Knowing From Within: Focusing Through a Living Systems Thinking Lens
Further explorations in applying Focusing alongside AI
This series grows out of my ongoing application of Focusing in real‑world contexts — including my explorations with AI. These are my personal experiences of Focusing as I understand and apply Gendlin’s philosophy in my daily life.
In the previous piece, AI and the Felt Sense, I wrote about what emerged as I applied Focusing while working with AI. After that, a deeper question kept circling: What is it, exactly, that the body knows? That earlier piece ended with the tension between disembodied intelligence and embodied knowing — the place where AI can help me think, but only my body can tell me what’s true. Sitting with that question opened a wider terrain: living systems thinking, Gendlin’s philosophy, and my cultural story that makes the body so easy to overlook.
Where Systems Thinking and Focusing Meet
When I first began applying Focusing in daily life, something in Gendlin’s philosophy felt familiar. His description of the body — not as a thing but as a process — echoed what I had encountered in living systems thinking through Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi. I didn’t see the connection at first. But the more I read, the more I realized both perspectives were pointing to the same shift: life as relational process, where anything that looks like a “part” only makes sense in the context of the whole.
Gendlin’s phrase body–environment interaction stopped me. It challenged the idea of the body as a container of feelings or a machine to be regulated. He was pointing to something more dynamic — a body that is always in relationship, always carrying more than words can yet express. When I paid attention to my own felt sense, I could see what he meant. It wasn’t a static feeling. It was a whole situation forming in me, in relationship with my inner and outer world.
Reading Capra and Luisi’s book The Systems View of Life again while learning Focusing, I began to see the same pattern: meaning doesn’t arise inside an isolated unit; it arises in the interaction. This wasn’t just intellectual recognition. It showed up in my practice. When I pause and sense something in me, I’m not accessing an internal object. I’m entering a process that shifts as I attend to it. It carries forward because I’m in relationship with it. That movement — feedback, emergence, adaptation — is also how living systems behave.
Open Systems, Closed Systems
Working with these ideas led me to a moment in a podcast with Brené Brown on leadership, where she described a basic systems thinking principle: closed systems collapse because they stop taking in information; open systems stay responsive because they remain in interaction with what’s around them. Hearing that, something clicked. Gendlin isn’t adjacent to this — he’s describing the deeper structure that makes it true.
For him, the body is not a closed unit. It is a living interaction with its situation. A felt sense forms only when the body is open to the whole of what’s happening. When I close down, the process can’t carry forward. When I stay open and curious, the next step can emerge from the situation itself.
Sitting with this, I began to notice the cultural implications. In a society that prizes independence, control, and extraction, openness and interconnectedness can feel like liabilities. But in living systems, they are what keep life alive.
Focusing helps me stay in contact with that interconnectedness. It draws attention to the edge — the place where something in me meets something in the world. It helps me sense the feedback loops between my inner life and the systems I’m part of: families, communities, institutions, ecosystems.
What AI Can’t Feel
Working with AI as a thinking partner made the contrast unmistakable. It could generate statistical patterns, but it couldn’t participate in the situation the way I could.
Many artificial systems are built on assumptions of closure and control, shaped by a business culture that prizes efficiency, prediction, and extraction. They draw boundaries to simplify complexity. They extract patterns, but they don’t feel the systems they’re modeling. The system I was working with didn’t pause or sense. It didn’t have edges that could be felt from within.
But I do.
And that difference matters. AI researcher Ben Goertzel argues that intelligence can’t emerge from disembodied pattern matching alone — that systems without relational grounding or embodied context will always miss the meaning of the situations they act within. These systems don’t pause. They don’t sense. They don’t feel the edge of a situation. And without that capacity, they can’t correct their course.
The risk I kept noticing wasn’t just technical — it was epistemological. A system that cannot feel itself cannot know when it’s gone wrong.
Staying in Contact With What’s Alive
As I kept applying Focusing in this terrain, I began to see my cultural story that makes embodied knowing feel out of place.
This is why Focusing and living systems thinking matter to me — not as elegant models or individual tools, but as ways of staying in contact with life. In a time shaped by artificial systems that optimize, predict, and control, we need practices that help us sense what’s alive. We need ways of knowing that honor interconnectedness, feedback, and emergence.
Focusing is one of them. It helps me feel the whole from within.
These practices help me notice when something is stuck, when a pattern is repeating, when a shift is forming but not yet named. They support decision‑making that’s responsive rather than reactive.
Capra and Luisi describe living systems as networks of relationships, sustained by flows of energy, information, and meaning. When those flows are blocked, systems become rigid. When they’re open, systems stay alive. Otto Scharmer might say we’re learning to move from ego‑system awareness to ecosystem awareness — from siloed knowing to participatory sensing.
In my experience, embodied practices like Focusing help us develop the very capacities current artificial systems lack: contextual discernment, emotional literacy, self‑awareness, temporal sensitivity, anticipatory sensing, and organic pattern recognition. These aren’t soft skills. They’re survival skills for complex times. They help us stay in contact with complexity, not just manage it. They help us lead from presence, not performance.
It seems to me that teaching students and leaders to sense those flows from within — rather than only modeling them from outside — could change how we build, lead, and relate. The systems we create reflect the ways we know. And if we want living systems, we need ways of knowing that are alive.
As I continued applying Focusing in this context, I kept noticing how natural it felt — and how out of step it was with the culture around me. That question stayed with me, and it’s where Part 3 begins.
About the Author
I’m Simone — an embodied listening practitioner with a scientific background in engineering geology. After years in extractive industries, I turned toward embodied discernment and living systems thinking. I write about thresholds, liminal spaces, and the intelligence that lives in the body. More at simoneislistening.com/blog.
This article makes my heart sing YES again and again. To how we educate ourselves, our leaders and our youth: "if we want living systems, we need ways of knowing that are alive." Embodied practices like Focusing develop this way of knowing from the inside out. May we find our way sooner than later.
I appreciate how you end with a teaser around noticing how out of step our current world is with the naturalness of experiencing life as process. Looking forward to Part 3 already!
Thank you Simone Grimmer, Your photos are encouraging and hopeful alongside a reader's growing dedication to bringing embodied practices forward.