Sarah's Response

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#634

“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) bodily feeling.” –Gendlin

While I know that felt sense and intuition are two different things, I can’t help but place them in the same realm. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to sort out felt sense, and “intuition” is just a more familiar word. And while intuition is defined as: “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning,” (which actually feels like a bad definition) and felt sense does not have such immediacy, there is some kind of bodily response that feels similar to me. I imagine this will be cleared up with the guidelines, but when I’m trying to listen to my intuition to make the “right” decision, I feel in my body (not my mind) that something is right, which leans me towards one way of being, even if it isn’t one word. Maybe felt sense is just another way of harnessing this kind of primal bodily energy?

“There are many ways in which to access felt sense. We can tune into it by breathing slowly, quieting down, waiting for it to form, and then allowing it to lead us to this incipient sense of meaning” (10).

This sounds very much like what my mom tells me to do when I’m trying to make a difficult decision. “Don’t think too hard, and the answer will come,” or, “You know deep down, you just have to listen to yourself.”

This quote is from the Focusing Institute’s website: “your body picks up more about another person than you consciously know. With a little training, you can get a bodily feel for the ‘more’ that is happening in any situation.” Maybe focusing is a way of harnessing those feelings of bodily knowing and “intuition” into something that can be recognized more easily, and therefore, used more readily?

Even Gendlin’s symbol [not reproducible in WordPress] represents (for me) the same kind of space when I’m trying to tune into how I really feel about something. It’s on the edge, but not quite there: “Gendlin asks us to imagine a poet in the midst of writing a poem. She has a sense of what is to come…but that exact phrasing hasn’t come yet” (51). Of course, anyone who has written knows this feeling.

Lately it feels like my writing has come from a more frantic place than it used to, and I can’t help but think this has something to do with the computer. When I was younger I enjoyed the feeling of composing on paper. I could turn the world off and could not check my email or the New York Times. This screws up my process. With felt sense I feel like I’m slowly learning how to tune back into my creative self more readily. Of course, I could always turn off my Wi-Fi and sit quietly, but what if I miss an important email?

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