A Season Of Listening To The Body
When your perspective changes, what makes sense to practice also changes.
Current approaches to the body—exercise physiology, nutrition, the fitness industry—aren't wrong, they're just incomplete. As the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor observes: “the body you think you have is not your body.”
A Season of Listening To The Body is intended to help you with the following:
Learn and practice a form of Attention that helps you discover meaningful information about what your body has to say about how to solve a problem or answer a personally meaningful question
Develop a plan and action steps that arise organically from this body-oriented way of attending to your life
Quadrants
4 Practices & Inquiries That Deepen Your Experience of Life
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Focusing came out of research conducted at the Univ. of Chicago in the 1950s. It examined the question: when people meaningfully change, why is that? What was discovered was that people who change know how to “check inside” and engage a process of sensing their own experience directly and forming fresh language from this direct-experience. It was later discovered that this process can be taught and became known as the practice of Focusing.
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“There is one thing that when cultivated and regularly practiced leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? Mindfulness centered on the body.” Gautama Buddha
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Indigenous wisdom and practices of health are an important source for deepening one’s understanding of modern and post-modern dis-ease. This inquiry takes a deep look at 2 important sources of nourishment:
The Food we eat through our mouths (Habits of Eating)
The Food we eat through our minds (Habits of Thought)
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Life knows how to live, we just need to treat our own experience of life as a laboratory to be investigated:
“Experience is a myriad richness. We think more than we can say. We feel more than we can think. We live more than we can feel… …And there is still much more…Life always has its own forward direction, whatever else might also be going on.”
Struture of the Season
Discovery: Using the practice of Focusing, we will explore what your body has to say as to what is needing or wanting your attention
Structure: Out of this discovery week, your body will reveal the information needed to inform what the best structure of coaching, learning objectives, and action plan that will form the scaffolding for continued progress
Creative, Life-Forward Project: Your body has a direct line into what is at stake in your life right now and what actions will lead you towards a real sense of aliveness and fulfillment. We follow the body’s lead for the rest of the season allowing meaningful growth to emmerge from the process of careful attention to your direct experience from week to week.
"It took me a long time to affirm that the ongoing bodily experiencing has its own inherent life-forwarding implying. The little steps that arise at the edge are creative, imaginative, and always in some positive direction." — Eugene Gendlin
The Central Insight & Inquiry
Beginning from the Whole, Not the Parts
One way to approach learning what something is all about is to break it into parts, work on each part, and hope you've improved the whole. That logic comes from a deeply rooted mechanical metaphor for approaching life — useful for mechanical things, but limited when applied to a living process, and the body is a process, not a thing.
Mechanical things, no matter how well they mimic life, aren't actually living. As Victoria Sweet points out in her scholarship on Hildegard of Bingen, this mechanical metaphor marks an abrupt break — in the span of a few hundred years — from a more plant-like, organic orientation to the body.
The body is a living whole. When conscious attention is placed on the body-as-a-whole, what comes into view is life-forward movement — energy. Attention isn't a light shining on things that already exist out there or buried in some unconscious realm; attention participates in the reality it observes. So much of our natural creativity and energy stays on the table simply because of habitual ways of managing our attention.
Want to learn or explore more?
Book a call to discuss questions or get a sense of what a Seasoning of Listening to your Body can look like for you
"If there is in you something bad or sick or unsound, let it inwardly be and breathe. That's the only way it can evolve and change into the form it needs. Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move towards its rightness." - Eugene Gendlin
Your Guide To The Seasons
A Season of Listening To The Body is guided by Derick Deal.
With a background in Focusing, experiential learning, and body-centered philosophy, Derick creates spaces that honor slowness, depth, and the intelligence of the more-than-human world.
Each program is shaped not by rigid doctrine, but by the living rhythm of the season itself, and the wisdom carried in the body of each participant.
This is not about escaping life.
It’s about re-entering it—and with a recognition that human experience contains valuable information that is not already codified in books, AI, or other external sources. Listening to your body is about learning to think for yourself and experiencing the immense creativity and resilience inherent to all living processes.
In the words of others…..
Mike
I feel like there is a sense of freshness that I got from this trip. It's already priceless. I've always been service oriented, it's part of me. But I forgot one thing. I forgot to service myself. And one of the things that I can see becoming is non-negotiables. And one of them is to be loyal to myself, putting the air mask on myself before helping others. Because from that place, I'm going to be able to do and give so much more.
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