The Philosophy of TCI

TCI is more current than ever,
it has, for me, the answers to so many questions and
it asks so many questions to which we must find answers.
It is an attitude and a method at the same time, both are inseparable.
It is a call for democracy and it promotes living democracy in its methods.
It demands and promotes human rights and humanity, solidarity and education, social justice and shared responsibility, clarity of roles and equal opportunities.
It makes the importance of environmental protection and nature conservation tangible.
Everything and everyone is connected with everything and everyone.
Take responsibility for what you do and don't do, both privately and socially, and treat yourself and others with care. (cf. Ruth Cohn)

What makes TCI special for me/for us?

Let me start like this:
I started to experience TCI 25 years ago. I was enthusiastic and did not know why. It seemed simple, plain, not to say trivial, but what made it so fascinating? What seized me inside? Later, when I started working with TCI and progressed in my training, I began to understand the first coherencies. I tried to understand TCI and to grasp it in its entirety. During my diploma training I was sure that I had understood it and sometimes tended to be a bit arrogant, only to realise that this did not help me in my endeavour to act according to TCI.

Again I felt doubt and this fascination to go further, to understand and to feel and savour the liveliness that comes from TCI. I experience liveliness in and with TCI. I feel alive, I experience lively contacts and lively learning. The Globe (our environment and surroundings) comes very close. I experience powerlessness and dependency and at the same time I am part of this globe and therefore not powerless, but partly powerful.

I experience opportunities for action, solidarity and courage. But I also experience that I am responsible: for my decisions, for my actions and their effects on me, on others, on the task and on everything that surrounds me. Burden and desire, despair and courage, helplessness and the power to shape things – all this and much more is there at the same time. Again and again, I learn to get along in areas of tension, to live and communicate the values of TCI, the axioms in my decisions. I am not always successful, and yet I always have the choice.
The two postulates 'Look inwards and look outwards and then decide in responsibility' and 'Disturbances take precedence' guide me and us. To live, lead and teach according to them never takes longer than a whole life, if you start today (cf. Ruth Cohn), and that is a good thing.

Many reasons and explanations of the complexity of TCI are revealed to me when I take a look at Ruth Cohn’s life, which is intrinsically linked to TCI. However, its complexity also makes me doubt whether I have understood TCI at all. And then again, statements and events from Ruth Cohn's life touch me deep in my heart and I understand – not always with my mind. I would like to encourage you to read the following extract from Ruth Cohn with your heart:

"What do I want with TCI?

I want everyone to learn to say 'I' completely
because only then can they find their fulfilment;
and every I already includes the You and the We and the world.

When I get involved with myself deeply enough, when I trust my eyes and other senses,
I also see the world outside –
my neighbours, wife, husband, children, friend, people in the streets, on the screen, trees, animals, houses, mountains, sea and sky. –

When I get completely involved with myself and my eyes, I see the world, and when I get completely involved with my ears, I come to myself.

When I get completely involved with my ears,
I hear the voices of the children and the cars, the crickets, the jet fighters, the screams of the tormented, the whispers of the needy, the cheers of the happy, the waves of the sea, the wind.

When I get completely involved with my feelings and senses,
I rejoice about the smell of the lilies of the valley, the sunbeams on a child's curls, the appreciation of friends and strangers, the visit of people I like, a loving, tender, electrifying embrace of a loved one, the awareness that I have been able to help someone, that someone came to me when I needed him.

I am sad,
when I feel left alone with my thoughts and feelings, when a loved one dies or leaves me, when something very important to me does not work out, when I think about wars and violence and when I see rubbish in mountain streams or the nasty dirt in city streets, when a work of art is destroyed deliberately or carelessly.
The more I belong to the world with my feelings, the deeper are my joy and my sorrow.

When I get deeply involved with my feeling, I come into the world.

And when I get involved with my own body?
At first I really seem to feel only myself, my skin, my weight, my pain, my easing, my breath.
Yes, at first I only seem to be the feeling.
But especially when there is pain and tension and I get involved with myself deeply enough,
something happens that I do not do,
something like healing and space and air and a temporal timelessness, a spatial spacelessness –
a feeling of being carried.

I have never been able to understand,
why the body has been rejected by our religions.
The very body seems to me to be the safest messenger of the spiritual;
and this spiritual, which happens through me, I can only understand religiously – as well as inspirations (the penetration of the spirit) in poetry or thinking.

And when I do not turn to the body, but to the outside –
when I look at the world, the light, the wood, the butterflies, the railway, the aeroplanes,
then I see them with my body-eyes
and realise that I have eyes;
and when I listen to the noise of the street, the squeaking of cars, the sirens of the fire brigade or the wind in the trees and the calling of children or birds,
then I know that I have ears, then I am 'all ears'.
And when I see the light in the child's hair, I find my joy. –
What I'm trying to say is,
that inside and outside – self-realisation, world realisation – meet within me in autonomy and interdependence.
I experience that the more I am aware of our interdependence, the more autonomous I am, and the more collaborative I am, the more I cultivate my own individuality.

I want to have eyes to look out from my room, from my world of flowers and waterfalls and birds, beyond the meadows and mountains and beyond national borders and seas to the boats that swim on cold waves, with women and children raped by pirates and robbed of their last grain of rice and their last clothes.
I want to have ears to hear the cries of those who are sinking and the cries of men in torture dungeons, with hungry dogs eating their penises covered in grease, and the cries of children and parents who have to watch each other's torment at the sight of their loved ones being tortured.

I would like to encourage people who do not want all this suffering not to resign and feel powerless,
but
to use their imagination and their ability to act in order to declare and act in solidarity as long as we still feel autonomous forces within us.
This is what I really want to do with TCI.“
Ruth C. Cohn from "Gelebte Geschichte der Psychotherapie" ("Living History of Psychotherapy"), pages 373-375, 1984

TCI is more current than ever,

it has, for me, the answers to so many questions and
it asks so many questions to which we must find answers.
It is an attitude and a method at the same time, both are inseparable.
It is a call for democracy and it promotes living democracy in its methods.
It demands and promotes human rights and humanity, solidarity and education, social justice and shared responsibility, clarity of roles and equal opportunities.
It makes the importance of environmental protection and nature conservation tangible.
Everything and everyone is connected with everything and everyone.
Take responsibility for what you do and don't do, both privately and socially, and treat yourself and others with care. (cf. Ruth Cohn)