The Relationship between Presence and the Felt Sense
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Laura writes: "Would you describe the relationship between the self in presence and the felt senses or ‘somethings,’ in the process of a focusing session."
Dear Laura, Let’s start by affirming that this relationship you’re pointing to is crucial. In Focusing, I am with my felt experience. So there is me, my self, and there is my felt experience, in my awareness.
Eugene Gendlin writes about this eloquently in his book Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy, page 21: "As one comes to have a [felt sense]… there comes to be a difference between oneself and that sense. There is a concrete disidentification … A felt sense lets one discover that one is not the felt sense. When one has a felt sense, one becomes more deeply oneself."
There is a process here. As the felt sense forms, I feel how I am more than that. I am not only this feeling, I have this feeling and I am much more.
So in a very interesting way, the felt sense and Presence arise together! And we can define Presence as the sense of me being more than the felt sense and able to be with it.
Sometimes we speak as if Presence is a waiting inviting space in which the felt sense forms. And this is true.
But it is equally true that the forming of the felt sense (the whole, freshly arising sense of "all this") allows us to feel ourselves as more than it. So Presence comes from the forming of the felt sense too.
It’s no paradox that these arise together; it’s central to Gendlin’s philosophy that interaction is first. It’s only the awkward logic of our dualistic language that makes such a mutual arising seem strange.