…plus self-love, inner power and so much more. Here’s what you need to know right now.
If you’ve ever felt butterflies in your stomach before going out on a hot date; experienced the sensation of your heart plummeting during a breakup conversation or know what it’s like to notice a contraction in your chest or stomach after an awkward encounter with a former partner in public, then you know exactly what it’s like to tap into your “Felt Sense,” also known as “interoception,” and “Focusing.”
Coined in the 1960s by Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher and psychotherapist, his work regarding the bodily felt sense and the “philosophy of the implicit” greatly influenced how we now understand the body-mind connection today.
What is the Felt Sense?
The felt sense can be described as the sensations in your body and body-mind (more on that coming up) that float up to the surface and make themselves known in the present moment. They are alive, right in the here and now inside your body. The felt sense speaks to us in sensations; a quality or texture of a feeling or sensory experience felt in the body. Words like itchy, tight, tense, smooth, bubbly, buzzy, thick, and thousands more can help to define and pinpoint what we’re going through from moment to moment.
Listening to the felt sense is a practiced skill that over time, requires one to dive beneath their thoughts, to make contact with what’s alive below the surface, and then lovingly offer compassion and connection by simply standing with it and offering it curiosity.
It is the felt sense that gives us insight into the body-mind and what that really means – a map of the route between mind and body as a bridge between the physical and mental bodies. You can think of it as an energetic layer.
A great question to ask yourself to help you get closer to determining what it is your felt sense is experiencing is: “What am I noticing that’s happening inside of my body right now?” Or, try finishing the sentence, “Something inside of my body feels…”
Layla Martin / Peter Gendlin
Dozens of answers might come up.
“I’m noticing a flapping of wings at the base of my neck between my shoulders….”
“…effervescent bubbles popping and rising up my upper left arm…”
“…a warm, liquid flow of heat slowly pooling around my genitals….”
Sometimes it can be more elaborate to include colors, textures, memories, and images:
“I’m noticing the feeling of a squished flower in my heart space trying and trying and TRYING to grow, but it keeps getting trampled on.”
Or simply nothing at all. It’s not uncommon to experience stillness. Quiet. Numbness.
When this happens, the invitation here is to allow for whatever comes up to come up. By practicing child-like curiosity and acceptance, with time, making the connection to your felt sense will strengthen. There could also be multiple layers of survival strategies, coping mechanisms, distractions, and habitual patterns built up over the years that might make accessing your felt sense more challenging.
How Can I Listen Better To My Felt Sense?
Practicing patience and offering a loving and compassionate approach to connecting to your felt sense will help to create safety and self-love which are the keys to transformation. It’s not about pushing yourself to come to a place of healing and discovery, rather healing comes from a place of how much you can hold yourself with safety, love, and acceptance no matter what comes up – pulling back instead of pushing forward when required is not a sign of defeat. Knowing when to give yourself a break is an act of self-love.
Pro-tip: Treat your felt sense like a sleeping kitten. Kittens typically respond better to a tender, loving touch rather than a forceful and abrupt approach! Try to remain free of judgment and criticism and gently encourage the felt sense to show you what it needs to show you in its own time. What wants to rise to the surface to be integrated will rise to the surface to be integrated. Can you choose to meet it with love?
How Does the Felt Sense Work in Coaching?
By accessing the felt sense in a coaching session, you can learn about the inner workings of your current and even your past experiences in the present moment.
Before applying a label or story, raw sensations act as a way to determine what’s going on inside of you before you name it as an emotion or try to make sense of it. By traveling inward and listening to the subtleties of your body-mind without making it mean anything or tacking on a title (like “I feel angry” or “I’m sensing grief”), the felt sense can deliver deeper meaning within the coaching container for deeper excavation, connecting the dots and pulling out otherwise unknown or overseen information that might not come up due to lack of a safe space, distraction, avoidance, and other everyday priorities.
Also, without “making it mean something” or attaching an emotion, you can get a better handle on the raw, unnamed, untitled sensation at hand. It becomes less overwhelming and more accessible. This is where growth and transformation can be found in a way that isn’t so all-consuming!
So Why Use Your Felt Sense? How Does it Work to Transform Your Sex, Love, and Relationships?
The short answer: The more you know how you feel, the more you know who you are. Knowing how you feel plus knowing who you are, leads to feeling confident in your body; And feeling confident in your body leads to a deeper sense of self-love and stokes the fires of your inner power for juicier, and more fulfilling sex, love, and relationships.
The longer answer: Your felt sense is a direct portal into connecting more deeply with your body, emotions, and desires. It is an intelligent and data-rich tool that reveals to you in real-time what bodily sensations, emotions, and pieces of intuition are rising in response to fluctuating external situations, circumstances, and experiences…. like noticing what sparkling sensations arise when your lover caresses your skin or the fiery rage that’s never stopped boiling below the surface ever since you were a teenager.
