TAE (Thinking At the Edge) as a revolutionary new practice
What is my unique knowing and how can I nourish other people and contribute to the world through it? You are invited to a meaningful process that will guide you step by step into the depths of your own unique knowing… and beyond knowing… to the depths of the ‘soulprint’ that is revealed through your encounter with life.
This is a process that guides us to contemplate an area of life where we have rich experience and ‘living knowledge’. The goal of this process is to help us explicate the ‘implicit knowledge’ that we have, and develop a personal, innovative language and precise tools that refine this knowledge to the level of unique expertise.
Usually, to enrich ourselves, we are used to ‘thinking outward’, turning to sources that are already written and formulated, and unwittingly, we give up the natural but hidden ability of every person to turn to a rich and intricate internal source of knowledge and think it through from our own life experience. We often feel that ‘we’ are not ‘worthy’ to create knowledge that will be meaningful to others, but most often, we simply do not have the tools to reach the personal wellspring of our lives and share it with the world. Even if in our practice we do wonderful things and have wonderful insights, it often remains with us as unformulated knowledge and therefore stays hidden from others.
Thinking at the Edge (TAE) is a philosophy and practice that allows creative intervention into the ‘hidden perception’ from which we understand our lives. This process allows the personal wisdom embedded in us to become conscious and meaningful.
What is ‘personal thinking‘? What is the art of ‘first-person’ thinking’? How does one think their lives personally? Gendlin offers a new meaning to the act of thinking itself. For him, “thinking” is a movement that thinks not only with existing concepts and patterns but is also a first-person movement that turns our attention to the rich meanings that operate within us but are not visible in order to include them in our thinking.
What is expertise? TAE invites us to a new way of thinking about our field of expertise. ‘Expertise’ is the way in which a subject we have been dealing with for many years, such as our professional field or a creative work we are involved in, can become a space of personal significance – a place where my ‘soulprint’ is manifested in the world. ‘Expertise’ is not just a result that is the fruit of many years of experience, but it is a new meaning created from steps of explicating the unique way in which a person has lived and acted in the world for many years. This is a process that asks for subtle exploration of what we are ‘really doing’ in our lives, which is often covered by the jargon of our professional field. ‘Expertise’ seeks not only to formulate the known but also the ‘rich intricacy’that is implicit and seeks to be revealed, in which wisdom that I have never thought of as worthy of thinking about is embedded.
‘Thinking at the Edge’ is a process recommended for anyone who wants to develop their professionalism; for anyone at a crossroads seeking clarity and a meaningful leap forward in their path; for anyone involved in creative processes or a scientific project and is seeking to work with it in a new way; and for organizations seeking to understand their next possible step.
