register.
ABOUT
THINKING AT THE EDGE:
Thinking at the Edge (TAE) is the second practice
– after Focusing – to develop from the Philosophy
of the Implicit of Eugene Gendlin.
TAE helps us spend time with the unclear and
yet demanding sense of a knowing which needs our telling and
our sharing with the world.
Through a series of carefully designed steps,
TAE helps us position our thinking at the center of those most
powerful experiences for which language stalls and seems to abandon
us – there where we have no words yet, but a definite sense of richness,
well-seasoned by our living.
Gendlin tells us those are the fertile grounds
of thinking where we can contribute something new to our institutions,
relations, or projects.
The urgency of this historical moment
and the economic, environmental, human and political crisis that we face,
call for radically new responses and need the full creativity
and intelligence of each of us.
TAE will give us the courage and the tools to
bring the intimacy of our thinking into the public domain, enabling
us to share our wisdom.
By grounding our thinking in our own personal
experience and, from this rich intricacy, finding
a way to speak into a context that we inhabit and care for (our
family, our community of worship, our colleagues at work, our students
etc.) we will be contributing to building a more humane and democratic
world. The TAE process and the supportive partnerships that we
form to develop our TAE project help us become more resilient in standing
up against even subtle authoritarianism, in a world where externally produced
models are often imposed on people without our consent or consultation.
TAE helps us recognize that it is precisely
when we give full voice to the uniqueness of our own experience that we
contribute the most to our collective understanding and humanity.
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WHAT IS THINKING AT
THE EDGE FOR?
Have you been carrying with you a precious sense
of a knowing, yearning for enough quiet time to turn to it, nurture
it, and listen?
Have you been teaching or working on a project
for a long time, and feel there is more to it than the by now
well-rehearsed things you have been able to say and share? Are you
wanting to connect freshly to what is beginning to feel stale, but carries
your caring and your knowing out into the world?
Are you launching a new venture, feeling
ready for the change but needing to gather your knowing as you enter into
this new territory? Are you needing to know what you know so that you
can stand assured in yourself, and communicate effectively to others?
Have you been involved in a community project,
or an organization, or some endeavor that you consider
unique? Have you been wanting to pass on what you have
learned, so that others can benefit from your experience, rather than
having to start from scratch with no support or guidelines, like you did?
Do you sense your wisdom in an area of your
life that is undervalued by our culture? Do you sense your
ready-ness to assert your knowing there?
Have you had an experience that has touched
you deeply and yet you have not been able to find the words to
communicate it to others? You may hesitate to put it into words for fear
of banalizing its power and magic, or for fear of not being taken seriously
or understood. Yet that experience feeds you, it gives you strength,
and it has become a touchstone, a kind of secret resource to which you
return over and over. Can you trust the process of coming to
language enough to find your own words, words that touch that place in
you and reach out to others, connecting?
Have you been working in a field where un-spoken
embodied knowledge is primary (i.e. body-work, dance, mothering,
farming) and feel the need to articulate some of that knowing through
words?
Are you writing a dissertation, or a book, or
a manual and are tired of borrowing concepts from the recognized
authorities of your discipline, trying to fit your material into their
ideas and frameworks? Are you ready to develop at least one or two concepts
that you can call your own, and that come directly out of your own research?
If any of the above resonates with you, TAE
will help you unfold your project in a supportive and nurturing environment.
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TAE INTRODUCTORY
WORKSHOP:
This is a light and playful introduction to the TAE
process. We will begin to explore various steps and the TAE partnership,
so as to taste the process and prepare us for a more challenging project.
Prerequisites: None.
No Focusing experience needed, but welcomed.
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TAE WORKSHOP PHASE 1:
Far from reducing or limiting what one implicitly
lives and wants to say, a fresh statement is physically a further development
of what one senses or means to say. Then to write down and read
back what is said, can engender still further living. –Eugene
Gendlin
In this workshop you will be given an overview
of the TAE process, which consists of 14 carefully designed experiential
and theoretical steps, and you will be guided
through the first 5 steps of the process. To maximize learning,
we have found that it is important to come to the workshop with
a sense of a project that you would like to develop, so that
you will apply the steps to your own material and learn from the inside-out
– nurturing your own process with each of the steps.
This first phase is designed to position our
thinking at the central creative core of what we would like to communicate,
helping us recognize those spots where our words falter because what we
want to say does not fit into the existing logic or common discourse.
We begin to play with language as we
are guided to find fresh expressions and words that protect the originality
of our precious kernel. We learn to resist assimilating what we
know into pre-existing ideas or be silenced by the fear that more important
and well-known people have already said what we wanted to say!
Our way with language will be mediated by supportive
partnerships that will help us move from deeply sensing, to speaking
and writing, and back again into sensing. This way of thinking is rooted
in sensing into the whole of our organism – connecting to the feeling
of our experiences and the felt-meaning of what we want to communicate.
Engaging in this kind of organismic thinking while
being fully supported by a caring, attentive, and non-intrusive partner
is for many a deeply healing experience.
You will leave the workshop with the ability
to carry this nurturing way of thinking into your daily life. You
will also leave with a deeper connection to your project and the ability
to return to it with the support of egalitarian TAE partnerships.
As in Focusing, you will benefit from practicing
TAE immediately. Each little step will carry your thinking forward in
unexpected ways and incite you to apply this way of thinking
and sensing to many situations.
