Level 1
Hand out for class felt sense
Eugene Gendlin on the felt sense
“A felt sense is the holistic, implicit body sense of a complex situation… A felt sense contains a maze of meanings, a whole textile of facets, a Persian rug of patterning – more than could be said or thought. Despite its intricacy, the whole felt sense also has a focus, a single specific demand, direction or point… One single thing, one statement, or one next step can arise from the whole of it all…” from Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy p. 58
Ann Weiser Cornell on the felt sense
The Focusing process involves coming into the body and finding there a special kind of body sensation called a “felt sense.” Eugene Gendlin was the first person to name and point to a felt sense, even though human beings have been having felt senses as long as they’ve been human. A felt sense, to put it simply, is a body sensation that has meaning. You’ve certainly been aware of a felt sense at some time in your life, and possibly you feel them often.
Imagine being on the phone with someone you love who is far away, and you really miss that person, and you just found out in this phone call that you’re not going to be seeing them soon. You get off the phone, and you feel a heaviness in your chest, perhaps around the heart area. Or let’s say you’re sitting in a room full of people and each person is going to take a turn to speak, and as the turn comes closer and closer to you, you feel a tightness in your stomach, like a spring winding tighter and tighter. Or let’s say you’re taking a walk on a beautiful fresh morning, just after a rain, and you come over a hill, and there in the air in front of you is a perfect rainbow, both sides touching the ground, and as you stand there and gaze at it you feel your chest welling up with an expansive, flowing, warm feeling. These are all felt senses.
If you’re operating purely with emotions, then fear is fear. It’s just fear, no more. But if you’re operating on the felt sense level, you can sense that this fear, the one you’re feeling right now, is different from the fear you felt yesterday. Maybe yesterday’s fear was like a cold rock in the stomach, and today’s fear is like a pulling back, withdrawing. As you stay with today’s fear, you start to sense something like a shy creature pulled back into a cave. You get the feeling that if you sit with it long enough, you might even find out the real reason that it is so scared. A felt sense is often subtle, and as you pay attention to it you discover that it is intricate. It has more to it. We have a vocabulary of emotions that we feel over and over again, but every felt sense is different. You can, however, start with an emotion, and then feel the felt sense of it, as you are feeling it in your body right now.
Felt sensing is not something that other methods teach. There is no one else, outside of Focusing, who is talking about this dimension of experience which is not emotion and not thought, which is subtle yet concretely felt, absolutely physically real. Felt sensing is one of the things that makes it Focusing.