March 2007
Can't talk now... I'm writing... nearly at the 300 page mark...
Thinking too... about perception and how it connects with our project focus of reciprocity and dialogue... and about how perhaps 'therapeutic' conversation is more a process of embodied sensing and responding, and less about interpreting each other's words. Deciphering and co-creating meanings are perhaps not the primary tasks of understanding... rather our most generative and memorable moments with our clients involve so much more than our intellect... When we meet one another in dialogue we enter into a spontaneous, embodied 'interpenetrative' responsive-expressive interchange that leaves both practitioner and client irrevocably changed.
Perception is at the heart of David Abram's work (Spell of the Sensuous - thanks to my friend and colleague for sending the book). Influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Abram writes of participation and relationship as the very structure of perception: "humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin,the tongue, ears, and nostrils--all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness...." He writes of the diversity of our sensory systems, and moreover, of the reciprocity inherent in direct, prereflective, synaesthetic, participatory perception: "There is an intimate reciprocity to the senses; as we touch the bark of a tree, we feel the tree touching us; as we lend our ears to the local sounds and ally our nose to the seasonal scents, the terrain gradually tunes us in in turn."
Could the same be true in 'therapeutic' dialogue? Is there also "an intimate reciprocity to the senses" in the context of dialogical practice?
One of the participants in this project speaks of tuning into the way of being of her client, and her client, in turn, calls forward a particular way of being for her as practitioner... I think of her story immediately as I write this note.
Thinking too... about perception and how it connects with our project focus of reciprocity and dialogue... and about how perhaps 'therapeutic' conversation is more a process of embodied sensing and responding, and less about interpreting each other's words. Deciphering and co-creating meanings are perhaps not the primary tasks of understanding... rather our most generative and memorable moments with our clients involve so much more than our intellect... When we meet one another in dialogue we enter into a spontaneous, embodied 'interpenetrative' responsive-expressive interchange that leaves both practitioner and client irrevocably changed.
Perception is at the heart of David Abram's work (Spell of the Sensuous - thanks to my friend and colleague for sending the book). Influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Abram writes of participation and relationship as the very structure of perception: "humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin,the tongue, ears, and nostrils--all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness...." He writes of the diversity of our sensory systems, and moreover, of the reciprocity inherent in direct, prereflective, synaesthetic, participatory perception: "There is an intimate reciprocity to the senses; as we touch the bark of a tree, we feel the tree touching us; as we lend our ears to the local sounds and ally our nose to the seasonal scents, the terrain gradually tunes us in in turn."
Could the same be true in 'therapeutic' dialogue? Is there also "an intimate reciprocity to the senses" in the context of dialogical practice?
One of the participants in this project speaks of tuning into the way of being of her client, and her client, in turn, calls forward a particular way of being for her as practitioner... I think of her story immediately as I write this note.
It is now April... snow flies in the cold wind outside my study window... but Mexico is coming...
Wishing everyone a wonderful Spring,
Janice
posted by Janice DeFehr at 9:16 dop.
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