The Science of Connection: A Study of Heart-Centered Attention and its Impact on Relationships

This view resonates with Gendlin’s (2003, 2018) practice of focusing and process model. Gendlin (1999b) acknowledged the subjective by including the person observing in the process of knowledge, an approach of self that encompasses the living self and the situations it attends, and whose entanglement defines lived experience. The current investigation will use Gendlin’s definition of consciousness as “the self-sentience of making and re-making itself-and-its-environment. It is an organismic-environmental interaction process” (p. 233, emphasis in the original) to describe the extent of the awareness of the lived experience. Similarly, the current investigation will use Gendlin’s (2000) definition of focusing, or paying attention, as “spending time sensing something as yet undefined that comes in one’s body in connection with some specific problem or aspect of one’s life” (p. 266). This undefined “something” is what Gendlin defined as a bodily felt sense.