What is the “Felt Sense” and how drawing ‘it’ may bring insights

There is a moment in every somatic session where something begins to gather inside. It is not a clear thought or an emotion we can easily name, but more like something in between. Something that lives deeper in the body and that asks for attention in a different way. American psychologist and philosopher Eugene Gendlin called this the Felt Sense (Gendlin, 1981).

He described the Felt Sense as a whole feeling of a situation. A body knowing that is more than emotion and more than cognition. It is the physical shape of an inner truth that has not yet found words.

In sessions I support people to slow down and meet this inner place with curiosity and gentleness. Not to interpret it and not to fix it but to sense it and allow it to unfold at its own pace (which looks very different from person to person). Sometimes this Felt Sense is really quite murky and hard to grasp and, more often than not, we have to clear space and resource before we are able to go look for it. In practice, and in PolyVagal terms, that means making sure that you feel safe enough and resourced enough before we go play with the ‘murky waters’.

This way of working with the Felt Sense whilst being PolyVagal informed is very much the work of psychotherapist Jan Winhall with whom I’m currently studying (as of December 2025).

How I bring the Felt Sense into a session

The invitation to connect with it usually begins with a simple question - “What is happening in your body right now if you pause for a moment and notice?”, or “What comes forth when you tune into your body? What bubbles up more obviously?”

We stay with the first layer of sensation, touching only the edges of what we notice, rather than going right into all of it at once. It might be a tightness in the throat or a fluttering under the ribs or a heavy warmth across the back of the arms. We take our time here because this is where the Felt Sense begins. A vague but whole sense of a situation or a question.

It’s from this pace that the body starts to speak. Sometimes there is an image or a phrase or a gesture or a softening or a word. And this is a gateway into the Felt Sense. The body leads and the meaning emerges naturally rather than being forced.

An example from my own process

To write about this I looked back at my own bodycard from a recent session. Bodycards were introduced by Jan Winhall (Winhall, 2021) as a visual way to track the Felt Sense and how it shows up in the body. Bodycards help map what the nervous system is holding at the beginning of the session and what has changed at the end - if anything! We don’t connect with the Felt Sense to shift something. Attempting to get rid of something almost always has the opposite effect. Paradoxically, allowing for nothing to happen…often shifts something! Like trying really hard to fall asleep only to fall asleep just as you stopped trying.

At the beginning

The first image showed my body almost completely filled with black, with the left side feeling especially dense and heavy. My head was flooded with yellow lines that burst outward like a frantic search for escape. The felt sense here was overwhelming with an urgent need to protect from the difficult feelings I was carrying on that day.

As the session unfolded

We stayed with the sensations rather than the story. I had a big need to protect the dangerous and threatening core (represented in the drawing by a single red dot) and naturally and organically shifted to look for areas of my body that felt softer, gentler and more pleasant. This turned out to be my hands and I suddently found myself staring at my hands and at the grooves and valleys in the skin of my palms. I was suddenly reconnected with the memory of falling asleep as a child in my grandmother’s caravan and of playing with my hands. A time long before mobile phones and the pressures of adult life. I felt momentarily very joyous and thought my hands were amazing. This is when the sensations in the rest of my body began to shift. My breath softened and the the black hole felt…less black. The breath softened and the urgency to disappear was gone.

At the end

The second bodycard on the right (representing my Felt Sense at the end of session) showed a different bodyscape. The blackness was gone and replaced with a softer grey. The yellow around the hands carried a warm glowing quality. The thoughts had changed to feelings of appreciation and gratefullness for hands that are strong, capable and present. I thought of using them for Judo later on in the day and how strong they are when I used them for that! My hands and head felt good even if my body was still carying the vicious and violent experience of the last very difficult few days.

This is what a Felt Sense shift looks like. The situation inside does not necessarily become pleasant or resolved but it becomes more spacious and more integrated. The body becomes more available and something reorganises itself from the inside out to leave you with more capacity, more stable and more resourced.

Why this matters in somatic work

The Felt Sense is not a technique. Instead, it is a way of ‘listening in’ that honours the body’s intelligence.

When we give space to what is forming inside without pushing for meaning too quickly the body reveals what it needs for regulation and healing.

This can look like:

• a change in posture

• a new pattern of breath

• a memory surfacing

• a trembling that completes a protective response

• or simply a sense of more room inside

• …

The Felt Sense is the bridge between the implicit world of the body and the conscious world of language and awareness. Gendlin believed that real change happens when the body is included in this way and my experience in somatic trauma therapy has shown this to be deeply true.

Closing

Working with the Felt Sense invites us into a different rhythm. A rhythm where the body is allowed to guide and where the story emerges from sensation rather than the other way around. A hard thing to do indeed in a world of where intellect is King!

It is slow and relational and rooted in the wisdom that the body always knows more than we can think our way into.

If you want to explore the Felt Sense in your own healing journey I bring this quality of listening into all my somatic sessions. We move at the pace of your body and follow what unfolds naturally so you can feel more connected and more present inside yourself.

References

Gendlin, E.T. (1981). Focusing. New York: Bantam Books.

Winhall, J. (2021). Treating trauma and addiction with the felt sense polyvagal model : a bottom-up approach. New York, NY: Routledge.

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