About Us We are a Focusing group that started in the Carlisle Friends (Quaker) meeting in 2013. We teach focusing and we provide a space for people to practice it. For people new to focusing, we work with them in groups of two or three, walking them through the process and giving them detailed guidance. Once people feel comfortable with the process, they can join our bi-weekly gatherings where they can exchange focusing with other members of our group. Or form regular partnerships with other focusers.
Quakers and Focusing
So how did a bunch of Quakers get involved with Focusing. The connections between Quakerism and Focusing are both historical and epistemological. Historicially, one of the sources for what became focusing was time Gendlin, the originator of Focusing, spent as a young man at a Quaker retreat house called Pendle Hill. He watched these older Quakers sit in silence and find some wisdom that wasn't apparent at first. Fast forward 70 years, current Friends are turning to focusing to help elucidate what we mean by the inward light, which is the basis of Quakerism. Epistemology is the theory of what counts as knowledge and how we know what we know. What generally counts as knowledge is science. Science is usually thought of as objective, impersonal, value-free, intellectual, abstract, timeless, predictive, univocal, and universal. The knowing peculiar to Quakers and Focusing is about meaning, is personal, found through feeling or sensing in the body, includes everything that goes with a particular situation, evolves, is creative, evocative and methaphorical, uses a transversal logic as opposed to a universal logic, and is situational or existential. For more on the connections between Quakers and Focusing, you can click Quakers and Focusing. |