As we begin, here is an invitation for you:

In your mind’s eye, create a mental picture of a wolf. The wolf is alone; perhaps he is a young male who’s just left his mother’s side, setting out for his first solo adventure. The sun is setting, and our wolf is atop a hill, standing, all four paws on the ground. His head is high, his eyes scanning the horizon. His ears are perked, swiveling to capture sounds from all around. His nose receives all sorts of information from the evening breeze, information that would be imperceptible to us, his human observers. Perhaps his tail is lifted ever so slightly as it curves gracefully behind him. He is fully alive, vibrant, and completely in the present moment.

Now imagine what it would feel like to be that wolf. Feel the pads of your four paws on the ground, the bones and sinews of your legs supporting your spare, muscular torso. Feel your spine elongate as you gently test the wind with your finely honed sniffer. Feel the strength and springiness in your shoulders, your haunches. Imagine you are ready to respond in a split-second to any tiny change in the environment, reacting from instinct before you can even think about it.

Feel the energy that arises in your body as you spend a moment with this experience. And congratulate yourself, because in doing this exercise, you are contacting your felt sense.

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The felt sense is a term coined by Eugene Gendlin to describe our innate sense of everything we know and experience in a wordless, non-cognitive way, from the interior of our bodies. The common term “gut instinct” is closely related, as is the scientific term interoception, the process of sensing inside the body. Dr. Gendlin founded a school of therapy he called focusing. Essentially, focusing involves paying attention to our felt sense, and learning how to work with what it has to say. As the focusing website says, “This sensation in your body is called a ‘felt sense.’ It lies behind your thoughts and feelings and is significant and full of meaning. It is a message from your body to you, and will speak to you when you listen.” As Dr. Peter Levine is fond of saying, its language is sensation.

Much of this non-cognitive, somatic information involves not only our body, but also our reptile brain. As I have noted in previous articles, we are interested in the body and the reptile brain because this is where most mental health symptoms “live.” The felt sense is the place where we can work with painful symptoms to get them to subside. Then, the energy these symptoms used to drain from us becomes available for more joy and more productive engagement with the world.

Although modern Western thought has been quite resistant to this idea, there are other valid ways of knowing things besides our thoughts. In some cultures, people regularly converse about this innate, biological, or instinctual source of knowledge. As owners of living, human bodies, our access to our intuitive felt sense is our birthright! It is where the experiences of pleasure, joy, and liveliness originate.

Our felt sense is incredibly useful when we cultivate a relationship with it. As the focusing website points out, “Your body knows more about situations than you are explicitly aware of. For example, your body picks up more about another person than you consciously know.” Although modern Western thought has been quite resistant to this idea, there are other valid ways of knowing things besides our thoughts. In some cultures, people regularly converse about this innate, biological, or instinctual source of knowledge. As owners of living, human bodies, our access to our intuitive felt sense is our birthright! It is where the experiences of pleasure, joy, and liveliness originate. Unfortunately, there is very little discussion or guidance about the felt sense in our culture.

So, then, how do we cultivate a better relationship with this “interior us”?

Well, some of us have to be careful about it. If we have a trauma history, whether or not we’re aware of it, the felt sense is (predominantly) where it lives. In my experience, this is why some people have a difficult time even accessing any of their interior sensations: They are dissociated (disconnected) from their inner selves as a protection from the traumatic residue.

Unfortunately, shutting down pain inherently involves shutting down at least some pleasure. On the other hand, some people experience emotional flooding, physical pain, or other distressing experiences when they turn their focus inward. Of course, this is not true for everyone. People’s experiences with their inner selves vary greatly, largely depending on their life histories. Many people already have a rewarding and lively relationship with their inner lives—and that is ultimately one of the primary goals of somatic psychotherapy.

For more information about focusing, please refer to the focusing website. For those who suspect or already know that contacting this aspect of themselves can be challenging, I would recommend working with an experienced guide, such as a somatic psychotherapist. The work of Dr. Levine uses the felt sense as one of several fundamental tools for trauma healing. Pursuing such therapeutic support can greatly help in reclaiming access to one’s birthright of joy and vibrant well-being.

References:

1. Gendlin, E. (2016). What is Focusing? The International Focusing Institute. Retrieved from http://www.focusing.org/newcomers.htm#what
2. Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

My last piece on focusing ended with a definition of felt sensing as a “temporary wave, from the sea of being” (Madison, G.). What is meant by a temporary wave from the sea of being?

It is time to introduce Gendlin’s conception of human being. Note that I said “human being,” not “a human being.” For Gendlin, human being is “interbeing”—what we think of as an individual being is a “livings in the world, and living with” (Gendlin, 1978-79). He calls this principle Interaction First.

