While LW has seen previous discussion of Focusing, I feel like there has been relatively limited discussion of the felt sense - that is, the thing that Focusing is actually accessing.

Everyone accesses felt senses all the time, but most people don't know that they are doing it. I think that being able to make the skill more explicit is really valuable, and in this post I'm going to give lots of examples of why that is and what you can do with it.

Hopefully, after I'm done, you will not only know what a felt sense is (if you didn't already), but also will have difficulty understanding how you ever got by without this concept.

Examples of felt senses

The term "felt sense" was originally coined by the psychologist Eugene Gendlin, as a name for something that he found his clients to be accessing in their therapy sessions. Here are some examples of felt senses:

Think of some person you know, maybe imagining what it feels to be like in the same room as them. You probably have some “sense” of that person, of what it is that they feel like.
Likewise if you think of some fictional universe, it has something of its own feel. Harry Potter feels different from Star Wars feels different from Game of Thrones feels different from James Bond.
Sometimes you will have a word “right on the tip of your tongue”; it’s as if the word is almost there, but you can’t quite reach it. When you do, you just know that it's the right word - because the "shape" of the word matches the one you were reaching for before.

The felt senses of pictures

Here are are a few pictures that I recently collected from the Facebook group "Steampunk Tendencies":

How do you feel when you look at these pictures? What's the general vibe that unites all of these pictures?

Likely you can find quite a few. If I put aside the words "steampunk" and "Victorian", next I get the word "mechanical". "Dark" also feels fitting.

Whatever the vibe that you get, it's probably something different than the one you get from this collection of images:

Look at the first set of images, then the second. How does it feel when you switch looking from one to the other? What kinds of changes are there in your mind and your body?

I like both sets, but looking from one to the other, I notice that the forest images make me feel like my mind is opening up, whereas the steampunk ones make it close a little. Comparing the two, I feel li...

Introspection