Prerequisites:
Participants need to have a familiarity with the felt-sensing process
(Focusing) in order to be able to learn TAE. The more experienced in Focusing
you are, the more you will benefit from TAE. If you do not have Focusing
experience but would like to participate, you can do so by attending a
Level
1 Focusing workshop (see calendar on the side bar), or inquire with
us about one-to-one
tutorials.
To
register: Contact
us and send a non-refundable deposit of $100 to Francesca Castaldi
at Focusing Pathways. The workshop is limited to 8 participants,
so early registration is highly recommended.
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ABOUT
PHONE COURSES:
Phone courses consist of 5 two-hour meetings once a
week for each TAE phase (the meetings are of 2 hours for 4 people, 1 ½
hour for 2 people). You will be asked to pair up once a week with another
participant to develop your project between one class and the next. An
online forum will also be available to facilitate learning and communication
between workshop participants and myself.
The phone course is limited to a maximum of 4 participants
(2 minimum) to ensure high quality and individualized attention. To participate
in the phone course you need to have taken at least 36 hours of Focusing
training (3 levels), except for the Introductory Workshop where no experience
is needed.
Cost:
$250 per person per course with 4 to 3 participants, $300 per person with
2 participants.
Individual sessions are also available
at my individual sessions rates: $80 per hour if you book three or more
at the same time, or $100 per session.
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TAE WORKSHOP
PHASE 2:
How science renders living things is not a finding
but only a result of the model. Where we really stand is in the
open – in the endless possibilities of much greater intricacy than
any model. –Eugene Gendlin
In this workshop we use Focusing to enter into
the experiential intricacy of our project, coming back to the
precious kernel we have developed in Phase 1 and taking time to expand
it. We will find instances – times in which something occurred that
has to do with what we want to communicate, and we will look for the pattern
of each of instance. By looking for patterns, we become able to
re-enter our experience with the ability to ask more of it, so that a
process of finer and finer distinctions unfolds.
We will explore the Philosophy of the Implicit
by engaging in crossing – a technical term in Gendlin philosophy
that will help us find the internal connections between different instances.
This process will surprise us and delight us at the same time, because
it will help us say that which was so hard to say in the beginning. We
will be able to fully sense into the more-than-logical which
at first escaped us and held us tongue-tied: now, having strengthened
our sensing with many lived details, we can enter what did not fit into
the already made categories and let it unfold
slowly in all its complexity, giving it time to define its own newness.
We will be on our way to build our own model.
As we are the creator of the model, we can continually dip into the richness
of our experiencing and bring up our findings. The model
is open and we enrich it at every step.
At the end of this process we will
have grown much stronger in relation to what we wanted to communicate.
We will have the ability to hold with a sense of clarity what
went into making it just so, being able to pinpoint the essential
elements and dynamics of that which we care about. We will have
built a language that protects what we want to say from easy miss-understandings
and that instead enables us and others to ask more refined questions,
and dwell more deeply or create with more ease just that kind
of experience or constellation of dynamics or qualities that matter to
us.
This will be a point satisfaction, and for many a resting
place with TAE, having gained what you were looking for. Yet the TAE process
is so rich that often people find they need to go through the process
at least twice to harness the fullness of its power. Also we offer a third
phase of the process for those who want to go on building a more formal
model or theory (see below).
Prerequisites:
To participate in phase 2 you need to have taken phase 1 with me, or have
gone through the first five steps with another TAE instructor. If you
have studied TAE independently and have taken yourself through the first
5 steps, you may want to consult with me before registering.
To register:
Contact us
to let us know you are interested, and I will communicate to you the exact
dates. Also see above for information on phone courses.
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TAE WORKSHOP PHASE 3:
Applying any concept elicits an experiential feedback.
We can let our next step of thought come from this experiential feedback,
rather than only from the concept. –Eugene Gendlin
In phase 3 we will juxtapose logic to our felt-experience
and by so doing harness the power of both. At the end of this
process we will have closed your model (temporarily) in a rigorous manner,
having a theory that is both coherent and logical as well as experientially
rich and full of the humanity of our living. If you are interested
in phase 3 contact us.
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ABOUT
FRANCESCA AND TAE:
Francesca began studying TAE in 2002 when she attended
her first TAE workshop taught by Eugene Gendlin, Mary Hendricks, and Kye
Nelson. She has continued studying TAE through workshops offered
by the Focusing Institute and by Antheosophia, as well as through private
sessions with Kye Nelson.
Francesca connects to TAE from her practice of corpography:
writing with, for, and about the body. She also comes to TAE with a Ph.D.
in Dance History and Theory and her continuing research into what she
calls corporeality – the ways in which our corporeal being
is an ongoing performance and choreography, connecting our everyday living
with a felt-sense of history, memory, social formations, flights of fancy
and spirit, and more.
Her investigation of corporeality and her dedication
to corpography and TAE fit into a larger project of contributing
to build a person-centered as well as a community-centered democracy.
Francesca introduced TAE in Argentina in 2005 and in
Italy in 2010. In 2010 she was one of the organizers of the post-conference
on TAE and the Philosophy of the Implicit that followed the 22nd
International Focusing Conference in Pfzohelm-Hohenwart, Germany.
To learn more about Francesca click
here.
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THINKING
CIRCLE:
This is a space to nurture our creative and analytical
thinking through the practice of Thinking at the Edge. We will start
with a group attunement and check-in about our TAE projects. We
will then form TAE partnerships, and come back as a whole group before
the end of the meeting. Free and open to all who have taken
a TAE workshop.
I schedule the meetings upon request. We will meet for
2 hours in Oakland.
Contact us for more information.
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