Just wanted to put in a plug for this book:

Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning by Eugene T Gendlin
http://www.amazon.com/Experiencing-Creation-Meaning-Philosophical-Psychological/dp/0810114275

This book "healed" my meditation practice. I was missing/avoiding a vast and immediate landscape in my awareness, and this book served as "pointing out instructions" to help me find it. It cleared up a huge amount of mystery anxiety that flared up every time I sat down to meditate.

If you're using, say, Shinzen's system, I think Gendlin's "felt sense" or "experiencing" is a different beast than Shinzen's "subtle feel" and "subtle talk." I'm inching my way through the Visuddhimagga right now, to see if there's anything comparable.

Poorly formatted preface to the new edition:
http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2152.html

The book is rough going. Stick it out through the intro and chapters 1 and 2. (Definitely read them all: they pave the way for chapter 3.) Chapter 3 is payoff: precisely formulated, bare-sensation/in-your-face phenomenology. Again, hard work, but highly recommended. (If you make it to the end, "iofi" will blow your mind as another totally practical pointing out instruction.)

IMHO, anyway. Hope this helps someone!

-M

[a couple small edits for clarity]

Sounds awesome! Ordered... :-)

Reply to this thread, eventually, and let everyone know what you think!

i ordered it too. was taught focussing some twenty years ago by a therapist before i ever tried to meditate. recently came across a handout on the simple process (tucked in-between pages of stephen levine book from early '90's) and remembered it had helped me. seen now it seems vipassana based/oriented (?)

thank you for posting

There's no mention of meditation (as far as I know) in any of Gendlin's writing. I think of Focusing and meditation as two separate games (e.g. football vs soccer) that can be played on the same grassy field (i.e. your awareness).

Focusing isn't mentioned in ECM. (I believe Focusing was invented later. ECM is the philosophy on which Focusing is based.) Because ECM is grounded in immediate experience, I found that it was helpful to my meditation practice. But, meditation has its own rules and goals that are separate from Focusing's goals and from ECM which is a philosophical framework. (I do personally mix insight, concentration, and focusing together in a single meditation session, but I try to be clear about what I'm doing when and why.)

IMHO, your mileage may vary, and hope that makes sense!

-Mark

(edit: I should also mention, I haven't achieved stream entry nor do I appear to be particularly close, yet. So doubly IMHO.)

oh. cool. i'm totally new, so, thank you for helpful posts--greatly appreciated. i'll follow any further conversation on this thread with interest.

This is just one quick example, from hasty skimming, that it does look like concepts in ECM have correlates in Buddhist thought. That's cool. Practical utility? YMMV.