Three. What the Body Knows.

The stories in the previous chapter illustrate the two main discoveries on which this book is based:

First, that there is a kind of bodily awareness that profoundly influences our lives and that can help us reach personal goals. So little attention has been paid to this mode of awareness that there are no ready-made words to describe it, and I have had to coin my own term: felt sense.

And second, that a felt sense will shift if you ap­proach it in the right way. It will change even as you are making contact with it. When your felt sense of a situation changes, you change -- and, therefore, so does your life.

Let's study these two propositions in more detail.

First, I want to be sure you understand what a felt sense is.

A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. Physical. A bodily awareness of a situation or per­son or event. An internal aura that encompasses every­thing you feel and know about the given subject at a given time -- encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail. Think of it as a taste, if you like, or a great musical chord that makes you feel a powerful impact, a big round unclear feeling.

A felt sense doesn't come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a sin­gle (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling.

Since a felt sense doesn't communicate itself in words, it isn't easy to describe in words. It is an unfamiliar, deep-down level of awareness that psychotherapists (along with almost everybody else) have usually not found.

Let me illustrate. Think of two people who play a major role in your life. Any two people. I'll call them John and Helen in this discussion, but substitute the names of your own people.

Let your mind slide back and forth between these two people. Notice the inner aura that seems to come into existence when you let your attention dwell on John, the sense of "all about John." Notice the entirely differ­ent aura of Helen.

The inner aura as you think of each person isn't made up of discrete bits of data that you consciously add to­gether in your mind. In thinking of Helen, you don't laboriously list all her physical and personal traits one by one. You don't think, "Oh yes, Helen: she's 5'6" tall, has blond hair and brown eyes and a small mole next to her ear, talks in a high voice, gets upset easily, wants to be a playwright, likes Chinese food, needs to lose weight...." Nor do you list each detail of your relationship with her.

There are undoubtedly millions of such bits of data that describe Helen as you know her, but these millions of bits aren't delivered to you one by one, as thoughts. Instead, they are given to you all at once, as bodily felt. ! The sense of "all about Helen" -- including every one of those thousands of bits of data that you have seen, felt, lived, and stored over the years -- comes to you all at once, as a single great aura sensed in your body.

The sense of "all about John" comes to you in the same way. It is a huge file of data: what John looks like, how he speaks, how you and he first met, what you need from him, what he said yesterday, and what you said in return. The amount of information is staggering -- yet somehow, when you think of John, all the relevant facts and feelings come to you at once.

Where are all those thousands of items of information stored? Not in your mind, but in your body. The body is a biological computer[1], generating these enormous collections of data and delivering them to you instanta­neously when you call them up or when they are called up by some external event. Your thinking isn't capable of holding all those items of knowledge, nor of deliver­ing them with such speed. It would take all the remain­ing years of your life to list all the details you know about Helen and your relationships to her. Your body, however, delivers "all about Helen" in one great, rich, complex experience of recognition, one whole felt sense.

To illustrate the point further, think of your own re­actions when you talk with Helen, and then when you talk with John. You change inside -- correct? You can sense the difference within you. If you are talking pri­vately with Helen and then John unexpectedly walks into the room, you can feel yourself becoming different. Your felt sense of John is now here too, as well as your felt sense of Helen.

These changes inside you are not brought on by thinking. You don't think, "Oh yes, this is Helen: with her I've got to behave in such-and-such a way." Little thinking is involved. Ask yourself, "Why am I this way with Helen and that way with John?" The answers are not in your mind. Only your body knows.

Notice that a felt sense is not an emotion. It has emo­tional components in it, along with factual components. But it is bigger than any single emotion, more complex -- and much less easy to describe in words.

For example, your felt sense of Helen probably in­cludes a large number of emotions that you have felt at various times when with her. Perhaps some such emo­tion is dominant in your relationship at this very hour. The dominant emotion right now, let's say, is anger. You and she quarreled bitterly last night, and now the first word that comes to mind when you think of her is "anger." Yet that emotion is not the felt sense—is not "all about Helen."

