Felt sense (Embodied cognition) vs conceptualized experience.

 

Takeaways from Focusing by Eugene Gendlin

Felt Sense
The term was popularized by Eugene Gendlin (in Focusing, 1978). It refers to a vague, bodily awareness of a situation or meaning — before it is verbalized or clearly conceptualized. It’s nonverbal knowing, a sense that something is there, meaningful, but not yet defined.

“A felt sense is not an emotion, but the unclear, preconceptual body sense of a whole situation.”
— Eugene Gendlin

The tight heaviness in the chest when something feels off, even before you know why. A warm openness in the belly when something feels right or true. A bodily intuition, a “rightness” or “wrongness” of direction, without mental reasoning. In meditation, this is the intuitive texture of awareness felt through the body, not yet named or interpreted.


Perceived Sense:

Refers to sensory or cognitive perception — seeing, hearing, touching, or thinking about an experience as an object. It is what the mind recognizes through the sense organs and labels. It’s post-conceptual or concept-mediated — once you have identified, evaluated, or framed what you’re sensing.


“I feel anxious.” (labeling a bodily state)
“There’s tension in my shoulders.” (localized perception)
“I perceive that my breath is shallow.” (observation with conceptual structure)

 
Felt Sense: Implicit, pre-verbal, bodily, Subtle, holistic, Arises before thought
Perceived Sense: Explicit, labeled, mental, Clear, differentiated, arises after recognition

 

In Contemplative Context

Vipassanā: You move from felt sense → perceived sense → insight. Initially, one just feels agitation or heaviness (felt sense). As awareness refines, one perceives sensations (such as heat, vibration, and tightness) more distinctly. Ultimately, one sees impermanence and non-self in these phenomena. So Vipassanā uses perceived sense to clarify the felt sense — turning implicit body-knowing into explicit, impermanent phenomena under mindful observation.

Advaita Vedānta: Advaita asks: who perceives both the felt and the perceived sense? Both are appearances in awareness. Felt sense arises in the subtle body (sūkṣma śarīra) — the field of prāṇa, emotion, and intuition. Perceived sense arises in the gross body–mind interface (sthūla śarīra) — through the senses and intellect. The Self (Ātman) is before both — it knows them without being either.

Scientific Correlates: Felt sense involves interoception — awareness of internal bodily states — processed mainly in the insula, anterior cingulate, and somatosensory cortex. It’s pre-verbal, global, and emotional. Perceived sense involves exteroception and higher cortical areas, particularly the prefrontal and parietal regions that interpret, categorize, and label stimuli. It’s verbal, conceptual, and explicit. In Gendlin’s model, “focusing” trains one to stay with the felt sense until it naturally articulates itself — a bridge between implicit somatic knowing and explicit cognitive understanding. This process is now studied in embodied cognition and somatic psychotherapy.


Practical Application

When derailed or unclear, don’t rush to label — pause and sense. “How does this feel in the body, not what do I think about it?” Stay with the felt sense until it shifts. When clarity arises, observe how perception forms — watch the mind naming it. “Now it’s being called ‘tension’ or ‘sadness’.” See perception as a mental event, not as truth.


Felt sense grounds you in the living body. Perceived sense refines your discernment. Awareness holds both — unchanging, open, unbound.

The felt sense is life whispering through the body.
The perceived sense is the mind interpreting that whisper.
The witnessing awareness is what hears both — untouched, silent, vast.

Eugene Gendlin’s “Focusing” (1978) is not merely a therapeutic technique but a philosophical bridge between felt experience and cognition, and it resonates deeply with mindfulness and self inquiry. Let’s unpack it in layers:

 Focusing is a six-step process to access what Gendlin calls the “felt sense” — a subtle, bodily knowing of a situation that precedes clear words or emotions. It’s the experiential edge of awareness — the “living” process that can’t be reduced to mere thought.

Gendlin discovered that people who made genuine progress in psychotherapy spontaneously paused, felt inwardly, and described their feelings freshly from bodily sense. He systematized that process so anyone could learn it.

 The Six Steps of Focusing

1. Clearing a Space

Create an inner room by noticing what’s in your experience without being taken over by it.

• Sit quietly, breathe gently.

• Ask: “What’s between me and feeling all fine right now?”

• Let issues arise one by one — work, family, tension, confusion — and gently place each one aside, not to avoid, but to make mental space.

“I notice the tightness in my chest about an unfinished report. I’ll set that aside for now.” Then another: “Worry about my child — I’ll acknowledge that too.”

Imagine each issue as a file on your desk; you note it and set it aside. You don’t throw it away; you’re just creating space to see clearly.

