“Affection arrives quietly, more like a wandering breeze or a gentle grace blessing you on your journey through life.” – Father Ed

Developing a mental attitude in your head of being kind, caring, gentle and open expresses only a small part of what our feelings and felt senses need in order to unfold. To develop a new habit of being physically and not merely mentally present to feelings, you need to discover an additional resources within your own body that will enable you, gradually, to replace an old habit of disregarding or pushing your feelings out of the way with something new and different. These resources arise out of the memory and experience of what we call, “your  Affection Teacher” and the “Affection Response” capability that arises out of your Affection Teacher experience.

  You can’t THINK your way into your body. Dr. Eugene Gendlin puts it another way: “Knowing is not the process of changing.” Information is never enough to bridge the gap, the chasm into actually being “IN” the experience of your body’s knowing. The change you seek lies not in your mind thinking differently about issues, but in allowing your body to teach you how to carry them in a different way! To travel a road to this kind of transformation, you must set out on a highly personal journey – with the assistance of your Affection Teacher experiences held within your own body’s knowing.

“Affection Teacher” experiences that are the grounding for our Affection Response capability to express love and compassion can come from many sources: from people who love and care for us, from nature ( moments of awe ), and even from animals ( like your dog who welcomes you every time you come home.) All of these experiences help us to build our own capacity to extend love and compassion to others – and, more importantly, to what we hold within us. That extension of love is not just a mental attitude but rather a visceral sense that we call a “Affection Response“.

What is the Affection Teacher and the Affection Response? 

Experiencing one’s Affection Teachers requires that each of us return to our body’s memories of the gifts of affection, discovering there the embodied relationships that your physical organism still carries as potential Affection Teachers.  By returning to our body’s sense/memory/experiences of affection, we circumvent the tendency of imposing the mental construct of what we “think” affection should be.

“Affection Response” is the body’s innate physical affectionate response (learned from our embodied experience of our Affection Teachers) to our vulnerable/hurting places, holding them with “Caring, Feeling Presence” rather than the subduing of it under some conceptual category.  Your Affection Teacher is the learned physical embodiment of love and affection.  This experience is what makes your Affection Response of “Caring, Feeling Presence” possible.

When you bring the Affection Response of physical presence of caring love to your own body in distress, you actually bring the gift of God’s healing, life-giving-love-agápe into your needy feelings or felt senses as they cry out for some loving care. Your Affection Response of Caring, Feeling Presence can bring a frozen feeling back to life when good intentions in your mind just sound like more talking heads. Learning how to re-ignite this inner physical spark of your Affection Response, learned from one’s Affection Teacher, opens your body so you can begin to discover who you really are becoming in God’s love through the gift of this interaction with your own body’s feelings.

With your Affection Response, you connect in a totally different way from inside your body—expressing a quality of caring, felt presence that somehow involves far more than just a simple intention in your mind.

All of creation, all of nature struggles toward a unity and life-giving connections that our minds will never fully grasp. The untold, still disconnected stories within every unheard feeling are no exception. Love needs connection.

Fortunately, most of us have an available “inside Teacher or Teachers” to help build a new kind of relationship to ourselves–a relationship that puts us back on the path toward wholeness.

Your Affection Teacher and your Affection Response are vital, enabling elements on a long inward journey that will last for a lifetime. It is a spiritual quest, a journey of new links into who you are continuing to become as a person.

Essential elements of your Affection Teacher and Affection Response:

• The experiencing of your Affection Teacher is the experience of “Your-Body-in-Loving-Connection”.
• Without your Affection Teacher and Affection Response BioSpiritual Focusing is not possible.
• The sum of our Affection Teacher experiences is our Physical Embodiment of Caring Feeling Presence.
• Our Affection Response is the extending of the Caring, Feeling Presence / Agape that one has experienced with Affection Teachers to the emotions and felt senses one encounters in daily living.
• The Affection Teacher and Affection Response are not control or substitution – It is “Being Here – Living Now”. They represent a letting go of “control”.
• Your Affection Teacher and Affection Response are your body’s doorway for finding answers to the mystery of what it means to be human and how to grow more whole in Christ from within our bodies as they are felt from inside.
• Affection thrives in your body, rooted in your Affection Teacher experience. It drinks from the wellspring of your own life experience, your embodied interconnections.
• The body-experience of your Affection Teacher draws you into the world of relationships. It makes your Affection Response possible.  The essence of a healthy relationship is Love or Agape that is extended in our Affection Response.
• New Affection Teachers may emerge to assist us in carrying new experiences or challenges, deepening our Affection Response capability, and in doing so, they assist us in exploring new and diverse aspects of Love/Agape. Drawing us further into the mystery of what it is to be a developing/maturing, loving human being.

What characterizes the Affection Teacher and Affection Response?

• A fresh, loving, “Caring, Feeling Presence response.
• Encountering sacred gifts from our own lived experience.
• A new availability.
• A new openness.
• Experiencing your Body in loving connection and relationship.
• Being Porous.
• Deliberately letting go of control, judgement and criticism in an Affection Response
• Developing a loving response to fear.
• A highly personal journey.
• An inward quest.
• Embodying the life-giving essence of God’s healing love.
• Developing a new pattern/perspective.
• Being a true Companion to another.
• Developing a new bond with all your body carries.
• Developing a new healing inner connection.
• Being inside relating, rather than outside controlling.
• Allowing Love to live in and through us…