Empowering Your Own Knowing:How to Conceptualise From The Body Not About The Body…

Abstract

This brief paper is a rendition of a workshop given at the Society for Existential Analysis 2012 annual conference held in London. For the first time the SEA conference utilised Open Space Technology and the workshop described below was an attempt to encourage conference delegates to prioritise their own ‘experiential knowing’ over external authorities, expertise, or received concepts in order to generate ideas of their own to offer in the OST session. It is an elementary introduction to the ‘Thinking at the Edge’ method devised by Eugene Gendlin, but in keeping with the emphasis of the article there are no textual references, only further reading listed as a supportive resource at the end of the article. Key words Experiential-existential, Gendlin, ‘thinking at the edge’, Focusing, theory construction, existential philosophy, palpable existentialism.