NVC/Focusing

Reflections on Buddhist Self-Enquiry and Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ – Part 1

Reflections on the Five Wisdoms Mandala as a Framework
for an Approach to Buddhist Self-Enquiry Practice Informed by
the Experience of Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ Dyads

I have been reflecting for some time that in the Buddhist tradition, self-enquiry (in Sanskrit: dharma vicaya – pronounced ‘vichaya’) generally tends to be thought of as a solitary practice. To support and develop a culture of dharma vicaya within Western Buddhism, there is a need for us to explore effective forms of meditative self-enquiry dyad practice – practices in which Buddhist friends sit together and take it in turns to ‘hold space’ for each other, so that each one is supported to go deeper in their self-empathetic self-enquiry. Having studied and practiced Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ dyad practice for many years, I can see it as a model that Western Buddhists might wish to draw upon, while staying firmly rooted in Buddhist philosophical principles. Western Buddhists, not being constrained to traditional forms, have the freedom, after all, to adopt any practice that is an expression of the core values, principles and insights of their tradition. I know I am not alone in this thought, so I would like to share some reflections. This is partly for my own clarity, but I hope that others will find it stimulating also.

Part 1 – Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Clear Space’ and the Brahmavihāras

A Relational Understanding of the Body-Mind

Buddhists who are familiar with Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ dyad practice will inevitably tend to develop a deeper and more experiential understanding of the nature of mind than those whose engagement is more intellectual and philosophical. It is common for even passionately engaged Buddhist meditators not to see meditation in terms of self-enquiry, or self-discovery, or self-empathy, or as gaining familiarity with the relational nature of the body-mind. This relational understanding of the body-mind – a recognition that Consciousness exists in relationship with the functions and processes of the body-mind – is however, entirely intrinsic to Gendlin’s approach.

On the other hand, Buddhists, especially those who have been seriously engaged with the task of locating the central Buddhist philosophical principles in their bodily-felt experience, have a great deal to bring to any community that is practicing Focusing. The dialogue between Buddhism and Focusing can easily fail however, mainly because Buddhists can tend to regard Gendlin’s philosophical framework as a narrow one relative to that of Buddhism – and in taking that view can miss the direct parallels between the practice of Gendlin’s Focusing and the practice of self-enquiry at the highest levels of practice within the Buddhist tradition.

Focusing and Buddhist Wisdom

Buddhists also have a significant advantage over other practitioners of Focusing, because they are open to the idea that both that which is observing, and that which is observed, are ’empty’, or non-personal, and that our personalising identification with one or other, or both, of these poles in the subject-object relationship of our experiencing, is the ultimate cause of our egoic dysfunction. This sort of understanding is implied in Gendlin’s approach, and experienced in the course of Focusing practice, but spelt out much more explicitly in the Buddha’s teachings.

In Buddhist tradition, the relationship between that which is observing and that which is observed, can be described by the ‘five skandhas’ formulation. Importantly, each of the five skandhas was described by the Buddha as functioning in two ways – ‘internal’ and ‘external’ (as are the ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’ incidentally). This explains, at least in part, why the skandhas sometimes appear to be describing the five subjective components of Consciousness and its four cognitive-perceptual functions (i.e. the internal skandhas); and sometime appear to describing five objective components (i.e. the external skandhas) – Consciousness as an objective and collective appearance, or space, in which four categories of objective cognitive-perceptual ‘data’ come together to create the appearances of persons and things.

February 2, 2022

NVC and Focusing – Summaries of Related Articles in Other Categories

Because Marshall Rosenberg’s ‘Nonviolent Communication’ (NVC) and Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ self-empathy practice, have been such a strong influence on me, and have been so valuable in my understanding of the mandala wisdom of Buddhist tradition, I have incorporated these perspectives into several of my articles. References to NVC and Focusing can therefore be found in other categories on this website – especially the introductory series on meditation and self-enquiry, which can be found under ‘Meditation’ in the top menu.

