> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Chapter 10 - Finding Richness in Others > We find that if listening and if focusing are shared, people can come to know each other more deeply in a few hours than most do in years. Contact is a human need. Contact comes when we sense the difference we make to other people and they to us. ### Chapter 11 - The Listening Manual Quite striking how much the NVC practice of reflection was inspired by the idea of "absolute listening" in Focusing. > However, it helps much more if you the listener will say back the other person’s points, step by step, as you understand them. I call that absolute listening. Never introduce topics that the other person didn’t express. Never push your own interpretations. Never mix in your own ideas. > You may also tell that it is going right by more subtle signs of the relaxation that comes from being heard well well—the feeling we all get when we have been trying to say something and have finally put it across: the feeling that we don’t have to say that any more. While a person is laying out an idea, or part of one, there is a tension, a holding of breath, which may remain for several interchanges. When the crux is finally both said and exactly understood and responded to, there is relaxation, like an exhaling of breath. The person doesn’t have to hold the thing in the body any more. Then something further can come in. (It’s important to accept the silence that can come here for what seems like a long time, even a minute or so. The focuser now has the inner body peace to let another thing come up. Don’t destroy the peace by speaking needlessly.) > You will get it right sooner or later. It doesn’t matter when. It can be the third or fourth try. People can get further into their feelings best when another person is receiving or trying to receive each bit exactly as they have it, without additions or elaborations. There is a centeredness that is easy to recognize after a while. Like a train on a track. It’s easy to know when you’re off. Everything stops. If that happens, go back to the last point that was on a solid track inside, and ask the person to go on from there. > To make it easier, stop for a second and sense your own tangle of feelings, tensions, and expectations. Then clear this space. Out of this open space you can listen. You will feel alert and probably slightly excited. What will the other person say into this waiting space that exists for nothing except to be spoken into? # Quotes >_Direct experience is a kind of texture—it doesn't have boxes. It's more like a Persian rug—even that is too structured. Experience is non-numerical and multi-schematic. No one scheme will ever explain it. You can always create another aspect of experience by putting any two elements together._ >Therefore new symbols and concepts are always possible. Jungian, Freudian and other schemes work if you just use them to lift out of experience something useful, something that almost jumps out. But if you force a scheme, it will never work. You can't fit the whole of experience to any conceptual system. You falsify your experience if you assume it must be like your concepts.