by Stanley
With every experience there is an underlying mood. Or perhaps ‘mood’ is too strong a word. Maybe I should say: there is an underlying feeling component or feeling tone to every experience. We call this the ‘felt-sense’. Every thought you have, every imagining, every encounter with others, everything you touch, every experience in life carries this feeling component with it.
To get a handle on this consider what it’s like when this feeling component is missing, what it’s like when life goes completely flat, where all meaning just drains away, where everything is one dimensional – dead. Nothing suggests anything, nothing enlivens. It is as though one has gone tone deaf. The world is all there, but it means nothing. [1] The opposite of this would be to listen to your favourite piece of music; the bodily felt sensation will likely be quite strong – and with it that non-verbal sense of meaning. In the arts we dignify this by calling it the ‘aesthetic sense’.
We have learned about this felt-sense from the therapeutic technique of focusing where you give attention to a kind of bodily feeling-sense that can unwind a personal problem. But the felt-sense is a much wider phenomenon than just this. Not only does every personal problem have its unique felt-sense, but so does every experience you have in life. The difficulty is that the felt-sense is so seamlessly part of every experience that it has never before been properly differentiated. It is so subtle that it passes unnoticed as something distinguishable. Nobody notices it – until it’s missing. When people look for it, having read something about focusing, they might look for something quite distinct from the experience itself, instead of an aspect of that experience. It is a difficulty that’s understandable because people are not used to selecting or lifting it out. And for some people the feeling signal is quite weak. It’s like tuning into a radio station that’s distant – turn the tuner minutely one way or another and you loose the signal and can’t get it back.
It is often difficult to get the difference between the felt-sense and emotion. Emotion is elephantine and opaque. But emotion can be the object of the felt-sense just like any other experience. You can find out what’s underneath it. For example if you are angry with someone, the emotion is quite definite. But the anger, by itself, does not reveal what is underneath the anger. Emotions blot out the felt-sense, so you have to stand beside the emotion and tune in very carefully what is just alongside it.
Focusing in therapy has been a wonderful research area because though it we have been able to examine this component of experience closely. We emphasise the bodily aspect of the felt-sense because it is a vital and seamless part of you as a whole organism and can be more sharply sensed in the heart, chest or stomach. The body is the reference point, not ‘the mind’.
You can check out the ubiquitous presence of the felt-sense. Stop a moment and ask yourself, ‘what do I really feel drinking this cup of tea right now?’ or ‘what is the felt-sense of doing the dishes right now?’ If you do this seriously and intentionally you will find that tea drinking and dish washing is never just tea drinking and dish washing. It isn’t simply flat. Things are never ordinary. If they feel that way, just ask ‘what does this so-called‘ordinary ’really feel like? You will find that the sense of ‘just ordinary’ is a veritable portmanteau of luggage. Pull one thing out of it and it will drag out more and more: memories, intimations, feelings, wishes, longings, anxieties.
This is our sense of meaning. I don’t mean the big MEANING OF LIFE. Something much simpler. It’s the feeling of meaning attached to every small action: ‘gathering sticks and drawing water’. In Jungian psychology we sometimes call it the sense of ‘depth’. Really it is the sense of being involved, connected or interested and curious; if it’s strong we call it a fascination, even an obsession.
Some people are lucky enough to be easily interested. Things interest them. One noticeable characteristic of such people is that they don’t pre-empt surprise, they don’t ‘already know’. If you tell them something they don’t ‘already know’. They are always on the lookout for nuances that are different from what they thought was the case. They actually find out things. They are attracted to new meanings that had never occurred to them. That is precisely the characteristic of someone working the felt-sense in focusing-type therapy. There is openness to the as yet unexplored. More than anything, there is the sense that one doesn’t already know.
The felt-sense is not a source of mystic knowledge. It merely displays the unexpected connections between things that are going on for you right now. Perhaps you may tune in to your present feelings and discover that you feel guilty. For example: ‘this person expects something of me and I feel mean for not giving them what they want’. This isn’t your felt-sense telling what to do. It doesn’t give moral signals; it’s simply telling you how you are and an invitation to find out more, to see what further is implied. Are you being mean or are you simply standing up for yourself. Questions arising like this are not to be answered – they show you sharply what state you are in. Ah! That’s right. I can feel how difficult it is to say ‘no’? I didn’t realise how strong that is. And so on. When you’ve got more of what is going on the knot of guilt simply unties.
The felt-sense does not reveal great psychic truths. It’s no use asking the felt-sense about the Divinity of Christ because there is nothing more to be said. All the absolute truths about that are in the bible. There is nothing to open up. The felt-sense doesn’t work on fixed systems – except to undo them! It doesn’t work on fixed beliefs for the same reason. That’s the whole point: following the felt-sense undoes mental and emotional structures; it loosens fixities, places where we are stuck. It works best where there is uncertainty. There is room then for movement.
Of course, if you are hanging on to a fixed belief for dear life then you won’t want anything that will loosen it.
It is a mistake to look for the causes of a personal problem. When using the felt-sense on any personal problem you are not looking for causes – what is the cause of the problem or what to call it. You are not on a diagnostic mission. Once you get into such speculation the head will take over and run the show. There are many ways to diagnose you, most of them completely useless.
The felt-sense moves things, it carries a problem further, it opens out a problem. It does this progressively as a process, not as simplistic and interpretive one-off revelation. After the process has taken place, looking back, you can see what contributed to the problem. But you can never get that first. To start with you never know where the felt-sense will lead.
[1] Feeling and loss of feeling are complex issues in psychiatric and psychoanalytical literature.
Here we are coming at it from the phenomenological point of view, how these
appears directly to consciousness.
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