We are all familiar with the five senses of perception: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. I was reading today about another sense we all have but may not have heard about called the Felt Sense.
I read about this in the book Try Softer by Aundi Kobler. She describes this as when the sensations in our bodies are telling us something, and we just have a feeling, a “knowing” that we cannot explain. It often informs us of something that is going on inside ourselves.
We all have it, and in its simplest form is when we experience hunger or perhaps thirst. Maybe our stomach growls or our mouth gets dry. When I allow myself to get too hungry, my felt sense is I begin to lose focus. That’s my cue I need to get some food in my body.
As I learned about this extra sense, it immediately brought to mind another time I experienced it more profoundly. About six years ago I had been struggling with this feeling that something was just not right with me. I had this internal sensation which I can only describe as a feeling just under my skin that something was not right within me. I had never experienced this before, the constant buzz of low-level anxiety. I wondered if I was going crazy. A few times I also thought maybe I was sick, like I had cancer and was dying.
I made an appointment with my doctor and was sharing this with her. I asked for something for the anxiety and she encouraged me instead to see one of her colleagues, a psychologist who had been very successful in helping many of her other patients stop the anxiety medications they had been taking for years. I agreed and made an appointment.
Long story short, in my first appointment with him I spent the majority of that session calmly explaining all the things I thought was causing my stress. I then shared that three years earlier my dad had died. I began to sob. What he helped me discover was that I had never dealt with that. My felt sense was my body telling me I needed to grieve.
Thankfully I listened. I found a caring grief therapist who helped me down that unknown, scary path. Grief is no longer as menacing or intimidating to me, and taking that journey helped me when later I began to lose my mom first to dementia, and then when she died.
In a time when intelligence and a high IQ are seen as superior, I think it is just as important to develop our felt sense. It just may protect us from some hidden threats to our well-being.
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