This step mirrors the initial settling in meditation — like ānāpānasati or pratyāhāra — withdrawing from mental noise to cultivate awareness. Psychologically, it builds meta-awareness and self-regulation.

2. Felt Sense

 Let a vague, whole-bodied sense of the issue arise — not a thought or image, but a subtle bodily “feel.”

• Choose one issue that feels important.

• Ask: “How does this whole thing feel in my body right now?”

• Wait for a bodily response — perhaps a heaviness, tightness, or cloudy feeling — without labeling it yet.

Thinking about your child, you sense a weight in the stomach — not fear or sadness exactly, but something murky.

Stay gently curious. You’re waiting for the body to “speak,” not for the mind to explain.

This is akin to the Vipassanā moment of noting arising phenomena without conceptual overlay — or the Advaitic practice of “turning attention inward” to witness the raw sense of being.

Psychologically, this is interoceptive awareness — tuning into embodied signals that carry implicit information.

3. Handle

Find a word, image, or phrase that captures the quality of the felt sense.

• Ask: “What is the quality of this feeling?”

• Let words arise: “tight,” “stuck,” “pressured,” “aching,” “frozen,” etc.

• Don’t overthink — wait for the label that fits.

“That heavy feeling in my stomach… yes, it’s like being cornered.”

If the word feels right, the body will subtly ease — a micro-shift.

In mindfulness, this is the “noting” stage — labeling experience lightly, not to define but to clarify.

In psychotherapy, naming emotion recruits prefrontal integration, creating coherence between limbic experience and verbal cognition.

4. Resonating

Check the word or image against the felt sense; refine until there’s a sense of “rightness.”

• Alternate between the word and the feeling:

  “Cornered… is that right?”

  “Maybe not quite… more like trapped but resigned.”

As you adjust the description, you may feel a small body shift — a sigh, relaxation, or inner “yes.”

The key is bodily validation — trust the physical sense of correctness more than intellectual precision.

This is the “yathābhūta ñāṇadassana” (seeing things as they are) of Buddhist insight: direct, experiential validation.

Psychologically, it integrates right-brain (bodily, emotional) and left-brain (linguistic, conceptual) processing.

5. Asking

 Dialogue with the felt sense — “What makes it this way? What needs to happen?”

• Gently ask: “What is it about this situation that makes me feel trapped?”

• Wait — don’t think — let the answer form from within the felt sense.

After a pause: “It’s that I always have to be the strong one; I can’t show weakness.”

A deep exhale follows — a “felt shift.”

Ask from curiosity, not analysis. Wait for the body’s response, not mental chatter.

In Advaita, this mirrors self-inquiry (ātma-vichāra) — asking “Who is feeling this?” and letting awareness reveal truth.

In mindfulness, it’s akin to investigation (dhamma-vicaya) — the insight factor probing causes and conditions.

Psychologically, this accesses implicit memory networks and unconscious meaning structures, allowing re-integration.

6. Receiving

Welcome whatever emerges — relief, clarity, or stillness — with acceptance.

• Sit with gratitude: “Ah, so that’s what it was.”

• Let the new clarity settle; don’t rush to fix or act.

• Recognize the process is alive; it may continue to unfold.

You feel spacious, connected, less burdened — no longer “trapped,” but compassionate toward yourself.

End with gentleness. The psyche opens when it feels safe and respected. 

This is equanimity (upekkhā) in meditation or non-dual acceptance in Advaita — allowing being to reveal itself.

Psychologically, it consolidates insight with self-compassion, promoting emotional integration and resilience.

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Psychological and Neurobiological Grounding

Aspect	Psychological Process	Neural Correlate
Felt sense	Interoception, emotional granularity	Insula, ACC
Resonance	Emotion-cognition integration	Prefrontal-insular coupling
Felt shift	Reappraisal, parasympathetic release	Vagal activation, amygdala downregulation
Receiving	Consolidation, self-acceptance	DMN coherence, oxytocin release

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Focusing and Contemplative Parallels

Focusing Step	Vipassanā / Mindfulness Parallel	Advaitic / Phenomenological Correlation
Clearing space	Settling mind, body scanning	Withdrawing attention from objects
Felt sense	Direct awareness of bodily vedanā	Witnessing the sense of “I am”
Handle	Noting / naming phenomena	Recognizing the quality of appearance
Resonating	Yathābhūta ñāṇa (seeing clearly)	Discernment of Self vs. not-Self
Asking	Dhamma-vicaya (investigation)	Ātma-vichāra (Who am I?)
Receiving	Equanimity, letting go	Abidance in pure awareness

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Practical Integration Tips

1. Daily Mini-Focusing (3–5 minutes):

   Pause midday, notice your bodily sense of “how life feels right now.” Wait for one word that fits.

