Chapter 5
BOTH OF THE TECHNIQUES for engaging your felt sense presented in the previous chapter—bringing awareness inside your torso area to sense what your body is already holding, and starting by asking inside, “What wants my attention just now?”—can lead to important, even life-changing insights. That said, finding the felt sense is a powerful and radically different way to approach the specific challenges we are facing in our lives. Often it is the situation itself—a problem, emotion, action block, decision, work project, relationship issue, creative undertaking—that will prompt us to engage our felt sense. Once you are familiar with the process, felt-sensing can happen in a minute or less. This means it can often be applied in real time, right as situations are happening. But to learn and gain confidence in engaging your felt sense, you will want to devote some longer, uninterrupted sessions to practice.
The key to working with a situation through your felt sense is dropping or releasing its story line and attending to the feeling in your body. However, in dropping the story line, we don’t want to totally abandon the situation we are trying to work with. Even as we let go of its details, our emotions, and our ideas about it, we still want to hold on to its essential texture and energy. The situation has to remain present for us in a bodily felt way, even as the specifics recede from awareness.
There is a kind of paradox here: letting go and holding on at the same time. It is like the gap in a meaningful conversation when two people stop talking and feel the issue and each other’s presence more intensely. Eugene Gendlin calls this paradoxical process “holding and letting.” Here is how he describes it in his major philosophical work, A Process Model, using the technical term “direct referent” in place of felt sense:
In direct referent formation one both keeps the situation the same, and one also lets it change. One keeps it the same by holding the relevance, the point, the sense of the whole thing, the same. It is this situation (and all that is involved in it), which I wish to sense as a whole. I hold on to this relevance. But also, I await the coming of a new kind of feel, the felt sense of the whole business. I can only let it come, I can’t make it. In letting it come, I allow my body-feel to stir, to move, to do whatever it does independently of my deliberate control, while I do employ my deliberate control to keep the situation, the relevance.1
“Holding and letting” lies at the heart of Gendlin’s technique of Focusing, or finding the felt sense. It is the core dynamic of friendly attending. Indeed, it is the defining feature of all true contemplative practices.
I will have more to say about the philosophical and contemplative theory underlying Mindful Focusing in later chapters. For now, let’s stay with the main aim of this book, which is cultivating your own direct experience.
Exercise 5.1 Starting with a Situation
Decide on a situation to work with—anything that is alive for you right now. Then let go of it completely while you take as much time as you need to come into grounded aware presence. Then invite the chosen situation back into your awareness. Let different particulars of the situation come to mind, recollecting enough of the story line to make it vividly present, while at the same time staying gently aware of what’s happening in your body. When the situation, problem, or challenge is clearly present in awareness, release the story line and notice what felt sense it has brought in your body. If there is no felt sense after a while, or if the felt sense disappears, you can go back to the story line and repeat the process.
Sometimes the felt sense will lead you away from the chosen topic, perhaps to an entirely different situation. When this happens, follow the felt sense! Remember, felt-sensing is always about what is alive—in process—in your life right now. One reason we become stuck when trying to accomplish a conscious purpose is that there is something else, perhaps at a deeper level or “off to the side,” that needs our attention before any forward movement can occur.
It is also not uncommon when trying to get in touch with the felt sense of a challenging situation to first encounter a felt sense of the way in which we are protecting that part from being seen. Just as the body protects a wound by tightening up around it and making the surrounding area painful to touch, our felt sense may tighten or raise the alarm when a vulnerable area begins to be touched. In this case, it is important first to bring your friendly attending to the part that’s doing the protecting. This part may manifest as a sense of tightness, thickness, heat, or sensitivity. Recognizing and bringing friendly attention to it helps it relax. When the protecting part relaxes, the felt sense of the challenging situation itself can then emerge.
Sometimes the protecting part is not ready to give up its role so easily. It is important not to fight with it. Instead, try giving it empathy. You can say to it, “Of course you want to protect this place that feels so vulnerable [bad, scary, shameful]!” All felt senses deserve our respect, even those we would prefer to be rid of. Each of them is there for its own good reason. Perhaps the reason is outdated or not in touch with the big picture, but this part of us will keep striving to do its job until it has been recognized. It is by being recognized, heard, and treated kindly that these deeply embedded protective parts are able to get unstuck and become active contributors to positive change.
Perhaps you have heard the parable of the contest between the wind and the sun to show which one of them could separate a man from his coat. The wind goes first, but the harder it blows, the more tightly the man wraps himself in his coat. Then the sun goes, merely shining and warming the air until the man happily sheds his coat. Friendly attending is like the sun.