Gendlin conceives of human beings experientially not as separate “things” in interaction with each other. More radically, he sees our environments and us as a continuous co-creative process. We are not “inside our skins, but are our living-in the world, and living-with others” (Gendlin, 1978-79). Even our physical being is a continuous process with its inner and outer environments. Hence, in his view, it is impossible to conceive of human being as a separate entity. We are interbeing.

What is a living body such that it has the intricacy of our situations? … With the old concepts, people might say that Focusing is “subjective.” But clearly, if the situation is carried in the body, then a felt sense is not subjective. Objective then? No, also not, since “objective” means the units and patterns to which science limits anything it studies. We could fashion a new sentence that is neither subjective, nor objective, nor both: The body IS an interaction process with the environment, and therefore the body IS its situations. The body isn’t just a sealed thing here, with an external situation over there, which it merely interprets. Rather, even before we think and speak, the living body is already one interaction process with its situation. The situation is not out there, nor inside. The external “things” and the subjective “entities” are derived from one single life-interaction process (which they always bring along with them). (Gendlin 2004)

This is a radical view and paradigm shift that is difficult to absorb. We are used to thinking about ourselves and the environment “around us” through the lens and language of a Cartesian world. We are imbued with philosophical assumptions idealizing objectivity and neutrality and a mechanistic relationship of mind over body. For example, we may have heard of such concepts as the “observer effect,” yet we go about living in a way that leaves context out of the equation.

For Gendlin, the making of meaning is a pluralistic, contextual, constructed process; it is changing and dynamic, not static and eternal (Mitchell, 1993). Our lived bodily sense of things is a function of our interbeing, and our capacity for felt sensing extends us beyond the confines of our delimited physical body.

Recall that I started my first piece by saying that you have within you—“beneath” your everyday practical use of language—another dimension, an inner language that is an imagistic dialogue between you and your immediate experiencing. It is you speaking to yourself (and listening to yourself) in your own code. Gendlin calls it the zigzag between the everyday use of language and the way we may actually hold our experiencing in a bodily felt way.

Gendlin says that this kind of processing exists preconceptually, beneath our everyday use of language and concepts and the assumptions we have about how the world works. In focusing, we find our own language and meaning that is in fact much more specific and precise than our usual use of language. We find language from the sea of our being.

A client with a traumatic history sits quietly, with eyes lowered, pausing to find a way to articulate why his time in boarding school (60 years ago!) is still so meaningful to him. His life before boarding school was consumed by his father’s collapse into psychosis. He is sensing into the situation regarding boarding school—without any explicit reference to his catastrophic childhood history. After a full few minutes of silence, he finds one word that fits: Life at boarding school was “manageable.” At the point that he says “manageable,” tears come to his eyes. He doesn’t know why, but his felt sense tells him, preconceptually, that “manageable” feels right.

The therapist, attuning to her client, takes in “manageable” and acknowledges it. As it resonates within her, she realizes how much is contained in this word “manageable” for her client. Then she drifts into her own felt sense of his childhood and finds ‘unmanageable’ experientially embedded in the world of her client’s meaning making, the therapist quietly offers the newly emerging word “unmanageable” without any reference to his history, and the client considers it.

A few moments later, the client’s full catastrophe of life with his father’s illness impacts him, but in a different way. His therapist has offered a word that touches into his world precisely and with great specificity. What is captured here in two words—manageable and unmanageable—is much more than the common meaning of these words. The client is referring to the experiential world of living-with and living-in his father’s psychosis, as well as to the emergent significance of what boarding school provided for him. The unmanageable and the manageable.

 Notice that the felt sensing came first. With “manageable,” he has begun to capture the world of his experiencing—the profound relief of finding himself for the first time in a world that he could handle (boarding school). Then “unmanageable” is intoned, and he resonates with the years of struggling with the catastrophe of his father’s psychosis. “Manageable” arose as a temporary wave from the sea of being. “Unmanageable” emerged from their shared sea of being.

And this shared moment deepens their therapeutic journey.

References

1. Gendlin. E. T. (1978-79). Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the philosophy of psychology. Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry 16, 43-71.
2. Gendlin, E.T. (2004). Five philosophical talking points to communicate with colleagues who don’t yet know focusing. Staying in Focus. The Focusing Institute Newsletter, 4 (1), 5-8. From http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2187.html
3. Madison, G., www.gregmadison.net.focusing_way_being.
4. Mitchell, Stephen A. (1993). Hope and dread in psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books, pp. 285.

