Transcript for interview with Marta Fabregat

[Number of minutes are given at a change of topic so you can cross-refer with the video if you wish]

It's Tessa here today, and I am very honoured to have Marta Fabregat with me, who I have done some training with in the past around focusing. And we'll get into some detail about that later.

Tessa Venuti Sanderson: Welcome, Marta.

Marta: Hello, Tessa! It's so lovely to be here with you.

Tessa: Yeah, we wanted to talk about listening, and hopefully have a deeper understanding of listening by the end of this. And I've got a little poem by Kafka that just popped up in my life a couple of days ago.

He said, “You need not leave the room.

Remain sitting at your table and listen.

You need not even listen, simply wait.

Just listen. Just learn to become quiet

and still and solitary.

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.

It has not choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

And I just love that this just being there.

Marta as you were listening to that. Did anything come to mind about listening?

Marta: I always feel with poems like that that they are. It's like a door, but they are opening another for you to listen you to listen in a very intricate way. The edges of what is implied here. But what I am with after listening to the poem is, yeah, something in in my heart, and like an opening of curiosity.

(6 mins) Tessa: In the introduction I mentioned about focusing. And I know this is a big topic. I spent a year just beginning to learn about it with you, but in a few sentences can you give somebody a kind of overview of focusing.

Marta: This is the 1 million $ question. I think that nobody knows how to answer, and I'm not going to try to answer it from the mind really. Because

What is focusing? Because the world itself cannot cover exactly what focusing is. But for me, if I had to explain it with a felt sensation like thinking and feeling at the same time like, now it's feeling and thinking at the same time.

I think we need both. So focusing features has to be, to bring felt meaning that is growing and that is alive in any given present moment. Yeah.

So it's included in life and the environment. Your life and your inner environment, but everything else and the environment around you.So you can have a relationship. You are the environment. But you are also the one that is aware of the environment around.

So focusing is about inner relationship in contact with life.I would say something like that, simple and not that easy, not that easy to. So, as you know, the cause. The mind wants to understand it and it cannot it can. You cannot fake this because the man cannot do that. It has to be with the body. So the body needs to be fully involved in this listening from the world.

The priority is in the body and the mind is there also to give everything that it knows. But it's filtered through the body, so the information also from the mind help will help the body.

But the body is the drive is at the driver's seat of the experience. If you know what I mean. Focusing. Yes it's the art of living really more than a method or a technique, or anything like that. You know, you cannot tick the box with focusing.

You have to do it. You have to really want to do that, you know you. You have to want to cultivate things be part of of that way of living. Yeah.

Tessa: Should we give people a little bit of an example? So if they've sort of never heard what it sounds like, they can get a sense of it. Perhaps we could both do a little bit of focusing.

(8:52 mins) Marta: I would love that.

Tessa: Yeah, would you like to start? Would that be okay?

Marta: Yes, so are we. This are we going to like? I'll focus on you will reflect to me as well.

Tessa: I think. Let's just say aloud, what we're feeling ourselves. Because I know that when you're reflecting, that's a whole other level, it. It can seem easy when somebody does it. But actually, it's takes practice.

Marta: Totally so. Yes. Okay. So I don't know how much time do I have for this?

Tessa: thinking. Yeah, 2 /3 Minutes. Yeah.

Marta: Okay. First, as I close my eyes and the ‘something’ come to meet me more fully in an explicit way. So you know what is happening in me. While I'm here, even though when I was talking with you, that was happening. But I was not expressing this. Yes, I want to say that.

I've been sensing the whole day something and I still hear around my chest that I’m keeping company. So it's noticing that it's there.

I'm just pausing with that and allowing it to be there the way it is.

And then, coming very close to the sense of, sensation of gravity. I can sense how my bum is sitting. And I notice the little, so you know my sitting bones and different areas around the skin that is in contact with the chair.

And kind of a sense of pressure, and the contact with the fabric of my clothes where it's my skin, I notice different aspects almost millimetre by millimetre. I can sense.

Yeah, deep sigh with that sensing of that resting place. Feet on the ground also sends me, and the sense of temperature in my hands is a little bit cooler than other parts of the body.