What’s even more intriguing, especially in a coaching container, is that the felt sense can also reveal deeper, more embedded, and locked-down information stored in the body and nervous system. Under the guidance of a certified coach, you can use your felt sense to unlock wounding or pain from past traumatic experiences. The felt sense is a present-moment account that offers insight into old programming from years prior that is easy to pass over. When we’ve learned to live with different sensations for so long, it becomes a part of our body’s story. With gentle exploration and self-compassion, it doesn’t have to stay that way.
One more thing: Knowing what’s happening inside of your body and communicating it PLUS inviting your partner to do the same makes intimacy and connection juicier, richer, and way more pleasurable. After all, the more you’re able to widen your capacity to love yourself, the more you develop the capacity to hold the space to love others.
How Do I Know I’m Doing It Right?
There is literally no right or wrong way to do this. You are in full power, control, and curiosity of your inner navigation and experience. No matter how strange, abstract, or fleeting your felt sense might appear to you at the moment, try to honor its presence instead of judging it. This openness and acceptance of whatever shows up will encourage it to keep communicating with you.
How To Locate Your Felt Sense:
Inspired and built upon Gendlin’s six-step model, here’s how to begin to tap into your own felt sense anytime, anywhere:
1. Drop Into Your Body
Choose a quiet and uncluttered place to sit comfortably. Either cross-legged or with your feet flat on the ground and your back straight seated in a chair. Option to light a candle or incense and open up your ritual space. Close your eyes or soften your gaze, and begin to slow down your breathing.
Stay here for a moment.
Choose any of the following prompts: “What am experiencing in my body right now?” “Something in me feels….” “How am I feeling right now?” “How am I feeling about my life right now?”
2. Pinpoint a Felt Sensation
Allow for a response, no matter how seemingly random, to float up to the surface. You will most likely first encounter the tapes of your mind, judgments, judgment about the judgments, skeptical comments, and or mind chatter.
Notice if you can let it float by as you sink lower into the practice, beneath the static until you reach a bodily sensation that is present. It might feel subtle, vague, unknown. Try opening up to it and letting it into your present awareness.
3. Give it a Name/Title
See if you can latch on to a word or imagery that encapsulates the sensation. For example, “rippling” or “a watery sensation in my lower abdomen.” From here, after you’ve been able to give it a handle, simply remain present with it, not trying to change it or intellectualize it.
4. Create a Connection
Let yourself slow down to actually feel into and give space to this sensation you’ve encountered. Notice that the naming of a sensation and its location, like “my chest feeling like it’s being crushed under the weight of a thousand bricks” is more specific and ripe for unpacking and integration instead of plainly chalking it up as “anxiety.”
5. Ask for Clarity
Begin to get curious about its existence. What’s it doing here? What does it need? What is it trying to tell you? How long has it been here?
Invite the answers to come from your body and be communicated from your body-mind instead of your actual mind. Feel into an answer that might come in the form of a voice, an image or a “bodily knowing” instead of thinking about it. It’s totally ok if it sounds silly or nonsensical! Roll with it.
When a response arises, notice if you feel a shift in experience. Does your body viscerally change (clenched fists, tingling in the jaw, weight lifted)? Does the sensation/felt sense piece transfigure and metamorph – get bigger, smaller, closer, farther away?
6. Accept the Experience
Whatever your body communicated, welcome it. It doesn’t need to make sense, you don’t need to agree with it and you don’t have to do anything with it or even buy into it! The point is to receive it and decide if you want more clarity and if you choose to accept it. Depending on what came up, this can take some time. In the meantime, however, notice what it’s like to simply receive.
Even in less-than-desirable deep dives into the felt sense, the rule of thumb is that the sensation or piece that is found usually wants to be found. The sensations and pieces that speak up, no matter how dark or distressed, desire to be seen and to speak, each at their own time and pace. This is why it’s important to gently enter and leave your felt sense, always thanking your body for its intelligence and reassuring it that you will be back at some point to continue to support its communication.
One more thing: With practice, you can literally do this anywhere, from riding the bus to work, to being in the throes of passion with a lover (or yourself) and everywhere in between. Dropping into your body-mind and accessing your felt sense has so many benefits – including healing and intensifying pleasure – inside and outside of the coaching container.
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Now that you know a little bit more about the felt sense, how do you think you’ll start to incorporate it into your relationships with yourself and others, your love and sex life, and life in general?
Let me show you how we can go deeper into your felt sense experience to radically transform how you show up in your sex, love, and relationships in a way that is empowered and chooses love above all.
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