Felt sense outside the body

Felt sense and the body

The felt sense is often understood as an internal complex, intricate, vague feeling that has precision in terms of symbolisation.The internalness of this, is the sense felt in the body not necessarily of the body as with sensations.

This of course presupposes what the body is and whilst in Gendlins terms it is more than the skin envelope it is slightly difficult to describe. It is the living process interaction with the environment, in some sense the immanent sense of the EN2 interaction. It does also provide an environment itself the skin for the capillaries, my gut for my desire for slimness.

So coming back to felt sense this is the body side effect of the whole of the interactions with the environments. It is the result of paying attention to the interaction, and indeed on the body side.

In Gendlins thought there are not objects there are interactions and process. So there isn’t a distinct body and distinct environment, rather they interact. Indeed it’s more complicated than this because there are a myriad of processes that are all interacting and the result of everything interacting with everything else “creates” the situation that I am in.

So as I look at the world in front of me, the desk and the computer, this is part of an interaction with me. On one hand I can look internally to see the felt sense of this, the all of this, and I can feel a knotted feeling in my stomach, a stretching up around my shoulders amongst other things.  I also get a sense which isn’t in my body, the flat blackness of the monitor, its slabness. The variegate blue colour, the webcam, that has a sense of always monitored to it.  All of these things seem to have a sense to them, although they don’t exist in my body.

I realise that where Gendlin started off his adventures in focusing are after the studies that show that clients who pay attention to their experience do better than clients who talk about the world. I also realise that we construct the world to a certain degree, i.e. where we pay attention, the meaning we give to it, what we imagine has happened, will happen, and explain what has happened. So even though there is a received quality of the world, a transcendent feel to it, I am very central to its creation.

So I wonder with caution if part of the felt sense is in the world as much as it is in our bodies. The risk of taking this approach is to not to have ownership of this sense, of seeing it as how the world is, and to distance itself from you.

Merleau Ponty argues that the world of perception is our embodied world of utility. As we perceive the world we see all of our beliefs, and desires, history and future. The cup is to have tea in, the room is to keep warm and protect from the boisterous world etc. Our world of perception moves out spatially and temporally and in those movements then we can see more of thoughts and desires.

If you take Merleau Pontys position then I am in the world, which again could support the position of the felt sense being not just in the body. Again I suppose the key criteria for felt sense would be a sense of having it received, rather than created. So I can receive a thought, or actively think a thought.

Whilst I have spoken to focusing teachers about this they say turn inside when you look at the world and there can be the felt sense.

Maybe this offers something for me. Focussing is standardly an eyes shut turn inwards. Maybe for me its an eyes open turn inwards.

Saying Hello

 

Saying hello

There is interaction between world and the body, or maybe you should describe it as transcendence and immanence, so as to not set up a dualistic environment of objects.

In experiential terms there is something received and there is what is received, so if you say “hello”, I receive something, and this something is the word “hello”. So I guess there is a verb, the receiving, and the noun the received.

If you follow Gendlins idea everything has a felt sense behind it, so even the word “Hello” does. Indeed this explains how when we talk we reply to our experience of words, we don’t translate them before replying, as indeed this would end up in an infinite regress.

I can in abstract say a word, for instance “Yesterday” and I can notice my experience of that, what comes to me as a felt sense as I turn my attention inwards having said this word. However when we speak which is much faster than this, there is no felt sense evident. You say “hello” then I may either say “hello” or ignore you, or do something else depending on how I am feeling.

The how I am feeling I may find out because of how I answer, or I could notice inside an emotion, or I could notice inside a felt sense of the all of me in this situation.

How I am feeling I guess is quite an intricate and complex thing. If we think of all things as being in process, we could think of the closed repeating homeostatic processes, of hunger, sleep and breath. We could think of open process, of the development of someone’s life like the tributary of a river, or we could think of the demanded process of someone’s life’s goals.

All of these myriad of processes are in action when you say “hello” and the felt sense would seem to be the feeling of all of this when you do say “hello”. If you think in Gestalt terms them “hello” is the figure and the rest of the processes are the ground. The felt sense of the figure is the outcome of our experience of all of it, of figure and ground. Again in Gendlin’s terms the figure and the ground are all process and are each the result of process of everything that it is interacting, the eveving to use his term.

So out of all of these processes it would seem that the figure “hello” is that which is carrying forward the rest. The thing is the felt sense of  “hello” doesn’t exist until you symbolise it. This symbolisation can happen merely by paying attention to it. So it’s a bit tricksy like this, as if you start looking for a felt sense then you are changing the environment from what in the above instance drew you to say “hello”, now there is all of that, and the desire to find the felt sense.

Where is my felt sense

Where is my felt sense?

I write this as I attempt to focus. One difficulty is I turn inside and there’s nothing there.  Of course there are many options to this, notice the nothing, notice the part that wants something etc.  As I try to do this I’m still left with the sense that there’s nothing there.

I’ve also tried an approach where I will notice what I notice, a perception, a thought, an image etc. This seems a lot more freeing but it seems away from what focusing is. Although it seems to pick up my experience.

As I create a space to listen into and allow anything to show itself then I can get experience, it can come in the form of felt images, an image I can see but I can feel is there, and with it comes all the sensation. The feeling of a fun fair and the feel of the light and sounds and tastes.

Paying attention to this “felt image” produces more, it seems to move on. To a thought, a feeling an emotion etc.

So for me these feel like felt senses. Their quality is they have a primary received feeling, they are vague and dynamic, and there is a sense of when I talk about them, there is a something behind them to indicate if the description is right. It isn’t generally in my body, but that general sense of rightness you get, for instance when you remember a name that you forgot.