I would very much like to find the time to write some articles focused entirely on both NVC and Focusing, and hope that those will more fully articulate my conviction that these models are enormously relevant to modern students of Buddhism. In the meantime, I have listed below some of the articles on this site that reference NVC and Focusing – with brief summaries of each, which are different from the summaries that I have written for these articles when they appear elsewhere. Click on any of the titles or images to be taken to the corresponding article.

December 31, 2021

Mandala Innerwork and NVC Self-Empathy

I have practised various forms of self-empathetic innerwork over the years. In the past, my personal method has been a distillation of, and a combination of, the innerwork approaches of Eugene Gendlin (Focusing), Ann Weiser-Cornell (Focusing), James Hillman (Jungian Innerwork), Marshall Rosenberg (Nonviolent Communication), Richard Schwarz (Inner Family Systems), Jerry Donoghue (Inner Presence Coaching), Steve De Shazer (Brief Solution Focused Therapy). While I continue to draw on the specific methods of these innovators in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy practice, I have more recently found it helpful to set these learnings in the context of the non-dual mandala-wisdom that we find in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and which Carl Jung helped to make so much more available and accessible in the West. Hence my own personal name for the form of self-empathic innerwork that I now practice, is ‘Mandala Innerwork’, reflecting the fact that it is essentially a form of Buddhist self-enquiry.

The Buddha’s Self-Enquiry / Self-Empathy Dyads

As I have developed my approach to self-empathetic innerwork, and studied the various other self-enquiry dyad models that I have mentioned above, I have increasingly found myself coming back to the Buddha’s approach and to the Buddhist terminology of the Five Skandhas, the Five Realms, the Five Wisdoms, and the brahmavhāras. I have begun to outline the details of how these fit together in various articles on this website. By making these connections we can bring the richness and power of the Buddhist wisdom tradition to our Western approaches to psychotherapeutic innerwork, while also bringing a much needed psychological sophistication to Buddhist Mindfulness, meditation and self-enquiry practice.

In this article however, I will be avoiding the complexity that arises for us when we try to use the Sanskrit terminology of ancient Buddhism – by mainly using the language of the self-empathy aspect of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model.

In the language of Nonviolent Communication, we can conceptualise Mandala Innerwork as a self-empathy practice, and the person doing it as a ‘self-empathiser’ and the person holding space is the ’empathiser’. In Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing model the activity of self-enquiry came to be called ‘focusing’, and the person turning their attention inward was called the ‘focuser’, and the person holding space is the ‘companion’. In the context of Mandala Innerwork, I prefer to think of the activity simply as ‘doing self-enquiry’, but I acknowledge a debt to Eugene Gendlin by using the terminology of ‘focuser’ and ‘companion’ for the roles.

The Buddha had his monks do meditative self-enquiry dyads, the details of which got lost down the centuries. The modern Buddhists and historians of Buddhism understand the practice as some form of ‘confession’, which is an unfortunate projection of Christian cultural practice onto the much more complex and subtle culture of early Buddhist self-enquiry. It is my belief that these early Buddhist ‘Confession’ dyads would have more closely resembled the self-empathy / self-enquiry dyad practices of today, and my Mandala Innerwork model has in part been an attempt to recreate the sort of Buddhist self-enquiry that would have characterised them.

The notion of ‘Confession’ is not completely illegitimate – of course. It just needs to be freed from the assumptions that tend to attach to it. I shall be sharing more of my thoughts on this in future articles, but the main thing I would like to highlight here is that in a confession process we are addressing that which is incongruous with our deeper true nature. In other words, not merely incongruous with an external religious creed, but incongruous with our deeper ethically and aspirational sense of ourselves, which is felt to be more essential and more authentic. So, ‘confession’ is always about our inner relationship between this deep inner knowing (which I like to call Consciousness) and something more superficial which is incongruous with that.