2. Use it during emotional overwhelm:

   Instead of reacting, turn attention inward: “What’s the body’s sense of this situation?”

3. Journal your Focusing process:

   Write from the felt sense — not thoughts — and notice shifts as you go.

4. Integrate with meditation:

   Begin or end mindfulness sitting with a short focusing step — this makes meditation more embodied and alive.

5. Trust bodily intelligence:

   Insight is not invented but emerges from the organismic wisdom beneath thought.

Focusing is a bridge between meditation and psychotherapy — between phenomenology (experiencing) and philosophy (meaning).

Where mindfulness observes, Focusing dialogues with experience.

Where Advaita points to the Self beyond phenomena, Focusing honors the body as the doorway to that ground.

“Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being, if you can only get it felt.”

— Eugene Gendlin 

THE STORY OF A “TRIVIAL PROBLEM”

The woman who reported this experience is in her late twenties. I will call her Peggy. She and her husband—call him John—live in a suburb. He works for a bank, where he has a real chance to become an executive. Peggy works part-time as a teacher at the junior high school. The part-time status is necessary because she has to care for a five-year-old son.

One evening, John came home jubilant. The bank president had told him quite plainly that the bank had some expansion plans and that he, John, was considered a key element in those plans. In his excitement while telling Peggy of this, John knocked a dish off the kitchen table and broke it. It was her best china. Peggy flew into a sudden rage, ran upstairs in tears, and refused to cook dinner.

She was surprised and upset by her own outburst. Stormy scenes were not usual for her.

She sat alone in the bedroom and tried to patch herself up inside, using all those familiar approaches that we all use and that seldom work. At first, she tried to dismiss the problem as “trivial,” as though hoping she could belittle it out of existence. “So he broke an expensive dish,” she told herself angrily. “Am I so dumb that I can be upset by that? The damned dish isn’t all that important in my life. It’s replaceable anyway. . . .”

That didn’t work. The upset feeling refused to let itself be thought to extinction. Peggy next tried figuring it out. “Well, I’ve been under a lot of strain the past few days,” she told herself. “I let the school work pile up on me, had to stay up late grading all those papers. Haven’t had enough sleep. . . . Sure, that must be it. No wonder I’m edgy.”

No results. What Peggy told herself might have been true, but nothing changed inside. The angry, irritated feeling stayed right where it was.

Finally she decided to try focusing. She had practiced it for several years and was very good at it— was, in a sense, “fluent” in it as one might be fluent in a familiar language. She didn’t work her way through the six focusing movements one by one, as a beginner must do, but flowed through them in a single continuous movement. In recreating her experience here, however, I will flag the various movements so that you can see how she got from place to place.

Preparation: She began by getting as comfortable as possible, removing all unnecessary physical irritations that might have masked what her body wanted to tell her. She washed her face because it felt hot and itchy after crying. She took off her shoes, propped a pillow against the headboard of the bed, and leaned back against it.

First Movement: Making a space She stacked all her problems to one side, as though making a space for herself in a jumbled storage room. “Why don’t I feel terrific right now? Well, there’s that big pile of dog-eared school papers I still have to finish. And there’s that problem about Jeff getting sent home from kindergarten. And of course there’s this lousy new thing about the broken dish. . . .”

She pushed all these problems a little distance away from her. She knew she couldn’t make them go away. But she also knew, being a practiced focuser, that she could give herself a little quiet time away from them.

Second Movement: The felt sense Now she let her attention go to the problem that, at that moment, seemed to be the worst: the stormy scene involving that broken dish. She deliberately avoided trying to decide anything about it, trying to analyze it, figure it out. She simply groped for the felt sense of it.

She asked, “What does all that feel like?” And then she let the unclear sense come to her in its own way— large, vague, formless at first, lacking words to describe it, lacking labels or identifying marks of any kind.

She wasn’t impatient with this formlessness. She didn’t demand that it identify itself. Nor did she try to force an identification upon it: “Oh yes, of course, this odd feeling must be. . . .” She simply let it exist in its own way for an appreciable time, perhaps half a minute.

Third Movement: Finding a handle Now, very gently, she asked what the quality of the felt sense was. She tried to let the felt sense name itself, or to let an image come and fit it.

Again she avoided analysis, avoided self-lectures, avoided assumptions and deductions. She wanted the answer to float up from the feeling itself, not from the confused clutter of material in her mind.

In the third movement a word, phrase, or image— if it fits exactly—provides a “handle” on the felt sense. One can then often feel the first shift, the first bit of internal movement (sometimes just a twinge of movement) that says this is right.