An emotion is often sharp and clearly felt, and often comes with a handy label by which you can describe it: "anger," "fear," "love," and so on. A felt sense, being larger and more complicated, is almost always unclear -- at least until you focus on it -- and almost never comes with a convenient label.

To illustrate, let's suppose there is some difficulty in your relationship to John. Asked to describe this dif­ficulty, you might say: "I'm tense when I'm with him. When I'm with Helen, I feel as if my 'natural' self is safe and free, but when I'm with John, I am uncom­fortable, tense."

This tension arises somewhere in "all about John." People who don't know about focusing are likely to be aware only of the tension, over and over. They never consult their felt sense of "all about John," or perhaps a little less broadly, "all about this odd feeling I get with John." The word "tense" might be the best one-word description of the feeling, but "tense" is only the tip of the iceberg. "Tense" might be the dominant emotion at a given moment, but below it and behind it lies some­thing huge and vague.

You can feel that huge, vague something with your body, but you can't touch it with your mind -- your mind protests, "I don't want to be struck dumb every time I'm with John! I want to be relaxed, bright, natural. Why can't I be? Why?" But there are no answers in your mind. If your mind knew the answers or had control of the situation, presumably you could surmount the dif­ficulty through rational processes and an effort of will. You could think your way to a resolution of the problem. But this is patently impossible. No matter how your mind protests, no matter how hard you think, the same tension makes itself felt inside you whenever you are with John. This tension is generated by your body, reacting to John's presence. The reaction bypasses your thinking mind almost entirely. But when you let the felt sense form, then you can work with more than you can understand. If you attend to the felt sense through cer­tain steps I will show you, it will shift.

That is precisely what this book is about. It is neces­sary to approach our felt senses by an entirely different route -- that special through-the-body route that I call focusing. By approaching them that way, we can let a felt sense form and change.

Much of what has passed for emotional guidance and psychotherapy in our past has been futile. Counselors tried to make us analyze our feelings rationally, or "face" them over and over.

Let's look again at that hypothetical difficulty in your relationships with John, and let's look at some of the most common ways of approaching such a problem. (All the common approaches are, unfortunately, futile.)

Belittling the problem. You try to convince yourself that the problem doesn't exist or is too trivial to worry about. "It doesn't matter," you tell yourself. "It's noth­ing. I shouldn't let such silly little things bother me."

Does this change anything? No. The next time you meet John, the "trivial" problem is exactly as big as it always was.

Analyzing. "It must be that John reminds me of my father," you conclude solemnly. "I was always intimi­dated by my father. He was so sure of himself. So is John. Sure, sure, that must be it"

The analysis may or may not be correct. But it does nothing to change the feeling. You can analyze furious­ly the whole time you are with John, but if that feeling is there in your gut with its inexplicable discomforts and tensions, the relationship will not be eased any more than it was last time.

"Facing down" the feeling. "I'll just grit my teeth, stand up to it, and walk through it, "you tell yourself hopefully. "I'll ignore it. I won't let it get me!"

But it doesn't help, does it? If something gets you, it will go on getting you until some fundamental change takes place.

Lecturing yourself. "Now see here," you tell yourself sternly, "it's time you pulled yourself together and stopped all this nonsense. You're supposed to be an adult, right? So act like one! There's no reason in the world why John should make you feel uncomfort­able"

No. That doesn't work either.

Drowning in the feeling You sink into the emotion, hoping that this time just feeling it again will change it. "Yeah, that was a bad time when he started talking about my sex life. I just sat there like a dummy. I am stupid. Wow, that is awful! I feel like a squashed bug...." Whenever you sink into this unchanged feel­ing, it makes you feel as bad as last time.

These approaches cannot work because they don't touch and change the place out of which the discomfort arises. It exists in the body. It is physical. If you want to change it, you must introduce a process of change that is also physical. That process is focusing.

Part Two of this book devotes itself to the job of teaching you how to focus. I won't start teaching it here. For now, I just want to finish describing the char­acteristics of a felt sense.

The most exciting characteristic of all is the fact that a felt sense, when you focus on it well, has the power to change.

