What is the Felt Sense?
If you’ve ever had a hunch or gut reaction about a person or a situation but didn’t know where it came from, you’ve experienced your felt sense.
We sometimes call it our “gut instinct” or “intuition”. We see them as mysterious “knowings” that come unpredictably, but they are not as out of reach as we think. Our ancestors relied on their instincts to hunt, to protect, to survive. These instincts are still biologically wired in us, though often shadowed by incessant thinking.
The felt sense is a way to tune into this gut instinct and intuition on inquiry. It is a learnable skill. The more you practice, the more accessible it becomes.
The felt sense is a whole-body awareness knowing.
Data Collecting Your body is constantly communicating with your environment, collecting data. A gesture. The energy. A feeling. A ton of data is picked up by your nervous system, the sensory receptors and is stored in your subconscious. Sometimes a small detail is translated into conscious thought, but most of the time it gets stored behind the scene because of the large quantity. It requires some translation from the brain. A brain that is deeply communicating with the body.
Feeling & Sensing If we break down felt sense linguistically, it combines feeling and sensing, two capacities we each have. Feeling is the capacity of emotional affect. Sensing is the capacity to experience externally and internally sensorial experiences. External being hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, etc. Internal being mind’s eye seeing, hearing, and internal sensing.
Subconscious & Mystery The felt sense is direct access to your subconscious. The subconscious communicates in easy-to-understand dream-like visuals, metaphors, and/or gestures. The felt sense is also access to the mystery. It is spiritual. A connection to the whole resonance field that contains information and that which is interdependent. The body is a portal connecting to our immediate environment and to the “more”.
Living Process The felt sense is alive and organismic in and of itself. It emerges in form and morphs through contact. It is interactive, you can talk to it and it will answer. You are a witness and can tend to it.
What the felt sense isn’t.
Because the felt sense is a murky holistic knowing, it isn’t the separate parts in and of itself.
It is an entirely new entity that arises from the interweaving of all the above, and more. The felt sense isn’t a still point snapshot, it is evolving and co-arising with your interaction.
Also, while it serves as a portal to access the more, it would be inconceivable to say it is the more. It isn’t THE mystery. It isn’t THE subconscious.
How do you access the felt sense?
Just like with any living animate organism, we have to build a relationship with the felt sense.
As with any relationship, safety and time together call forth play. The same with the felt sense. We start with the emptying of internal space, settling in our bodily system with a sense of ground and safety.
With true curiosity and not demand, we can ask it to reveal itself to us through our bodies.
Like a shy animal, it may take a while to show itself. The felt sense is usually not clear at the beginning. But if we stay with our true attention, with expectancy, it reveals itself more.
What is the felt shift?
Just like when we are really understood, we experience a sigh of release, the same happens with the felt sense. When the full essence of what the body wants us to know is received by the listeners, the felt sense will release any tension and the body will experience a sensational shift. This is called the felt shift.
The aptest way to really get the crux of the message is through subliminal languages of metaphors, images, words, gestures, and movement.
How do I learn the felt sense?
The easiest way to learn the felt sense is through bodily experience. By having an awareness of the felt sense texture, then you can learn the language and the stances to communicate with it. See the workshop page to learn more.
