So hello I'm Mary Hendrix and I'm the director of the Focusing Institute and I'm also a
psychologist. And we are bringing you here a two-part tape two-part video of a new practice
called THINKING AT THE EDGE. And Thinking at the Edge was developed out of GENDLIN'S PHILOSOPHY OF
THE IMPLICIT and it consists of 14 exact steps that help people think from their felt sense of
implicit knowing and generate fresh language and fresh concepts. It's like the assumptions that
underlie our current society are the concepts that we use in our society are based on science and
things. And they don't allow us, they, ... already have ... they have built into them structures that
drop out that lived human body experience. And so anything that we go to think about if we're using
that this kind of prevalent concept it already has dropped out the living person. So one of the
things that Thinking at the Edge allows us to do is to to get out from under being caught in that
underlying assumption structure and speak freshly from our body lived experience and knowledge. And
we we need this kind of speaking in every area - in our relations with each other our relations
to nature we need a different kind of concept that would have in it our human felt capacity
not just our abstract human capacity to think with mathematical units. Thinking at the Edge
is a way of articulating finding new language to say something that you have long known and
not been able to say not being able to formulate or to communicate to people. And most valuable
something in your field of study. Something that the world needs something that as a result of
some years of working in some field, you have a sense for that. And there is really no way to say
it and so you haven't been able to say it. And it turns out when we say that to people almost
everyone has something like that and almost everyone has something major like that . Of
course you can find many things like that but there's very often immediately something like
oh yes of course that. If I could only say that. The Thinking at the Edges is our second practice
coming from the philosophy the Philosophy of the Implicit of experiencing. Philosophy
which relates language and also logic, to what we experience, what we feel, what we are, in what we
have a hold of in a bodily way, And by going back and forth between the attempt to say or think and
the sense directly in the body of that same thing or situation or concerned. By going back and forth
it becomes possible to speak from something like that. There's a complicated philosophy
about the relationships between logic and between language which is very different from logic and
what we roughly call experiencing which the very word has many formal meanings. But we mean what
you directly are living there and can sense. The first practice we developed is FOCUSING of course,
which is a way of using what you directly know and feel there, if you can get in touch with it. We
have very specific little steps to to help people get in touch directly with that. Usually we are
looking at what's going on we are talking we're paying attention and we are not directly aware of
the whole felt underbelly the whole complexity that goes into what we see and what we say and
what we. So the Focusing steps presume that you can get in touch with your body from the inside
that you can feel we're breakfast is or lunch or dinner inside you that you can feel behind your
belt and not just your belt externally. Some people have trouble with that and everyone can
find that we teach that in the preliminaries. And then Focusing has a number of steps and it's used
in a great many ways. Here now withTAE we are using Focusing and in in one sense you have to
already know Focusing to do TAE. Because you have to have a direct sense you have to be able to go
in your body and say oh yeah that. Which I wish I could say and can't quite I can say it but not
well, and people don't understand it, and there's no room for it, and But you have to have a direct
sense of it. But if Focusing is new to you in another way you might find it on this road if you
see whether that which you wish you could say and haven't said whether that can become a felt sense
as we call it a direct reference and something right there in a bodily way. Just as concrete as
breakfast if you've just eaten, just as concrete as being hungry or just as concrete as being
uncomfortable about a situation. Just as concrete as emotions, but not really an emotion, not really
a feeling. Much more like a holistic discomfort in your body that if you were to say "oh I can
say this thing to anybody" you would very quickly sense that no it's that they are and haven't quite
said that. And this is pretty much the first step of the TAE procedures can you have a felt sense?