What a feeling (or "felt sense”) is

To make it clearer what a " felt sense" is, so that you can find this experience in you, we will say first what it isn't.

It is not: words, images, emotions, muscle feelings, movements or actions.

Look this list over, because the things mentioned in the list are all things you can begin with, to get your felt sense of them. You can ask, in the case of any of these, “What does this make me feel? " or “What feeling does this come out of? "

It might seem odd, in the case of an emotion, to ask, “What does this make me feel? " or " What is this angry feeling? " If one feels anger, one would want to answer, " Angry, of course. What else? " But you can sense, aside and different from the anger, a whole maze of stuff. To say it all is impossible (why you got angry, what you expected which didn't happen, what did happen and how, who did it and all about them, what usually happens to you when this sort of thing happens, how you feel about you when it does, all the many meanings it has for you). You can feel or sense all this, and it is what your anger comes out of. From the anger, you can get into that quite other thing, which you can concretely feel if you ask yourself what your anger stems from. By “stems from" we don't mean etiology, or figuring out in terms of some scheme “why" you are angry. We mean that whole directly felt texture out of which the anger is forming.                                                                                             This we call a " felt sense, " to distinguish it from emotion (though, often, we just call it " feeling, " too).

Much as with emotions, you can also get to a felt sense by asking yourself about any set of important words, or some image, or some body spot that feels tense, or some movement or action you did or imagine, " What does this make me feel? " or " What does this come out of, in me? " and a concretely felt sense will be the answer. (Don't answer in words. )

Another way to put it: Where do you go, to find why you are angry - supposing you don't say an answer right away, but want to see why? There - where you go - that is a felt sense.

There is a " zig-zag, " a back and forth, one can go between felt sense and any of these (words, images, emotions, muscle feelings, actions). Just as from one of them one can get to a felt sense, so also, if you once have a felt sense, you can let that felt sense give you words, or an image, or an emotion, or some bodily expression or movement, or action. It can often be startling how one of these " comes out from" a felt sense.

By " feeling" or " felt sense" we mean a whole complicated mesh of stuff, not all of which you can see separately. We do not mean emotion. Felt sense is also felt as one " this" but is many. " Feeling" therefore contains a kind of thinking, it contains meaning s. You can call them " felt meanings. "

For instance, if you cut your finger and it hurts, there are no meanings in this feeling of pain, except perhaps that it hurts there, or that something is wrong in your finger, has intruded into your body there. Except for that meaning of the pain, as a signal, focusing on the pain sensation itself doesn't give you anything further.

On the other hand, you are likely to have some feeling of the whole situation in which you cut yourself, perhaps you felt rattled, angry, impatient, and now also angry at yourself for being clumsy, and if you pursue these, you can find how you always feel about yourself in there, whatever your attitudes toward yourself are, and also perhaps a sense that you had been in a tough situation just before this happened, and wished for some help which nobody gave, and anger at them, and the whole complications of your relations with them, and so on. Or you may have some feeling about being hurt and all the complex stuff that is for you - how you always manage to hurt yourself and how no-one helps you when you do, etc. (This was only a made-up example, of course. If you cut your finger, you'd find whatever is there for you, both before and then about that. )

Similarly, if you feel something in your body, a tense muscle, or your throat or face feeling odd, ask yourself what this makes you feel inside you, what this tenseness is about for you. Also, an image, or a sentence, or an emotion, or an action - any of these can be asked in this way, ’'What does this make me feel? " to give you the whole mesh of felt complications involved for you in that. Then wait, and let a specific feeling stick out of how that whole thing feels.

Usually the opening up of a feeling comes in words. Therefore, we are not at all telling people not to have words. The point is not to have only words, but to have and sense feeling, and let words arise as one senses the feeling, so the words can have a felt relation to the feeling.

We don't as yet have very good ways of conceptualizing, therefore funny sentences like the last one have to be used. The same thing is true for anyone who focuses, you have to be willing to allow for odd sorts of phrasings and metaphors, whatever seems to capture the feeling.