Focusing, Chapter 3: Are Felt Senses Physical?

I’m re-reading Chapter 3: What The Body Knows of the book Focusing. All the quotes are from this chapter, except for one, which is from the foreword.

In this chapter Gendlin dives a little deeper into his theory. He also give us some more experiential descriptions of the theory’s basic concept, the Felt Sense. I’m noticing that I have my own, adapted concept which evolved out the concept that Gendlin evoked in me when I first encountered his work more than a decade ago. And upon re-reading this I don’t think they are exactly the same, mine and his. So I’m going to use Felt Sense to point to Gendlin’s concept and felt sense to point to my own. Elsewhere on the blog I’m going to use my own concept unless further specified.

The biggest difference I detect while reading this chapter is that Gendlin’s theory says that Felt Senses are physical. He says:

“A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. Physical.”

When I hear the word physical it evokes the idea of material objects. A table, a ball, a tree. And material objects seem different from inner experiences. It’s possible that this is a matter of semantics, given that he goes on to say 

“Physical. A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event. An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time—encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail. Think of it as a taste, if you like, or a great musical chord that makes you feel a powerful impact, a big round unclear feeling.”

Awareness, aura, taste and feeling are all words that denote experiences. But it’s also a striking enough difference that I feel uneasy paving over it. Gendlin has a sophisticated philosophical theory of what bodies are that he elucidates in the book A Process Model. I’ve read it many years but it might be time for a re-read.

But for here I just want to note that I wouldn’t use the word physical in the same way and I don’t fully understand why he does. 

To me, felt senses seem like their own kind of entity, a class of experiences that’s different both from physical objects and from thoughts. They also seem different, but more closely related to, emotions, energies and body sensations. They are, as he describes, a form of experiential knowing with pseudo-physical properties, like spatial location, shape, texture, color, sounds, tastes and smells.

Hameed (Almaas) talks in his books about inner seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, sensing, etc. This seems more accurate to me.

It feels more right to say that the space that felt senses live in is overlayed on my experience of physical reality, but isn’t quite the same thing. It seems quite possible that this distinction is merely contingently conceptual, generated by a world view that holds these things as distinct, rather than fundamental to perception. But it is how it seems to me. 

So I think of (and experience) felt senses as their own kind of thing, neither physical nor mental but a particular aspect or layer of experience. Gendlin also says something interesting in the foreword to the new edition.

“Twenty-five years ago when focusing was new, I shocked a colleague at the University by saying “The unconscious is the body.” By now an emphasis on the body as a source of information and innovation is not new. But exactly how one can tap into this source is not yet widely known. Only from the Focusing Community can one get well-developed and tested instructions for direct access to embodied knowledge and the new steps that come from it.”

The unconscious is the body. That seems like such a bold claim that I wish he wouldn’t just throw it around as a background assumption without saying more about it. I’m not fully sure what to make of it. I'm used to the word body being associated with things like muscles, nerves, and blood. Muscles, nerves and blood seem different from the unconscious.

The most charitable interpretation I can come up with on the spot is that Gendlin must believe that Felt Sense are what the experience of the body (and physical reality at large) is like from the inside and then some idiosyncratic metaphysical ideas comes into play.

Maybe it somehow doesn't seem worth conceptually distinguishing this experience-from-the-inside from the attempt at pointing at a shared objective reality that I think is the more mainline interpretation of words like “physical” and “body”. Or maybe his internal experience is just actually pretty different from mine. I definitely feel confused as to what he is doing and where he is coming from. 

That being said, the rest of the chapter is full of beautiful explanations of what Felt Senses are and definitely worth reading!