The Seba library treats Clearing in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Gendlin, Eugene T., Winhall, Jan, Carol K. Anthony).
CLEARING A CLUTTERED ROOM We’ve already looked at this room-clearing approach. It is the one that makes me call this first movement the act of ‘clearing a space.’
Gendlin identifies ‘clearing a space’ as the definitive first movement of Focusing, a preparatory inner act of body-mind receptivity that must precede all other focusing movements.
, Focusing: How to Gain Direct Access to Your Body’s Knowledge, 2010thesis
Clearing space is step one in focusing. We are creating an inner relationship that is about being with experience… We clear space first to invite a ventral state of calm.
Winhall integrates Gendlin’s clearing-space procedure with polyvagal theory, framing it as the somatic induction of a regulated nervous-system state prior to working with any single problem.
, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Modelthesis
Ask one at a time to get some distance, just for now… Eventually, the space down in the centre of your body is clear. Notice what that is like.
Winhall provides a detailed guided instruction for clearing space, emphasising the progressive distancing of issues into imagined external locations until interior stillness is achieved.
, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Modelthesis
clearing Index 215 space 16; finding a handle 17–18; getting felt sense of problem 16–18; heart of 17; in partnerships 15–16; practice 60, 64, 77
The index entry situates clearing space as the discrete inaugural step within the broader Focusing sequence described throughout the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model.
, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Modelsupporting
Keeping still as meditation requires… bringing oneself to a state of inner emptiness through systematically clearing out the clamoring voices of the inferiors.
Anthony’s I Ching commentary invokes a structurally parallel clearing operation — the systematic quieting of inner voices — as the foundation of contemplative stillness and inner peace.
, A Guide to the I Ching, 1988supporting
We speak of picking up, washing up, doing up, clearing up, tidying up, maintenance as upkeep. Clearly, what is maintained rises up from disorder to order.
Hillman’s etymological attention to ‘clearing up’ as a maintenance verb links the clearing gesture to the broader cultural and thermodynamic logic of sustaining order against entropy.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995aside
Coming to a clearing in the forest, she lay down by a big rock and fell asleep.
The narrative image of the child finding a clearing in the forest serves as a mythic figure for the moment of rest and receptivity that precedes being found — a spatial analogue to the inner clearing operation.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994aside
I understood that part of cleaning house was clearing up any problems I had created or caused with other people or if I had hurt or insulted anyone.
Within the Twelve Step context, clearing up is applied to interpersonal and moral debris rather than inner somatic space, but retains the same logic of preparatory removal enabling forward movement.
, Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous: The Twelve Steps as a Spiritual Journey of Individuation, 2015aside