felt sense
Preverbal body awareness
A felt sense is the subtle, hard-to-articulate bodily awareness of a situation or problem—the physical sensation that accompanies knowing something before you can put it into words.
The term comes from psychologist Eugene Gendlin's focusing technique, which treats these vague bodily feelings as meaningful signals worth attending to: I had a felt sense that something was wrong, even though I couldn't explain why.
The felt sense is neither pure emotion nor pure thought, but a holistic, embodied understanding that can shift when accurately named.
- intuitionInstinctive immediate understanding
- bodilyOf the physical form
- body awarenessSensing one's physical position
- awarenessState of perceiving reality
- somaticConcerning the body
knowing · visceral · gut · embodied · focusing · subtle · inner · perception · hunch · implicit · preverbal · presence · attunement · texture · resonance · emotional · murky · unfolding
- mindmind, thought, cognition, consciousness, thinking
- instinctsinstinct, survival instinct, survival instincts, maternal instinct, gut instinct
- inner experienceinner life, mind's eye, inner world, awareness, intuition
- embodimentembodiment, proprioception, kinesthesia, corporeal, corporeality
- emotional intelligenceemotions, mood, empathy, self-awareness, emotional cues
- Attunementempathy, rapport, harmony, resonance, synchrony
felt senseverbal reasoning
Understanding through language
logical analysis · analytical thinking · abstract reasoning · deductive reasoning · rational thought
felt, sense, feel, feeling, feels, feeler, feelings, unfeeling, sensed