To encourage all writers’ easier access to the authentic inner source known in therapy as "felt sense," Sondra Perl’s book, Felt Sense: Writing With the Body, and the accompanying CD, offers a practical, guided meditation specifically for writers seeking guidance on their inner journey towards more effective outer expression.
The meditation takes two different forms for use in three different contexts: one for a longer classroom session (50 minutes), one for a shorter class session or for individual use at home (40 minutes).
The meditation, or “Felt Sense Guidelines” as Perl calls them, is based on the therapeutic method that Eugene Gendlin invented. He termed this method “Focusing,” and explained it in his book of that name, during the time when he was first theorizing about the concept of felt sense in order to develop his philosophy of psychology.
Gendlin on Felt Sense
In Gendlin’s description of the term felt sense from his book “Focusing,” he writes, “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.”
Perl on Felt Sense - An Illustration
Everyone experiences such physically transmitted messages, for instance when something has been forgotten and the possible memories of that thing come back one by one. It isn’t until a sense of certainty happens, often manifesting in the belly region, when the person remembering has summoned their true felt sense of what that forgotten object is.
In her spoken and written guidelines, Perl elaborates on the example of leaving the house without some forgotten object: “Imagine that you have just gone out. All of a sudden you feel uneasy. Something is nagging at you. You realize that you’ve forgotten something. You instinctively search your pockets. Is it your keys? No, you have them. Is it that letter you wanted to mail? No, you did forget the letter but that’s not it. The letter doesn’t satisfy or match the physical sensation.
"You try to imagine what else you might have forgotten. What could it be? Maybe you shake your head. Or you just stop in your tracks and pause for a minute. Suddenly, an answer emerges that feels just right: it’s that book you promised to return. That’s it. Your body relaxes. You let out a sigh of relief.”
How Felt Sense Can Help Writers
Anyone suffering from writer’s block or other forms of stress in the writing process can benefit from the practical method offered by Perl. Not only do writers completing the guidelines learn to relax, breathing deeply with eyes closed, but they also explore questions that they might not have asked themselves otherwise.
So if taking your own deep breaths and meditating in general doesn’t help enough when it comes to producing the written word in a compelling way, this more structured meditation geared specifically for the purpose of composing could be just what’s needed.
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