Eugene Gendlin

> Against Vivisection:
The reader may now check how well I have communicated up to now. Can you follow this specification?:
The most common sort of unhelpful inward activity today is not mere intellectualization or rationalization, nor even the same feelings over and over. Today the most common ineffective attempt to help oneself inside is what we now call "vivisection." One is very active "upstairs" in one's mind, drawing maps and attempting to understand one's trouble, thinking this, and thinking that, but instead of merely intellectualizing, one feels in one's gut every move one makes upstairs! Just about all these moves hurt.
Attending to These Hurts and Gut Feelings Generated by One's Own Cutting is Not Focusing, and Is Not to be Recommended!!
In the days when people were largely out of contact with their feelings, the map-making upstairs was mere intellectualizing. Now it is worse! That is your gut you are now cutting up, this way or that, as directed from your head.
The inward process we are specifying involves keeping quiet, and sensing the unease in the body, directly, whole as it comes, without putting ones maps, cuts, and distinctions on that. If you let your attention go directly to the bodily unease, you feel a little bit better.
Then let that make the map, let that sort itself into whatever parts or pieces it falls into on its own. But begin always with "that whole business" and not with anything you cut out of your living inside.
However well you think you have defined a problem, consider it as also undefined. Use what you have been calling it merely as a pointer, and call it "all that", whatever it may be and whatever may go with it, without first cutting it up and feeling the effects of this cutting.