Resting as Consciousness; Relating to Psychological Parts

Their are two close related features in my approach, and they are both rooted in the profound early Buddhist psychology of the five skandhas and the four brahmavihāras. The first, could be characterised as ‘resting as Consciousness’: a focus on familiarising ourselves with, and learning to ‘rest as’ the ’empty’ impersonal Consciousness (the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha), that is capable of witnessing our experience objectively, and ‘relating’ to our experience with a warmly accepting quality of Presence. In my articles – especially those on meditation and self-enquiry that are to be found under the Meditation’ menu above – I have been highlighting the fact that the character of that the ’empty’ field of Consciousness, as it becomes embodied in us as Presence, is beautifully and comprehensively described by the four brahmavihāras.

The second feature of my Mandala Innerwork, or ‘Buddhist Self-Enquiry’ model, is based on our development of a deep familiarity with the other four skandhas – essentially the conceptualising (rūpa), sensing (vedanā), evaluating (samjñā), and volitional (samskaras) functions of Consciousness – and this involves learning to ‘work with psychological parts’. By working with psychological parts I mean, essentially, that we look at our experience closely, and learn to recognise that our conventionally experienced self never does actually have the character of a self at all. Rather, on close examination is it found to be an aggregation of cognitive-perceptual processes and cognitive-perceptual data that are assembled into the appearance of a self. What’s more, when we engage in this enquiry, we also become keenly aware of the fact that the egoic self is certainly not single. Rather, it is multiple – each of our separate egoic selves or ‘psychological parts’ are an adaption, in the course of our development to particular developmental stages and challenges.

I have come to regard these two features: resting as Consciousness; and working with psychological parts, as inseparable. Whether our focus is on learning to be self-empathetically present with yourselves for the purpose of self-knowledge and psychological healing; or we are spiritual seekers wishing to know the ultimate nature of mind, we cannot avoid acknowledging these two features of the process. It is one of foundational paradoxes of the process of spiritual integration and psychological healing that in order to become more unified and whole, we need to acknowledge that our egoic self is made up of many psychological parts; and need to develop a sense of the inner relationship between Consciousness and those psychological parts.

January 16, 2018

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) – Mandala Wisdom

This article was written to present a very brief explanation of my passionate conviction about the little known connection between Marshall Rosenberg’s ‘Nonviolent Communication’ (NVC) model and the mandala model of mind and mental functioning that we finding Buddhist tradition. It is the first post in a series of articles on the closely related themes of Marshall Rosenberg’s ‘NVC’; and Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ (a self-empathy/self-enquiry model) – and which can be found under ‘NVC/Focusing’ in the top menu.

I have also incorporated reflections on these themes into several of the articles in the introductory series on meditation and self-enquiry (under ‘Meditation’ above) – and in the other categories also. Summaries of those NVC/Focusing-related articles in other categories are available here.

One of my greatest inspirations has been the work of the late Marshall Rosenberg (October 6, 1934 – February 7, 2015), who wrote Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Rosenberg, and the world-wide community of students who have worked with him, have created an inspiring communication skills and self-awareness model that is deeper and more challenging than anything comparable. Marshall trained as a clinical psychologist, but worked outside the medical and academic mainstream. In using the term Nonviolent Communication (NVC for short) as the name of his model, he was consciously identifying himself with the intellectual tradition and with the struggles for social justice through nonviolent direct action, of Dr Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi.

Another Spontaneous Expression of the Universal Mandala-Wisdom

From my point of view, as a student of Consciousness and archetypal psychology, what makes NVC so interesting, is its obvious similarity with the mandala-wisdom that we find in Tibetan Buddhism, in Carl Jung’s archetypal psychology, in the Native North American ‘medicine wheel’ traditions, in the four ‘elements’ of Western Astrology, and in numerous other places. It is of the nature of the mandala archetype, that the same wisdom appears in many different cultural forms that have evolved entirely independently of each other. It seems that wherever, and whenever, individuals are seeking spiritual truth, we frequently see the emergence of this mandala-form wisdom, and in my view Marshall Rosenberg and the NVC tradition have made a profound and very practical contribution to that body of wisdom-knowledge.

April 22, 2017