I can really sense the something around my chest. And just after coming back from another meeting that I’ve been working with, group of people every week at this time, and I was coming to meet you, Tessa and I, and I knew I had a very small window 5 min, or it was kind of there's something here around. Yeah, I've been here with you and really want to something that really wants to rest here with you

Something like that when I say that something is like, it's about things resting here with you, and something along being in the listening field with you. Notice that something settles as I'm speaking from that place and letting it know that I am here, and I'm acknowledging this, please.

Long breath. Something is already changing and shifting. That area is still alive, and I can sense that is here, and I'm letting it know that it can be there the way it is and I will keep company to it, as I am

forward flowing with you, with the rest of the podcast

I'm going to open my eyes now.

Tessa: (13:53 mins) Thank you, Marta, for sharing.

Marta: Thank you.

Tessa: I’ll have a turn as well. I'm really sensing how I'm sitting. And I notice I'm leaning forwards a little bit. It's, there's a feeling of anticipation or kind of moving towards. Of feeling at the front of the body.

I'm aware of the chest and the front of the neck. And also sensing there's a quietness and a settling after moving around different places today and it's a feeling of: the expression that came to mind is “comingg home to roost” and it's a feeling of comfort.

And as I say, that I can really feel a warmth in my belly with that acknowledgement of the feeling of being back home and comfort. There's a real warmth spreading through the belly, and actually all the way up the back. I feel like I'm reconnecting with the back of myself.

I'm also aware of something in the throat. It's not tension. A sort of slight drawing in. And then a bigger breath than a sigh as I notice that. And I'm gonna open my eyes. Come back.

Marta: Thank you.

Tessa: (16:35 mins) I wonder whether you could say something about your experiencing of focusing and saying, You know this art of living? How how does it change the way you are in your life? Big questions!

Marta: A big breath. I can feel the basically, the fullness of the question, because almost the question implies the answer, isn't it?

Now, focusing, then changes everything. And for people that have been listening to the podcast. Until now. This on, you know, we are only here 15 min or so. It's not that long, but I hope you are already noticing that there is something about pause and the stillness that we can, one finds and anybody can find. Okay. Everybody can do this.

That is unique for all of us. an individual, it's unique. So when we access that or when we remember that aspect of meeting ourselves more fully. we what happens in the outside. That's is a reflection. You cannot not do that.

You're experiencing life in contact with you. And what happens in your body. And you're noticing. And even if you don't name it like with what we have done. Now you don't you name it for yourself when you notice it.

And you're resting with it. You're not doing anything with it. You're not intervening or wanting to make a stretch or wanting to stop it from being or offering something not to be there or running away from it. You are with it. You have decided to stay with it. It's a big thing, isn't it?

You make a decision to stay with it, but it's not even a decision. It's just with practice this is natural. That will happen because we are in relationship with you. How this affects is, oh, my God! Everything changes. There is less right and wrong, or at least you are. You are working towards less work, right and wrong in your life.

It's not happening in this way. Life is not happening in that way. So someone tells you, or gives you an idea or a belief system, or implying something. You can listen to that in a way that maybe nobody listened to that before.

So the all the structures of defence that maybe are there in terms of our conditional, conditioning structures of our the obedience of patterns that we have in our life as in our conditioning go down and something new that maybe was not realized before in this relationship can start growing.

Everything changes this everything. It has a ripple effect, and it's not. It's not esoteric. Natural, organic.

Tessa: (20:39 mins) What's coming to my mind is, I remember there was an email I saw that Jewels Wingfield wrote. She's done circles for many years with couples and with women and she talked about how she realized over the decades that there'd been too much initially. And by slowing down the process and actually being with the process rather than thinking about an outcome. As we were talking about at the beginning everything changed.

And what I notice in my women's circle is that sometimes people are very engaged in what they're hearing. But there's that response, oh, yeah, that happened to me. I want to build empathy. I want to show that they're not al1. 0h, yes, that. But then we're moving away from the pure, listening.

Marta: When there is an objective, when we're exactly what you're saying, when we are concentrated in the objective of that, they will get it right. For example, let's say for groups, yeah, that that you don't. You want to, you know, to care and to nourish that holding in such a way that they will really also be finishing the session with a kind of a sense of something.

