Felt sense is treated, in many contemporary introspective practices, as a reliable and directly accessible datum. One need only “tune in” to receive clear information about one’s inner state. The Laboratory’s experience substantially nuances this hypothesis.
Structure of felt sense
Raw sensation: the pre-conscious information of the body. Rarely directly accessible to the adult who has developed significant interpretive filters.
The interpretive layer: what the subject “knows” they should feel in this context. This layer often precedes raw sensation and may mask it entirely.
The narrative layer: the storying of felt sense, which transforms a diffuse datum into comprehensible information. This transformation is necessary but always partial.
The evaluative layer: the judgement on felt sense — acceptable, problematic, to be changed. This layer disturbs observation by introducing a bias of avoidance or amplification.
Implications for the practitioner
- Treat felt sensations as hypotheses rather than certainties.
- Distinguish “I feel something” from “I know what I feel”.
- Accept that observing a felt sense modifies the felt sense observed — and that this modification is itself a datum.
Felt sense is not a source of directly accessible inner truth. It is a complex, noisy signal that requires a method to be intelligibly processed.