In my first piece, I said “we want to move into the place where meanings can reconstellate…we sit quietly, eyes lowered, with attention inside.” But what precisely are we paying attention to?

We are paying attention to the forming or coalescing of an internal phenomenon Gendlin calls bodily felt sensing (BFS) or bodily felt experiencing. Since BFS is a central concept in Gendlin’s philosophy (and is best grasped when sensed directly), I want to be clear conceptually about what it is and what it is not.

Gendlin’s construct of BFS is a holistic unity that cannot be divided into the traditional divisions of mind and body. If you are reading Gendlin from a Cartesian separate mind/separate body, it may take you some time to grasp how BFS is different. I think of it as the smallest indivisible microunit of experiential process.

Each of the descriptions below emphasizes different aspects of this central concept (the italics are mine).

“A felt sense typically forms in the trunk area of the body, as an unclear but tangible sensation. If attended to directly where it forms in the body, a felt sense can respond with new meanings, confirmed with shifts in the bodily feeling.” (Barnett, L. & Madison, G.)

Sills describes BFS as a kind of “global perception of the whole of arising process in any one moment of emergent experience – a sense of “all of it.” All those sensations, emotional tones, mental constructs, symbols and images that compose our self-constellations are directly experienced as an embodied and coherent whole.”

“A felt sense is not (only) a mental experience but a physical one. Physical. A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event. An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time-encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail. A felt sense doesn’t come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) feeling.”(Gendlin, G., 1981)

At any moment, one can refer directly to an inwardly felt datum. Experiencing, in the mode of being directly referred to in this way, I term the “direct referent. … At first it may seem that experiencing is simply the inward sense of our body, its tension, or its well being. Yet, upon further reflection, we can notice that only in this direct sensing do we have the meanings of what we say and think. For, without our “feel” of the meaning, verbal symbols are only noises (or sound images of noises)..” (Gendlin, E. T., 1964)

“Focusing is a way of paying attention to one’s being-in-the-world, one’s interaction as it is experienced through the individual (but not separate) body. A felt sense is a temporary wave from the sea of being – it is understood as on-going process, not ‘internal content.’” This initially unclear bodily feeling is referred to as the ‘felt sense.’ It is physically felt, more than clearly defined emotion, and incorporates a whole constellation of this and other situations, now and other times, self and others, elaborated by language. By staying with a felt sense, a shift in meaning may eventually occur that brings a physically felt relief in the way the body holds that issue. (Madison, G.)

Although the content may be vague at first, with practice, the focuser (and the listener) can  identify the phenomenon of BFS distinctly. It is manifested in the quality and prosody of the focuser’s language. Also, BFS, carries within a potential to transform or to move, to “shift” as you come in contact with it. Further, it is accessed through the body, as an epiphenomenon of our experiencing self, yet cannot be localized in the physical body proper.

What BFS is NOT

It is not sheer emotion, yet includes emotions within it.

• It is not sheer emotion, yet includes emotions within it.
• It is not “pure” thought, yet includes thinking within it.
• It is not purely physical, yet includes physical sensations within it.
• It is not imagery, yet includes imagery within it.
• It is not memory, yet includes memories within it.

This “temporary wave, from the sea of being” is embedded in a worldview that has implications for our notions of relationality and communication, as I will explain in the next article.

References

1. Barnett, L., Madison, G. (2012). Existential therapy (p.83). New York: Routledge,
   p. 83.
2. Gendlin, G. (1981). Focusing (p. 33). New York: Bantam New Age Books.
3. Gendlin, E. T. (1964). A theory of personality change.  In P. Worchel & D. Byrne (eds.), Personality change (pp. 100-148). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Retrieved from http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2145.html
4. Madison, G. www.gregmadison.net.focusing_way_being.
5. Sills, M. (2006). “In this body, a fathom long…” In J. Corrigall, H. Payne, H. Wilkinson (eds.), About a body, working with the embodied mind in psychotherapy (pp. 199-213). New York: Routledge.

“This is a healing. I haven’t allowed myself to heal. I didn’t understand it. I mean I heard what people said when they said this, but I didn’t understand it – until now.”
– Independent filmmaker

At significant moments in sessions, we pay attention to the nuances of our client’s experiential process as it is conveyed through their verbal and nonverbal communication; and we rely on our own experiential process for our vital clinical intuition. We listen through these levels to grasp what our client is experiencing. It is inconceivable to consider the practice of psychotherapy without paying careful attention to experiential process.

But what is meant by experiential process? Are there different levels of experiential process? What does it mean when we say that someone is “too much in their head” or, for that matter, too much in their feelings? What makes one type of psychotherapy really experiential and another less so? Does experiential process have its own natural properties? If such properties exist, how can we know them? These are philosophical and theoretical questions of great value to clinicians.