In some way we are intervening in the natural process. It's very interesting how that happens. Because we are in a way, you know, gardeners. Yeah, we have learned to garden. We haven't learned to rewild or to rewild ourselves and life. So we all our all our learning until here. And still it's going on. You name it. You go into Google, and you're looking for a course. And there it is. How to be a gardener

In many different ways, I spoon fed on how to be a gardener. 1,500 ways of methodology on how to be a Gardener. But the most difficult thing it always will be to rewild and to really be in a hands off environment where you allow the natural order of things to function and to find its own natural way

For that to happen it also needs some conditions. It's not that you are redundant from that place. No, it needs company for a natural regeneration to happen, of the order of connection in among us people or among life. I think it works in all levels, animals, plants, and… we need company.

We need company and a kind of company that is not interventional, that is nonjudgmental, that it cares in such a way that will not there to put a finger on it so it can find itself when the time is right. One time is that as a perfect arrangement and conditions.

But the most important thing is that you will remain there. cause then it can grow.

Tessa: (18:45 mins) Did you think of that like a ‘being with’?

Marta: And that being we is full of things. It's not empty: is empty and is full. That's my sense. It really brings you to that place, you know.

And it's not you know, a place that you're floating. It's really grounded, you know. I think in the body keeps us grounded in that connection with the organic becoming, of who we are. And if we are in contact with the body that organic memory of who we are and how we are made of, and how our body functions.

If we have that capacity of listening to that memory everything else is like an intricate listening to everything else with environment around us. You know, it's like, the analogy that keeps coming to me, I'm actually writing about this and the organic memory, and the listening to our organic memory in our body.

Where you can find that access point like a nucleus point of resting in you can offer you, and it will be different for everyone. That's my investigation.

Your own mycelium in Middle Earth to listen to everything else in a way that is not judgmental, you know. It's not objective based, but it is.

It has the quality, whether you have information of it or not. Your body has the information. Yeah.

It's giving you the quality of listening that will for you to understand it in a very intricate and maybe less words way, you know, with more compassion and more, including everything.

Tessa: (20:30) Hmm! How important do you think it is that we can find the words when we're listening to the felt sense they.

Marta: so yeah, felt sense is something curious. And for those of you that don't know what a ‘felt sense’ is one is a word that that Eugene Gendlin developed or found. I think he found that word in his own experiencing, of coming into, I mean, in contact with his history. Yeah.

And he found that felt sensing. And now it's being used by many others and methods. And it's okay, you know. But I'm not sure if they describe it in the like or experienced in the same way. It's the core practice of self sensing and focusing. Felt sensing is not everything that you find in there.

Cell sensing is a complex organism that only can grow inside of your body when the right conditions of listening to you are happening which means when you can be with all the different aspects that are at the surface of experience whether it is conditioning thinking, physical aches and pains and sensations or feelings.

Feelings that are can be background feelings, or it can be feelings that you are with most of the time. There's a kind of a sadness there, or there is a kind of a melancholy ongoing in you, you know. They are not felt senses, even though you might have a physical sensation of them

Felt sense is something of the complexity of what you find when you open the door of a feeling. Yeah. And it comes in a different tonality in the physical body, in how you are sensing it.

It's delicate, it's it can be moving. It can be, you know, wavy and making different things, and like now I can feel it in my around, my head, heart, as I'm speaking of it. It comes to show me how it is beautiful.

so felt sense has meaning. But has information about everything about that. It won't do it with one word only. And sometimes it might be okay. One word comes and root, it lands completely in the felt sense. And the felt sense you can feel it that says, Yes, yeah, it's about that. Yeah.

But if you stay a little bit longer, if you don't, just keep it and fix it, and you just catch it, and you go away with that word. If you stay a little bit longer, it's going to give you the multi-layer experiencing of that theme, or that something that you are with in such a beautiful and amazing way that you can write a book about that theme.

Let's put it that way. So the felt sense has an endless information in a philosophical way, where it's creating new meaning. Something that it's known, but also your own experiencing of this theme, which is probably new. That's it.

Tessa: (24: 00) I was thinking again of poetry and sort of how when you're trying to find the right words, and you said, Well, it's it, or maybe it's not quite like that. It's more this. And oh, oh! And there's through that clarification you're getting close to.

