Excerpt from the book The 5 Knots by Claus Springborg, PhD

Both Sensing Scope and Sensing Taboos use attention to felt sense as a means of directing the client’s attention towards Being. But this is achieved in opposite ways.

In Sensing Scope, we invite the client to examine the felt sense they expect to get if they successfully create their desired experience. This guides the client to notice the felt sense underpinning a positive reification of Being.

In Sensing Taboos, on the other hand, we invite the client to examine the felt sense they expect to get if they failed completely in creating their desired experience. This guides the client to notice the felt sense underpinning a negative reification of Being.

The relationship between the two processes is illustrated in Figure 14.

The outer circle illustrates the two processes emerging from positive and negative reification of Being respectively.

On the right side, Being is reified as a positive phenomenon by relating it to something negative. This generates a wish to create or acquire that phenomenon. This, in turn, leads to the development of ideas about what conditions are necessary to fulfil to create or acquire the phenomenon.

On the left side, Being is reified as a negative phenomenon by relating it to something positive. This generates a wish to avoid that phenomenon. This, in turn, leads to ideas about what conditions one must fulfil to avoid the phenomenon.

Wishes to avoid negative reifications of Being and wishes to achieve positive reifications of Being can then match up in a wish to change something in one’s life.

A client may, for example, reify the silent aspect of Being as deadness (negative), which they wish to avoid, and the dynamic aspect of Being as aliveness (positive), which they wish to attain. These two wishes can merge into a single wish to feel more alive and less dead in life.

Alternatively, a client may reify the silent aspect of Being as peace (positive), which they wish to attain, and the dynamic aspect of Being as agitation (negative), which they wish to avoid. In this case, the client may express a single wish to feel more peace and less agitation in life.

The inner circle illustrates how both Sensing Scope and Sensing Taboos start from the client’s wish to change something in their life and move the client’s awareness step by step back to Being.

In the Sensing Scope process, we start from the change the client wishes to make in their life. By inviting the client to imagine what 100% success would feel like, we move the client’s awareness to the state they seek to create or acquire. By inviting the client to examine the felt sense of this state, we move the client’s awareness to Being.

In the Sensing Taboos process, we also start from the change the client wishes to make in their life. By inviting the client to imagine what 100% failure would feel like, we move the client’s awareness to the state they seek to avoid. By inviting the client to examine the felt sense of this state without any judgement, we move the client’s awareness to Being.

Figure 14: Sensing Taboos vs Sensing Scope

Both processes are tricks in the sense that the therapist starts the exploration within the framework of the misconceptions that underpin the client’s understanding of their situation while leading the client along a path of inquiry that is guided by knowledge of the true nature of Being.

Sensing Scope is a trick because the therapist starts by talking about the wonderful thing the client is trying to create or acquire – knowing that when they become aware of what they are ultimately reaching for, they will discover that they are seeking Being, which is already present, and that they, therefore, don’t need to create or acquire anything.

Sensing Taboos is a trick because the therapist starts by talking about the terrible thing the client is trying to avoid – knowing that when they become aware of what they are ultimately avoiding and suspend their judgements, they will discover that it is Being and that it, as such, is the very same they in other contexts have been seeking and longing for and, thus, not something they need to avoid.

In other words, in both processes, the therapist should avoid directly challenging the client’s current understanding, even if it is flawed, and leave it to the experience of the process to alter the client’s understanding of their situation.