whoa I think these would be a great trio for a secular spirituality curriculum: Focusing, Alexander Technique, and the Headless Way

Alexander Technique helps you expand awareness “outwards” which helps you orient and move and relax.

Focusing helps you become aware of the “inner” world.

Headless shows the primordial openness onto the outer world, inner world itself as embedded in a spacious openness.

these all seem to reorient the practitioner in a phenomenologically basic way, creating space for ease and clarity

Focusing is also about “expanding awareness” in the way it asks you to locate the felt sense as if you were sitting beside it; you need to find a vantage point that’s “larger” than the feeling of tension, confusion, anxiety, or whatever

And expanding doesn’t mean losing the particular local thing — opening up to the background and the spaciousness allows a BETTER type of “focusing” — like, you perform better because you have a more global, less scrunched-up perspective

Noting-style mindfulness practice also seems to work in a similar way: the noting demands that you get familiar with stepping out of your scrunched-up mental posture and see more clearly in this global, expanded way

While I’m at it, initial koan practice demands focusing entirely on the most global possible “felt sense” that accompanies a question like “Who am I, fundamentally?” — feeling it as a “red-hot iron ball stuck in your throat.”

This questioning has nothing to do with reasoning or arguing, so teachers are in the funny position of demanding their students to engage deeply with a question WITHOUT ANSWERING IT.

And that’s what Gendlin does too, for more localized felt senses. He encourages finding preliminary answers that cause tension to relax, and I think “getting through” a koan is a kind of fundamental felt shift regarding a truly global felt sense of being alive?

Which crucially seems to always involve familiarizing oneself with some spaciousness in which the whole phenomenon of life appears! Like an actor expanding awareness to the whole stage, but even more radically to some “arena” that’s “beyond birth and death” and so on.