Relevant skills
This workshop will help you acquire the Felt Sense Introspection skill, which will appear on our upcoming Skill Tree 2.0 release.
Introduction
“Felt Sense Introspection”, also known as “Focusing” or “Gendlin’s Focusing”, is a powerful technique for understanding, articulating, and sometimes resolving your own feelings. In this workshop we will learn the theoretical basis for the technique and how to apply it.
Felt Sense Introspection
Source: Gendlin's Focusing
What do you get out of it?
The good
- You know more about yourself and your emotions. This makes you able to handle emotions more skillfully, as well as stay true to your deep desires.
- You have better access to subtle intuitions. There's much happening in your brain that you aren't aware of, and sometimes all the answers you need are already in there somewhere.
- You recognize more easily when other people are being honest. When you get the hang of the skill of connecting to your deep emotions, it will also be easier to tell if other people are doing it or not.
The bad
- You have the reality of your mind rubbed in your face. You won't always like what you see. Depending on your pre-existing assumptions, it might trigger a serious re-evaluation of your self-image and life philosophy.
- You might be more easily frustrated with shallow conversations. Discovering emotions together with other people is a very powerful and enriching experience. But it's not always appropriate, and you can't always do it.
How to tell if you have it?
- You find it easy to talk about your emotions. It sometimes takes time to find the right words, but it's not often that you find yourself completely stumped.
- You can systematically resolve vague, nagging doubts into clear insights. Whenever you sit and think about your issues, they tend to become more and more clear (as opposed to more muddy and confused, forcing you to give up).
- You are able to make quick decisions which you don't regret later. When there is no time, you act in agreement with your deep emotions, and even though it's not always the best possible decision it's also nothing you are ashamed of.
How to learn it?
Note that this skill is naturally easy for some people, and quite tricky for others. Don’t be discouraged if others seem to be having an easier time than you. On the other hand, if this is so easy that it feels like a waste of time, bear in mind that working on this skill gives you indirect benefits, which are much more important than any particular insights coming out of a single session. Putting effort into it will train your mind to be more responsive to emotions in general, even when you aren't paying attention.
If this is already your second nature, you'll probably feel that any specific instructions about how to do it are pointless. Don't worry - the purpose of the detailed instructions below is limited to initial stages of learning, and you are supposed to go beyond them. However, please do try to follow the instructions first, and only then branch off and break the rules.
Step 1: Felt sense
Bring up something that you'd like to work on together with your subconscious mind. It can be a question, feeling, memory, desire etc. It's usually a good idea to let the topic "pick itself" as much as possible.
Focus on the wordless blob of intuition that represents it, rather than any names you might have for it.
Hold it "delicately" in your attention.
Don't assume that you know any answers! Your mind is likely to surprise you, and you need to give it space to do so.
If your intuitions seem murky and hard to access, stay with the feeling for a minute or so, to give your mind time to bring up the full richness of related thoughts and feelings.
Find a corresponding sensation in your body.
Emotional disturbance tends to influence muscle tension, and this can often be felt as physical sensations in the body.
Some common examples include feeling tightness in the chest, belly area, or throat.
Even if you can't feel anything in your body, you might still have some success with the next step.
Spend at least 2 minutes in this step.
Step 2: Match a verbal description
Try to bounce some guesses off the felt sense, to see what feels right.
Give your mind lots of space! If your guesses don't stick, let them drop away without getting attached.
If something just pops up in your mind, try going along with it for some time and see what you can find. Just don't lose track of what you're trying to do.
Often, you'll hit on some words or phrases that "click", but aren't a complete answer. Build on them and explore the most promising areas.
Spend at least 3 minutes in this step.
Step 3: Felt shift
At some point, you'll finally hit on a description that "clicks" really well, and feel a release of tension.
After you manage to get this to happen once, you'll know exactly what you're looking for, and the whole process should become more straightforward.
Spend at least 5 minutes in this step.
After concluding step 3, repeat the process 2 more times, for a total of at least 30 minutes doing the exercise. Leave 20-30 minutes for discussion at the end of the workshop.
Post-activity
If comfortable, share the topic you were working on, and your experience with the activity. What challenges did you face? What “clicked” for you? Does anyone else present have advice on how you can improve your experience?
Further reading/progress
The instructions in this workshop aren't really how you use the skill when you're good at it. You don't need to do anything in any particular order, as long as it works. You also don't need to use any verbal thoughts. In fact, mental images or impressions might be more powerful.
Try to stay in touch with your body and your "felt senses" all the time. In this case you don't need to use the technique at all, because you already "get it" automatically, much in the same way that training your body to have good posture becomes automatic. However, before making a big decision, you might still want to take a longer time to consult your inner feelings and thoughts.
Change how you communicate. If you learn to speak directly from your deep emotions, especially in a setting in which other people are willing to do it too, your relationships will be greatly enriched.
Background
This is the beginning of an adaptation of the Be Well Tuned series. The Guild council has long admired this series, especially because it also takes the form of a “skill tree for agency” in a very similar way as ours. We were saddened to discover that the author passed away before they could complete the series. Because we and others found the content useful, and it works very well with a lot of the other things we teach, we decided to take the liberty of incorporating it into the Guild, both as a skill chain in our skill tree, and as this workshop series that you (metaphorically) hold in your hands. Furthermore, we will be taking a stab at finishing the series, filling in the missing content with what we hope will do the series justice.
As you may know, the Guild divides our skill tree into 3 broad categories: Empiricist, Meditative, and Pragmatist. Most of the content from this series will fall into the Meditative skill tree.
Below is the tentative vision we have for the structure of the Be Well Tuned skill tree, as it fits into our Meditative skill tree.
(Not pictured is the Upgrade Your Decision Theory -> Track Reality w/ Beliefs -> Tune your Cognitive Strategies chain, which will go in the Empiricist tree.)
Much of this series will be information taken directly from that series, but will occasionally include new or slightly altered content when we think effectiveness or safety is a concern.