You can actually feel this change happening in your body. It is a well-defined physical sensation of some­thing moving or shifting. It is invariably a pleasant sensation: a feeling of something coming unstuck or uncramped.

I can best describe it to you by starting with a familiar human experience: the odd feeling of knowing you have forgotten something but not knowing what it is. Undoubtedly it has happened to you more than once. You are about to take a plane trip, let's say, to visit family or friends. You board the airplane with a small, insistent thought nagging you: you have forgotten some­thing. The plane takes off. You stare out the window, going through various things in your mind, seeking that elusive little piece of knowledge. What did I forget? What was it?

You are troubled by the felt sense of some unresolved situation, something left undone, something left be­hind. Notice that you don't have factual data. You have an inner aura, an internal taste. Your body knows but you don't.

Maybe you try to argue it away, try to squash it in­tellectually or rise above it -- the method of belittling it. You tell yourself: no, I won't let this bother me and spoil my trip.

Of course, that doesn't work. The feeling is still there.

You sigh and rummage in your mind again. You find a possibility. "Helen's party! I forgot to tell Helen I can't come to her party!"

This idea doesn't satisfy the feeling. It is perfectly true that you forgot to tell Helen you would miss her party, but your body knows it isn't this that has been nagging you all morning. You still don't know what you forgot, and you still feel that wordless discomfort. Your body knows you have forgotten something else, and it knows what that something is. That is how you can tell it isn't Helen's party.

At some moments the felt sense of what it is gets so vague that it almost disappears, but at other moments it comes in so strongly that you feel you almost know. Then suddenly, from this felt sense, it bursts to the surface. The snapshots! I forgot to pack the pictures I was going to show Charlie!

You have hit it, and the act of hitting it gives you a sense of sudden physical relief. Somewhere in your body, something releases, some tight thing lets go. You feel it all through you: Whew!

It feels good. You may feel bad about the pictures but the step feels good. This is one of the key character­istics of a shift in a felt sense: it always has that easing and sometimes very beautiful sensation of bodily re­lease. It feels like exhaling after holding your breath. You can feel the tension draining out of your body.

There are no words in the language to describe the felt sense and its physical shifts. Therefore, I must give a name to that feeling of coming unstuck inside. I call it the body shift.

Not everybody feels the shift taking place specifically in the belly. It may seem to happen all over the body, or it might feel like a loosening in the chest, or it might be a relaxation of a tight throat. I call it body shift main­ly to suggest that it doesn't happen in the mind. It is always, in some way, a physical sensation. You often can see it and hear it when it happens in somebody else. There may be a long audible sigh of relief, a sudden loosening of some tight facial grimace, a quick, com­fortable relaxing in the posture.

That is what it is like to get a shift in a felt sense. The example I've used -- forgetting something on a trip» -- is trivial, of course. But undoubtedly there are problems in your life that you don't consider trivial. Stuck places inside you that spoil parts of your life, ways in which you feel trapped and helpless. In all these cases, exactly as with those forgotten snapshots, your body knows much that you don't know, much that you cannot possibly figure out.

Nobody can figure out, intellectually, all the details of a personal problem. No therapist can. You can't -- neither for someone else nor for yourself. The details are in your body. The way to find them is through focus­ing.

When you do, as we've seen, a physically felt shift occurs. Why does it occur? Where does that odd feel­ing of release come from?

It comes from two sources:

First, the once-hidden knowledge is now available to your conscious mind. You may be able to use it in some rational plan of action for resolving the problem. This can certainly lead to a feeling of relief: "Yes, of course! That's where the hang-up is.... That's the di­rection I need to go!"

The second source of that "uncramping" feeling is more important. Even if you can't make immediate or direct use of the once-hidden knowledge, the body shift makes your whole body different.

Consider those snapshots again. The once-obscured fact -- “I forgot the snapshots” -- was not the kind of fact that could be put to immediate use in a rational plan of action. The fact came to you aboard an airplane. There was nothing you could do with it. Despite this, your felt sense of your trip was now changed. You were changed.

And so it is with more important personal problems.

You can feel the change happening inside you.

Part two. FOCUSING.

 

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