As often happens, she went through the focusing movements almost simultaneously here. She got a word (third movement), checked it (fourth), and asked the felt sense what it was (fifth).

Using more words than she herself did, I would put it like this. She had asked: “What is the worst of this?” The feeling came back: “Anger at John.” A further question: “Over the broken dish?” The wordless reply: “No. The dish has hardly anything to do with it. The anger is over his air of jubilation, the way he radiates confidence about his future.”

Thus did the problem change. The inner shift was unmistakable.

She received this fully and sensed it over and over, feeling the change going on in her body. When her body had finished changing, she went on.

A shift like this can come at any time in focusing. You receive it and continue another round of focusing.

Again she got the felt sense, now the changed way the whole problem was in her body at this moment. “His jubilation. . . what now is the whole sense of that?”

She waited. She did not try to force words onto the felt sense. She sat patiently and let the felt sense speak for itself (a second movement, again).

She tried to sense its quality, the fuzzy discomfort of the whole thing, and to get a “handle” on that quality (third movement again). A word came: “Jealous.”

Fourth Movement: Resonating. She took the word “jealous” and checked it against the felt sense. “Jealous, is that the right word? Is that what this sense is?” The felt sense and the word apparently were a close match, but not a perfect one. It seemed that the felt sense said, “This isn’t exactly jealousy. There’s jealousy in it somewhere, but. . . .”

She tried “sort-of-jealous” and got a tiny movement and the breath that let her know that was right enough, as a handle on the felt sense. She did it again, and . . . yes.

Fifth Movement: Asking Now she asked the felt sense itself: “What is this sort-of-jealous? What about the whole problem makes this sort-of-jealous?”

She let the question reach the unclear felt sense, and it stirred slightly. “What is that?” she asked, almost worldlessly.

And then, abruptly, the shift came. “Sort-of-jealous . . . uh. . . it’s more like. . . a feeling of being left behind.”

“Ah!” That “ah!” came with a large, satisfying sense of movement. Peggy’s body was telling her that she was unhappy over the fact that her own career was stalled.

Sixth Movement: Receiving As she tried to stay with the relief of this shift, she had to protect it from voices that soon attacked her. “You shouldn’t feel that way.” “You’re lucky to have the teaching job.” And also, “How will you ever get your career moving?” “You know there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Peggy shoved all those voices over to one side. “That all has to wait,” she said. And she came back to sensing the new opening. “Being left behind . . . can I still feel that?. . . Oh yes. There it is again, yes . . . that’s right . . . that is how I feel.”

But this quality—the feeling of being left behind—was only the tip of the iceberg. Peggy wanted to see if it could lead to more change and movement.

And so she went back through the cycle of focusing movements again. “What is this left-behind feeling? What’s really in it for me? What’s the worst of it?”

This focusing session lasted for perhaps twenty minutes. When it was over, Peggy felt enormously refreshed. The shape of her problem had changed, and so she had changed. She and John then talked calmly about their lives and their futures.

The broken dish was forgotten. That one focusing session had not made Peggy’s career-versus- motherhood problem vanish, but it had started a series of beneficial changes inside her. Further sessions told her more about herself and helped her to move from where she was stuck.

1. Clear a space
How are you? What’s between you and feeling fine?
Don’t answer; let what comes in your body do the answering.
Don’t go into anything.
Greet each concern that comes. Put each aside for a while, next to you. Except for that, are you fine?

2. Felt sense
Pick one problem to focus on.
Don’t go into the problem. What do you sense in
your body when you recall the whole of that
problem?
Sense all of that, the sense of the whole thing, the murky discomfort or the unclear body-sense of it.

3. Get a handle
What is the quality of the felt sense?
What one word, phrase, or image comes out of this felt sense? What quality-word would fit it better?

4. Resonate
Go back and forth between word (or image) and the felt sense. Is that right? If they match, have the sensation of matching several times.
If the felt sense changes, follow it with your attention.
When you get a perfect match, the words (images) being just right for this feeling, let yourself feel that for a minute.

5. Ask
“What is it about the whole problem, that makes me so—?”
When stuck, ask questions:
What is the worst of this feeling? What’s really so bad about this? What does it need?
What should happen?
Don’t answer; wait for the feeling to stir and give you an answer.
What would it feel like if it was all OK?
Let the body answer:
What is in the way of that?

6. Receive
Welcome what came. Be glad it spoke.
It is only one step on this problem, not the last.
Now that you know where it is, you can leave it and come back to it later. Protect it from critical voices that interrupt.

Does your body want another round of focusing, or is this a good stopping place?