Marta: Yeah. Thanks.

Tessa: The richness.

Marta: Exactly, and I can, and I can understand why so many poets, they go back into their poetry years after, and want to change the poem. And why is that? Because when they read it again. Something jumps up in the body, when those words are pronounced again as an echo to the body because they don't want to stay the same. There is from that moment that it's it was written to now. Something has shifted.

How many people that write music after I have, my son is a musician, and he tells me all the time. “Oh, please don't play that song.” Because that's 10 years ago. Song when he was 15, and his experience of 22-year-old now is not the same of 21, you know. It's very different. Maybe you can revisit that song and go back. And then, maybe, you know, write something that is current. With that that you learn. And all the time in between. There's so much information.

So no wonder that happens. Yeah. No wonder.

Tessa: (29:45) And I noticed there was an article about focusing in the Juno magazine. So it's the autumn. 2024 edition.

Marta: Of?

Tessa: Yeah. Juno, magazine. Yeah. And it's a lovely article about using it with children?

Marta: Wow, yeah.

Tessa: The way they titled it was ‘hearing our own insides’.

Marta: Yes, nice.

Tessa: And they were saying, because it might be that a child couldn't explain what's happened. But if you say, “Where is it living in your body?” most children kind of be able to say something about that and what it feels like. I thought that was lovely.

Marta: Yeah, exactly. Where do you feel it in the body? When there are less defences or mechanisms or strategies that have been built up, that's like a human animal functioning here.

And we are more connected with our senses. And when we are children, we are connected very much with that moment of an edge. There is an edge at some point on our, on our on our development child development. Probably at around 5, 6, 7, where we are, we have to make a choice.

And somehow we make a choice to be gardeners instead of rewild. Keep rewilding ourselves, you know. So, because the conditions are not appropriate, we, it is safer to become a gardener, to fit in and to to belong to the quality of institutional colonialism. Yeah, that it's happening. So we need to become a gardener, even though in within us we are exiling so many things at that point of that want to to be re-wilded. I want to continue growing as a native woodland.

Tessa: (27:37) And I'm thinking about how this then translates into a group of people or a circle where, you know, it's possible that people could come together and just talk on a more surface level and that might be helpful to be listening in some sense and being witnessed in your experience.

But then, if it shifts to that, that deeper listening where you're tracking what's happening as people talk, that's quite a different thing. Actually.

Marta: Radically, different. Very radically different. You all probably have been in a meditation retreat. Yeah. And the moment that the silence is gone everybody starts talking like nothing has happened. Most likely this is going to happen, and I've been meditating for a long time, and I always struggled with that. That's why I became a focuser because I needed. I needed to continue in the outer relationship.

I needed to continue noticing my experiencing in contact with everyone else, and not to start, you know, not to start talking about, I don't know, politics. Or if we are talking about politics, that it's been spoken from a place of that felt sensing. Oh, I mean, there's that something in me that feels that this is very uncomfortable. What's happening here? And I'm struggling with this and I'm feeling it here in my heart. I miss that in retreats I miss that. That's why I very rarely. You will rarely see me in any retreat anymore, unless it's a focusing retreat ‘cause I know that even though that might happen in a focusing rate, I can ask for this way of listening.

I can always ask for that way of listening, anyway. Yeah. That the space is created for that to happen.

Tessa: (29:50) Because I know from when I'm running trainings around people want to who want to start to lead circles. There's a lot of worry about the dynamics that there will be in the group. And if there's a lot of raw emotion that comes up, or if somebody starts to dominate.

When you start to make all of that explicit...

Marta: So that's why I think reflection is very beautiful. And and of course it needs to be done at the same time. When you're learning focusing. You cannot do this by reading a book.

Okay, focusing needs to be learned and it has. And it is a, it is a process, a group process. So you have your own experiencing of how that affects your body system when you are accompanied in this way.

And that is like you are accessing your inner pedagogy. You know you're you're learning. You are learning in your own way, and all of a sudden all the conditions for learning appear in your process, so I would always say, please don't ever reflect if you haven't done, don't reflect, because I'm sure that your conditioning is creeping inside of the edges of what you're, you know, trying to do, and still be doing the same advice given or wanting to intervene, you know.

