Dear all,

Here is a link to Claire Petitmengin's micro-phenomenology website. There you will find training material and the dates of future workshops. This is supposed to be a research method, but I believe it is really good personal training as well for meditators, so I would recommend people attend one of these, perhaps just the interviewing technique: the duration is usually 1 week for interview training, 1 week for analysis training. It's not too expensive, 400 euros a week, I think. There is something eye opening and very clarifying about this whole process, especially in becoming aware of the difference between our experiences and our theories, judgments, and explanations about our experiences, and developing the skills of contacting and describing the actual experiences with fresh words. One also learns how to help another person do that. I think it would be very valuable because people tend to be better at expressing their theories about their meditation experiences rather than precisely describe their actual experience. Yay!

Best,

Olivier
 

Have you taken any of their courses, Olivier? 

Yes, both! A valuable experience! 

The two major things for me are (1) the ethics of interviewing people: you really get to experience, by alternatively interviewing and being interviewed in a special state called the state of evocation, how violating/unpleasant it feels when someone gives some sort of "command" or does not make sure they asked your permission to inquire into an apect of the experience you are collectively exploring, or not paying much attention/caring for the intimate details you are sharing. It's not the same as being asked something insensitively on a forum, and it really drives the point home, that ethics and deep care are needed for a good interaction. The interview technique is inspired by clinical interviews and incorporates elements from ericksonian hypnosis. It was initially adapted from another technique by Claire Petitmenging at the request of Francisco Varela to find out about the details of the pre-ictal experience of epileptic patients. They managed to bring to the surface tiny symptoms which the patients had never noticed, that were sure signs of an upcoming seizure, and then able to train the patients to recognize those signs, which meant they could have more power over their disease. So it has a firm grounding in ethics, informed consent, deep listening. And (2) the level of detail you get to in the experiencing will be familiar to more advanced meditators, but the level of detail in the process of analysing the interview data, is something I think most people don't realize is possible. There is a palpable difference, to me, in the scientific writing of someone who's done this sort of training, and someone who has not. Claire Petitmengin has crazy analytical finesse and clarity. Granted, this might not be needed for most purposes in life, and in fact, I am not sure I will ever do a full scale micro-phenomenological study. Still though, I am glad I know about this ;)

​​​​​​​Cheers

Thank you. That's the kind of information I was hoping you'd supply.