Chapter 2
FELT SENSES ARE paradoxical. In a way they are always there, but since we rarely notice them, they are also not there. When we first bring attention into the body and sense for “something” we may notice nothing at all. Or we may sense that something is present in a bodily felt way, but it is vague, subtle, murky. In learning to find the felt sense, we have to learn to differentiate it from more common modes of experience: physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions. The good news is that each of these modes can be a gateway into the felt sense. In this chapter and the next, we will practice approaching felt senses through each of these three gates of body, mind, and emotion, beginning with the body.
The Body Gate
When we stub our toe or touch a hot stove, we experience a sudden, sharp sensation of pain. Compared to felt senses, these are purely physical sensations. They are “about” the immediate situation of toe stubbing or stove touching. Less dramatic examples would be an itch, a sore muscle, a stomachache. Of course, physical sensations can be pleasurable as well—a full belly, the touch of a friend or a lover—or they can be neutral. They are all responses to a specific stimulus or event. Usually we know exactly what is causing the sensation.
Felt senses are different. They don’t seem to be responses to specific physical stimuli. Rather than having physical causes, they are connected to situations, activities, and relationships. In this way, they are more like feelings, yet different from ordinary emotions. In the next exercise, you will practice differentiating physical sensations and felt senses.
Exercise 2.1 From Physical Sensations to Felt Senses
Bring your attention to your body. Start by noticing the physical sensations wherever your body is contacting the earth—the feel of your bottom against the chair, your feet on the ground, your hand resting on the desk. Take a few moments to really notice the immediate sensory qualities you are experiencing. Notice too any places where one part of your body is touching another.
Now move your awareness all around your body and notice any kind of physical sensations: aches and pains, itches, tight spots, stiff joints. Include positive, negative, and neutral sensations. Take time to really experience each one.
Now gradually bring your awareness inside your torso—the whole area from your throat down to your bottom. First check again for any purely physical sensations anywhere in this area. Then soften your awareness and sense if there are also present some less obvious, less distinct sensations. They may not feel exactly physical, yet they are present in some way that can be felt inside the body. They will have a location, shape, texture, movement, or other tangible quality. A tight spot in the chest, a fluttery feeling in the belly, or a melting sensation around the heart are some examples, but felt senses come in endless variety and can be hard to describe in words at all.
If you don’t find anything like this or aren’t sure what it is you are noticing, don’t worry. At this point what is important is the attitude of gently sensing inside the body—friendly attending. If you feel confused or frustrated or impatient, check if there is a body sense somewhere inside that goes along with that feeling.
The purpose of this exercise is not to make too sharp a distinction between physical sensations and felt senses. Indeed, at times they are nested together. The main point here is to learn how to shift attention from direct physical sensations to the more intangible, elusive sensations of the felt sense.
The Mind Gate
Most of us, during most of our waking hours, are involved in thinking. Whether we’re expressing our thoughts in speech or silently to ourselves, there is a continuous stream of words, ideas, and images. If you’re in any doubt about this, take a few minutes now to close your eyes and simply sit in silence without having any thoughts. You are unlikely to be able to sit still for more than a few seconds before some thought, memory, or daydream arises in your consciousness. This is the nature of conceptual mind—it is always going, like a radio that can’t be turned off.
In working with the felt sense, we need to counteract the way in which conceptual thinking usually dominates our waking consciousness. We have to learn how to drop the story line of discursive thought in order to enter the nonconceptual felt space of direct experience. The story line is our internal narrative about our life experiences. It helps us make sense of our experiences and allows us to share them with others—both very important—but it is an interpretation of experience rather than the experience itself. This is a subtle point: most of the time we get along fine without differentiating direct experience from our interpretations of it. But it is a crucial difference. Like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon, our interpretation points toward the experience, but if we take it as the whole truth, we lose the connection to our actual, lived experience and can easily end up misleading ourselves. To contact experience directly, we need to release the story line and sense, beneath it, how our body is actually living our life situations. In the next exercise, you will practice deliberately dropping the story line.
Exercise 2.2 Dropping the Story Line
Gather your attention and bring it into your body. Take a moment to notice any unclear felt senses that may be present there, trying not to give rise to discursive thinking. After a little while, choose a topic to think deliberately about. It can be a recent event, a relationship issue, a work challenge, something in the future.
Now go ahead and think about this topic in the usual discursive way: recollecting what happened, ruminating, thinking about the future, and so forth (the word discursive literally means “running on about”). After about two minutes, simply let go of the whole thought process and bring your awareness into your torso. You are dropping the story line, the descriptive words and images of whatever topic you were thinking about, and bringing your attention to how things feel in your body just now.
If you find it challenging to shift gears directly from thinking to body-sensing, try first shifting your focus of attention from the story line to your breathing, noticing the physical sensations of your breath as it comes into your chest and abdomen and goes out again. Once you have moved from discursive thinking to the present-moment felt experience of breathing, you can relax the focus on your breathing and sense in the same internal space for subtle body feels. Remember, you are sensing for what is present in a nonverbal way in your experience right now. If you notice “something” try to stay with it for a while without giving rise to new thoughts.
If thoughts do arise, recognize them as thinking and let them go, gently shifting your attention back to the felt sense. After spending time with one felt sense, take time to notice if there are any others present in different spots and with different textures, shapes, or energy.
When you release the story line and find a felt sense, sometimes you will know intuitively that there is a connection between the two. Other times there may be no apparent connection. In chapter 5, we will explore in detail how to find a felt sense about a particular issue. For now, it makes no difference whether what you find does or doesn’t seem to connect to the topic of the story line.
Dropping the story line, the ability to shift gears from discursive logic to felt sensing, is especially important. In simpler times, when you might have passed a whole day hoeing a garden plot or plowing a field, certainly the work was hard, but once you got the hang of the hoe or the plow, there was not a lot of thinking involved. There was time and space to let your thought formations disperse like clouds and to enjoy the blue sky of the moment. These days, almost everything in our lives involves thinking: planning ahead, multitasking, communicating with others, dealing with information overload, even daydreaming. One of the most vital skills we can develop is the ability to pause the momentum of discursive mind and experience our world—both inner and outer—directly through our senses.
Given that our lives are so thought-centric, it is no easy thing to turn off the constant talk radio of our minds. It’s a bit like trying to switch from using your right hand to your left (or the other way if you are left-handed). First you have to inhibit the impulse to reach with the dominant hand; then you have to get the nondominant hand to perform an action like brushing your teeth or writing that doesn’t feel natural for it. You should expect that it will take repeated practice to become proficient at dropping the story line, and there are likely to be times when it is uncomfortable. Be gentle with yourself; adding to the discomfort by getting frustrated or discouraged is counterproductive.
Mindfulness meditation, which is really a kind of basic training in detaching from discursive thought, can be a great support for finding the felt sense. Dropping our story lines, creating a gap in discursive mind, pausing the momentum of thinking—whatever we choose to call it—is a process of self-cultivation. It is a gentle discipline of becoming familiar with the open, nonconceptual space in ourselves that is always available once we know how to find and rest in it. My Buddhist teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, used to talk about “going back to square zero.” Square zero is this inner space that is empty of specific content yet full of fresh possibility. It is a “full emptiness” that provides a home base, a place we can come back to when we find ourselves off-kilter, rest for a while, and then make a fresh start.