Participative Interview with Steven M. Rosen

Steven M. Rosen is an emeritus professor of psychology and philosophy in the City University of New York. Since meeting with David Bohm in 1990, Steven became involved in Dialogue groups in New York, incorporated Dialogue into his college courses, and later founded a Dialogue group in Vancouver that includes a somatic dimension. Steven calls this Proprioceptive Dialogue. The sessions typically begin with ten minutes of silence so participants can settle into their bodies and calm the riot of thoughts they often arrive with.  We attend not only to our thoughts and feelings but to the bodily dimension of what we experience (one person’s sense of “butterflies” fluttering in her chest, another person’s perception of abdominal heaviness, etc.) Other aspects of  Dialogue we have emphasized are the importance of listening and the key role played by silence. And the group has occasionally experimented with vocal and musical forms of expression, such as Kirtan.  These experiments are designed to go beyond the abstract content of speech in order to investigate proprioceptively the rudimentary sensations and energy patterns of vocal production.  Steven’s website (embodyingcyberspace.com) devotes two pages to the theory and practice of Proprioceptive Dialogue.