"Space speaks." Edward Hall

David Grove, the originator of Clean Language and the innovator of many processes for working with autogenic (client-generated) metaphor, has done it again. He has created Clean Space, a fascinating new approach that uses emergence to model human perception and facilitate organic change.

Adjacency is about 'next to-ness'.  It creates meaning in people's minds - naturally.  This article examines the significance of adjacency, how we can recognise it, and how we can work with it for ourselves and our clients, taking a 'clean' approach to adjacency.

A joined-up model of how methodologies derived from the work of David Grove invoke the psychoactivity of spatial relations in therapeutic, as well as in other settings. Once a space becomes psychoactive a person is effectively 'living in their metaphor'. Then, when something changes in that perceptual space (often spontaneously), more of their mind-body is involved. This usually produces a more embodied and systemic change.

Clean Language is a method developed by David Grove to dialogue with a client's symbolic representations and metaphoric expressions. This article briefly describes how you can use Clean Language to enhance your non-verbal communication with clients.

Space is not 'nothing'. It may be no 'thing', but that is not the same as 'nothing'. It is probably the most overlooked aspect of cognition. Just as the goldfish in its bowl does not include the no-thingness of its water (or rather, the clarity of its water) in its cognition of things, so we tend to disregard  the space within which our cognitive processes function. I say within which our cognitive processes function, because the evidence is that we do not think within our heads, but within our perceptual space. The totality of human subjective experience would seem to be an intimate interaction between the body , the Perceptual Space and its Generative Source (not considered within the scope of this article).

"In all living creatures, from snails to people, knowledge of space is central to behavior.  As John O'Keefe notes, "Space plays a role in all our behaviour.  We live in it, move through it, explore it, defend it."  Space is not only a critical sense but a fascinating one because unlike other senses space is not analyzed by a specialized sensory organ.  Because we do not have a sensory organ dedicated to space, the representation of space is a quintessentially cognitive sensibility: it is the binding problem writ large. The brain must combine inputs from several different sensory modalities and then generate a complete internal representation that does not depend exclusively on any one input. How, then, is space represented?" In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, Eric R. Kandel, Norton, 2007