Sometimes Buddhist teachers inaccurately use the phrase ‘felt sense’ – a term which has, in the wake of Gendlin’s work, become popularised over the last thirty years. What is a felt sense?
Not Another Word for Sensation
Sometimes, all the meditation teacher means is: ‘a sensation that you feel closely, or objectively.’ Joseph Goldstein, for instance, in his book on the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, when talking about the ‘four great elements’ (Pāli: mahābhūta) – that is, the earth element, the water element, the fire element and the air element – says:
“This mindful precision helped illuminate the body as the interplay of these four elements. As we free ourselves from the concept of “body” and increasingly experience the direct felt sense of it, the mind becomes less prone to attachment and to the desire, aversion, and conceit that come from it.” – Joseph Goldstein. Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening (p. 71).
I think that what he means here, and in the several other places in the book, is just ‘directly-experienced sensation.’ A ‘felt sense’ is, of course, a type of sensation– a quite subtle and vague sensation – but it’s a special case of sensation. One which is specifically about meaning.
“A felt sense is a bodily sensation, but it is not merely a physical sensation like a tickle or a pain. Rather, it is a physical sense of something, of meaning, of implicit intricacy. It is a sense of a whole situation or problem or concern, or perhaps a point one wants to convey.”
– Eugene T Gendlin, Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method
Not Another Word for Feelings, or Feeling-Tones
I got a surprise one day, when reading a book by a Buddhist psychotherapist. He was talking about Gendlin’s work, and instructing us about the ‘felt sense’; but, in fact he was explicitly and mistakenly identifying Gendlin’s concept of the ‘felt sense’ with the Buddhist concept ‘vedanā.’
Vedanā one of the five observable, sentient processes. The word refers to the three feeling-tones – three categories of experience, which are: pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant nor neutral; and, which go with any sensation or experience.
A felt sense (as Gendlin means it) is not simply the feeling-tone aspect of some sensation. Naming the feeling-tone of an actual felt sense is often useful, and so it is sometimes part of a Focusing process. Indeed, sometimes when I start checking in to see what a felt sense is telling me, I might say: “Hmm… there’s something here that doesn’t feel so good.”
That can be step. It’s certainly naming feeling-tone, but it may be just an opening, an invitation for the felt sense to show itself some more, to come into view. Or, it might be that a sub-personality ( a part) is speaking, right there; and, I’ll need to say hello to that, first. In these cases, there’ll be more steps follow from the naming of the feeling-tone. In other words, a particular feeling-tone may provide a partial angle on a felt sense – a bit of information about a felt sense – but a felt sense is always more than a feeling-tone.
It might be possible, if you want to use the Buddhist model, to say that all felt senses are going to have some feeling-tone. Of course, that’s true. But, we don’t always have to name it; and, that’s not all a felt sense is.
To give you a sense of the importance of feeling in our intelligent life, I want to communicate something about what it is. Have you ever wondered what a feeling is? To most of us ‘feeling’ means a subjective experience – a sensation (a feeling of being tired, for example), or an emotion (a feeling of being angry), or to have a belief or conviction (“I feel strongly that..”).
Normally we take a feeling as part of a fixed self, part of its make-up – even though they do come and go. The feeling tells me about ‘me,’ and about what kind of person I am. Furthermore, t looks like something of mine that springs up at the end of a chain of some that it is purely internal which is trotted out in reaction. It looks, to the ordinary untrained perception, as though it comes formed in a packet, by itself, in reaction to something separate and ‘over there.’
Let’s look more deeply into it. What if we start, in Gendlin fashion, by saying that our self-organising body is always an interaction with the environment. Indeed, that the environment is an aspect of what we call body. An environment is in a body every bit as much as a body is in an environment. So, the feelings of our subjective world are the bodily-felt aspect of that interaction. Feeling indicates how the body is going on in its situation. Feeling is the body reiterating its experiencing-checking process.
This means that, the felt sense of something is the actual living interaction – it’s the environment as it is in us and it is the body living its situation – not just some end-point package brought forth in reaction to an outside event. This is why it carries/is/feels meaning.
This is important. If we believe (as most of us do) that feelings are only internal reactions, then we miss what they are about – they are interactions; they are of the environment. The bodily life and its self-sensing of its situations are a kind of self-locating, and tell us how our life process is carrying forward.
The ‘felt sense’ is a special case of feeling, then; in that, it is the subtle, vague, yet precise feel of a meaningful inward ‘wholeness’ of the interacting.
The felt sense layer of functioning is at the unfolding edge of awareness. Gendlin says, in Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method:
“General descriptions do not convey focusing. It differs from the usual attention we pay to feelings because it begins with the body and occurs in the zone between the conscious and the unconscious. Most people don’t know that a bodily sense of any topic can be invited to come in that zone, and that one can enter into such a sense. At first it is only a vague discomfort, but soon it becomes a distinct sense with which one can work, and in which one can sort out many strands,” p.9
It’s the feel of the ‘more of the meaningfulness’ that our body knows. It’s the ‘all that about X,’ and it brings the next step forward in our life.
One can sense that it includes many intricacies and strands. It is not uniform like a piece of iron or butter. Rather it is a whole complexity, a multiplicity implicit in a single sense.
– Eugene T Gendlin, Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy: A Manual of the Experiential Method, p.33.
The trouble is, once you decide that a felt-sense of something is identical to either a ‘sensation’ or a ‘feeling-tone’ (both have been translations for ‘vedanā’), then you have stopped being open to more steps from inside that vague spot in the middle of you; and, this being so, people then often grasp onto other mental factors which might or might not be in reaction to it – such as the desire for more of what is pleasant, or less of what is unpleasant. Or, some analysis, or opinion, about the feeling.
If we don’t know about the felt sense – don’t know that the murky edge that comes when we check to see how we really are about something may have something to say to us – then we will easily miss the opportunity to facilitate the unfolding of a next step in our process.
So, when you hear a meditation teacher talking about having a ‘felt sense,’ I suggest you ask (yourself or them) what they are actually referring to. It may mean nothing more than having “bare attention” of a sensation or a feeling-tone.