Felt Senses

Felt senses come in many forms. There are more familiar ones, like tightness, pain, tension, heat, and emotional states. To ones we might be less conscious of, such as musculature bracing, nervous system dysregulation, patterns of protection - like a sinking feeling in the tummy or an armouring that pulls you inward when something feels off about a situation or person. There are felt senses bound up in reflexive movements, such as an impulse to flee an unsafe situation. There are felt senses connected to how we feel, like a wave of emotion that rises in the chest.  Always present is how we take things in through all our senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste). Then there are complex sensations that are vague, something that’s fuzzier, or intuitive, an inner knowing that is harder to put into words – like a “gut feeling”.

Why would encountering your felt sense be useful? There are clues in the way we speak to our troubles, such as:

I can’t seem to let go. I’m sick of this. This has got a hold of me. I’m broken-hearted. This is weighing on me. I’m all wound up. I’m frozen. That made my blood boil. I feel numb. It spilled out of me. I’m all over the place. I’m about to burst. I’m scattered.

It’s a sense of being internally gripped by something hard to shake off. That no matter how hard you try to make sense of it, it doesn’t change how it feels in the body. After all, we are not just a head on a meat stick; we are multidimensional and experience the world through many channels (thinking, feeling, sensing and relating).

How we come to “make sense” of what happens to us needs to move beyond thought to what’s intrinsic to the word sense, a bodily perception. When we are more connected to our whole perception (thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting), it becomes easier to trust our appraisal of what’s happening internally and in our social environment.

By themselves, all these sensations might seem unworthy of attention. But when they are in response to specific contexts, people or traumatic memories, they become valuable pieces of information.  Information that points to old wounds, unmet needs, longings, boundaries, or to something needing acknowledgment and release.

Let's say ruminating thoughts hijack you; they're often tied to a sense of dread or panic, which makes it hard to reframe them. When we can acknowledge and follow the panic’s felt sense, we come to see what's tangled up in it. On the surface, you might be calling it anxiety, but when we track the movement of the felt sense, it could reveal a needed boundary, or memory, or release tightly held grief. So, we’re taking in the whole picture of what's happening, which deepens insight and provides clues for the next steps.