Sarah's Response

[Website Services Admin]

#646

In composing this response, I was thinking a lot about process and the space between thinking about creating and the physical act of creating (a piece of writing). Being attuned to what happens in that space seems to speak to felt sense.

I am still grappling with felt sense versus intuition, and Lavender’s piece doesn’t point me in many new directions. Honestly, it just felt like a lot of jargon. No wonder commenters were saying things like: “pretty deep stuff here.” I feel like the concept in itself isn’t too difficult to understand from an abstract, feeling perspective, but writing about it is something else. Sondra’s work got me much closer to understanding felt sense in more theoretical terms.

“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.”

I think I’ve been having such a hard time formulating a response to some of these pieces because they are talking about something I’ve always felt physically but haven’t had to put words to. It reminds me of when I first started tutoring ESL students in college. In order to explain English grammar to my students, I had to take a course about grammar – something I had used my whole life without having to explain the reasons behind it. . Having never really put words to the actual process of writing feels a lot like writing about felt sense.

We are not “inside our skins, but are our living-in the world, and living-with others” (Gendlin, 1978-79).

I love this concept because it makes the world seem continuous in the sense that our lives and experiences are unified. I think this is a pretty basic idea in eastern philosophy, though I don’t have a lot of solid information to back that up. It reminds me of what Gendlin says in the video about how living is a fresh process and that the body we have now is not the same body we have when we die. To think of the body as continuously reproducing itself feels almost freeing from monotony.

[Sondra Perl]

#673

Yes, this all makes sense to me.

[Author]

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