Approaching A Process Model experientially. Reading with Donata Schoeller.

A Process Model can turn into an experience. This amazing text allows to conceive creative exercises that make it come alive. Experientially you will understand more easily what the concepts convey. You will be able to think-with Eugene Gendlin.

This way of reading and exercising oneself through A Process Modell does several things at the same time: it deepens our understanding for Gendlin’s process-philosophy. It grants us new words to bring Focusing into the world. It opens up new possibilities for our Focusing- and TAE-practice. And it conveys surprising perspectives into the intricacy of our own feeling-, thinking-, languaging-capacities.

During each session we will do experiential exercises to feel and “have" what is explicated in the text, and of course we will read, exchange thoughts and questions. This way, the model will become a kind of sense-making lense into our own intricate kind of being.

While reading and experiencing together, the group becomes a joint-thinking-body. Each one’s understanding helps the other one, each shared experience crosses with someone else’s. This kind of reading has by now become an elaborated practice in itself. The most direct way of understanding Gendlin’s embodied and interactive approach to meaning is via our living and interacting bodies. I experienced ever so often how this strangely dry philosophical book on interaction begins to flourish when it is read in such close experiential interaction!

A next course continuing through the book is likely to follow!

Donata Schoeller is a professor of philosophy in Germany and Iceland. Together with Christiane Geiser she has translated A Process Model into German. She is principal investigator of the international research project Embodied Critical Thinking (ect.hi.is) and Academic Director of TECT (trainingect.com). Among her recent publications are Close Talking: Erleben zu Sprache bringen, Saying What We Mean, ed. with Ed Casey, and Thinking Thinking, ed. with Vera Saller. Her PhD on Meister Eckhart and Jakob Boehme was published in 2nd edition in 2009. She is a Focusing trainer and teaches Thinking-at-the-Edge at institutes, academies and universities in Europe, the US and Israel. She has three grown up daughters. donataschoeller.com

Monika Lindner assists in the workshop and organizes the registrations. She is an educational scientist and Focusing Trainer teaching Focusing and Thinking-at-the-Edge (TAE). As a doctoral student she is a member of the international research group "Embodied Critical Thinking" (ect.hi.is) at the University of Iceland. monicalindner.com