Marta: So in a, in a group, in a group for me, one of the beautiful things of being a facilitator and I’ve had the deep honour to be carrying many groups in my life.

Sitting with the experience of all that is there without exception, just as it is without judgment. So, for example, if someone is speaking, I will just give them the space, whatever it is. I wouldn't imply that they are dominating. So that's something that says that they are dominating.

I will keep company to that myself as a awesome, how do you say it, as a facilitator, know for space? Because that may come up for me. Yeah, cause we are human beings. I'm not enlightened, and I'm not trying to do that. I am a human being with a very messy inner stuff, like everyone else. I just happen to be keeping company to it ongoingly in my life. A lot. So I have a lot of practice not to get in the way of other people's growth.

We are shaky human beings, all of us, and I think it is very important that the arrogant self as a facilitator comes down the stage with people and change the dynamic from that place, and only, and the reflection will help the whoever is there to be more with themselves. So it can self-regulate whatever it's there.

And you can keep on doing that, you know. So I noticed that we, when we are reflecting in this way. My knowing of everything. I leave it in one side, and my analysis of things and everything that I've learned, and everything in between psychology and everything else. I leave it on the other side.

And I'm only really there, like, if I was going into the woods and I was seeing this deer, and that's the deer that it is. As it is, there is no right and wrong thinking there has not to be.

If there is some right and wrong thinking, we need to keep company to ourselves, otherwise it will affect the holding of the group. Really. So it is a delicate place holding groups. Yeah, it is delicate. For safety and for real shift.

For real shifts to happen in circle holding.

Tessa: Yeah, very delicate. There's a real art and skill. But, as you said, with the focusing only comes through practicing it and doing it and being there. I wonder what do you think the connection is to the beginner's mind? Is that perhaps something that's recognisable to people that you think is applicable?

Marta: Yeah, beginners mind, as said Zen Suzuki. Yeah. Of course. My background is in Zen. Before I came into focusing. I was as practitioner for many years, and I still am. And I don't think I can ever be out of that, because it really humbles me that beginners mine ongoingly, and no matter how many years you are at it, you know, I feel that we need to come back into that, you know.

Yeah. The humility of being shaken, you know, because if we go inside, it's most of the time it is shaking inside, most of the time shaking in some way whether it is about your life, or it is because something that is unresolved in your life and in your with your family or the world is shaking, and if you are in contact with your human animal, you really feel that not to not to do something, but to be with both, with beauty and terror within you. Because if you listen, that's what it is.But that doesn't mean that we need to be merging or having to fix it, or anything like that. It means that being in contact with what is, is, I feel, very important for the new paradigm that maybe we are all waiting for, you know. But I don't think it can be done without the not knowing and the humble beginner mind.

Tessa: And so, if somebody was aspiring to become a circle holder. What would you recommends in terms of their rewilding? How, how would you, I don't know, signpost them to how they can develop that rewilding rather than being a gardener still?

Marta: Well, I haven't found anything better than focusing in my life and I've been shopping around like everyone else, but I think I want to stay here. There is nothing in the world that is being offered that I'm interested anymore. Because that reduces every focusing for me has reduced everything into simplicity, into really just cultivating a practice that has endless infinite information that comes from me, and not from other people or other sources.

Other people and other sources will. It will also be very beautiful to be with, to play with. But ultimately the newness of what I'm about. It's it's my own signature, is your unique purpose. It is important in the world that we bring our own signature.

Tessa: Thank you so much. You've raised some really important points. You know, that authenticity of being with your own uniqueness, and the being humble and all of those things. I really appreciate your experience on this. And I hope people will take a look at focusing. If they've not heard about it before, I'll put links below the episode so people can perhaps start a new journey to their own rewilding.

Marta: it was lovely to be with you, Tessa. I have very fond memories of you in the class, and our group. Our little group of that year. I'm very happy about your book and everything that you have done. Really, you know, I'm bowing at you.

Tessa: Thank you. My heart is full. Having talked to you, I'm going to go and enjoy that that glow with my heart.

Tessa: Thank you.

Marta: Thank you so much.