Do you wonder what kind of thing a felt sense is? Read on…
Ellen writes:
Could you say more about the difference between a felt sense and a gut instinct?
Dear Ellen:
People have been having felt senses for many thousands of years… I suppose as long as we have been human. So of course we have recognized this and called it by many names — gut instinct and intuition are two examples.
People might also say: “I don’t know how I knew, something told me…” or “It just felt right.”
But until Eugene Gendlin came along, we didn’t have reliable ways to teach people how to listen to (and trust) their inner knowing.
From Gendlin’s research and writing, we learned how to recognize a felt sense, and how to get a felt sense about anything: a situation we’re in, a decision, a relationship, a creative project… And we learned how felt senses change and develop as we pay attention to them.
Getting felt senses is a natural human process. But until we learn how to do Focusing, we often don’t recognize the felt senses we have. We may even talk ourselves out of them! We may have life experiences that make it harder to trust our felt senses, such as when what we are told we should feel contradicts our own felt sense.
So a felt sense is like an inner knowing, a gut instinct, or an intuitive sense… but what’s best is that you can check with it, and keep checking in with it, as you go forward with your life.