This article is the first of a series introducing you to Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of experiencing, its theoretical principles, and its clinical applications. As a philosopher and phenomenologist, Gendlin makes a rare contribution to our work because he addresses ontological questions about the nature of experiencing itself. While a growing number of clinicians, from different schools of psychotherapy, know the clinical value of his experiential focusing method, the philosophy itself is less well known. Ahead of its time, it can now be seen as providing an intellectual holding environment for some of the latest developments in intersubjectivity theory, self-psychology, trauma work, and what is now called the philosophy of the implicit.

My plan in this introduction is to give a brief background to Gendlin’s thought and then to show you how his conceptualization of the natural “laws” of experiential process have direct application to our work with clients.

Gendlin is a philosopher who collaborated with Carl Rogers when they met in 1952 at the University of Chicago. Gendlin’s first major work, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (1962), introduced the experiential dimension, and he went on to say that, based on his research (see below, re: The Experiencing Scale), client-centered therapy was not enough. Rogers acknowledged this, citing Gendlin’s contributions to his own article called “On a process conception of psychotherapy” (Rogers, 1958, p. 142). Gendlin went beyond the person-centered approach to describe his view of experiencing in what now is called the implicit dimension of meaning and “implicit knowing.”

Gendlin and his collaborators discovered that clients who showed no progress in therapy didn’t seem to have a capacity to “refer inward” in a particular way. Gendlin designed a way to capture and teach this natural process to anyone interested in working with their inner experiencing.  In order to test the validity of the focusing method, Gendlin and Hendricks developed The Experiencing Scale, a statistically reliable method of measuring levels of experiencing. In the last 20 years, experiential focusing has been cited as an excellent example of a microunit of naturally occurring human change process (Patterns of Change), that can be worked with across most approaches to psychotherapy.

Consider this: You have within you—“beneath” your everyday practical use of language—another dimension, an inner language, that is an imagistic dialogue between you and your immediate experiencing. It is you speaking to yourself (and listening to yourself) in your own code. Gendlin calls it the “zigzag” between the everyday use of language and the way we may actually hold our experiencing in a “bodily felt” way.

We start the process when some situation in our lives—something we “find ourselves in”—feels stuck or painful. The problem beckons to us in a bodily way. We want to move into the place where meanings can reconstellate. To touch into this realm, we sit quietly, eyes lowered, with attention inside. We let form how exactly the situation touches us, how it is meaningful to us, but in an implicit way, not in words. You might say that It finds a way to let itself develop explicitly.

By staying still yet alert, our inner sensing seems to order itself; bodily felt senses (to be defined in the next article) carry within them a palpable sense of significance. As we let them come to us (we cannot in fact go after them!) they prioritize themselves. In a way, they tell us what we need to be attending to. As we hold them in our awareness, we let our words speak directly from our immediate sense of them. And, as this happens, something starts to happen, however subtle. Something starts to dawn on us. Our usual way of holding a situation starts to open—but it’s not only the situation. It is the way we “hold” the situation. We notice a palpable change. This was a good moment in a good therapy session.

If the above description seems familiar to you, that is probably because you have access to your own creative process; you refer to it without needing to know how it might work. The process has its own palpable efficacy. If you are taken by the process, Gendlin’s philosophy in action, you might over time find yourself “living the practice.”

Gendlin’s worldview has helped me to sit with the pauses, stuck places, and moments of uncertainty that are intrinsic to life, including to my life’s work as a psychotherapist. His view of the human universe lends a beauty to the process of meaning making, helping our clients and ourselves stay alive to the creative process that makes good therapy.

This first attempt to describe the microprocess of experiencing will be refined in further articles. In my next article, I will use clinical examples to demonstrate Gendlin’s principles so that you can see them in action.

References:
1. Depestle, F. (2007). The Primary bibliography of Eugene T. Gendlin.  Retrieved March 3, 2012, from http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/gol_primary_bibliography.htm
2. Gendlin, E. T. (1962).  Experiencing and the creation of meaning:  A philosophical and psychological approach to the subjective. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Second Edition, Evanston IL: Northwestern University, 1997.
3. Rice, L. N., & Greenberg, L. S. (1984). Patterns of change, intensive analysis of psychotherapy process. New York: Guilford Press, 213-248.
4. Rogers, C. R. (1958). A process conception of psychotherapy. The American Psychologist, 13, 142-149. Also in: Rogers, C. R. (1961). On  Becoming a person: A psychotherapist’s view of psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 125-159.