In meditation, we often use the words “felt sense” to point to how an experience is known directly in the body before it is named, explained, or interpreted. It’s pre-verbal, experiential, and embodied with a sense of expansive openness.
The intention of using felt-sense in practice, instead of an intellectual framework, is beneficial because:
- Concepts divide our experience (self & other, good & bad)
- Felt-sense integrates (brings us into oneness with what arises)
- Thoughts are reactive to situations (with habitual patterns)
- Felt-sense is responsive (open to expression of connection)
- Stories reinforce our concept of a separate self (I, me, mine)
- Felt-sense softens it (becoming one with our experience)
When applied to practices of love, compassion, and joy, our experience as felt-sense helps correct a common misunderstanding: these qualities are not primarily ideas or emotions you think about, but, rather, patterns of lived sensation and tone that can be directly contacted and stabilized. In meditation, this distinction matters because stories pull us out of the present moment into fantasies of the future or regrets about the past.
One way to understand it is that felt-sense is not an emotional storyline or conceptual idea. A story about an emotion sounds like this:
“I love this person because …” or “I feel compassion because their situation is sad.”
By engaging with our ‘felt-sense’ during practice, we are learning to recognize and embody experiences such as:
“This is what love feels like when it is not mixed with wanting.”
“This is compassion without self-reference.”
“This is joy without excitement.”
A felt sense is simpler and more immediate, registered as a present moment experience known in the body:
- Warmth spreading in the chest or throughout the body
- Softness around the eyes and the face
- An uplifted or expansive quality in the torso
- A gentle steadiness, peacefulness, or lightness of being
- A sensation expanding beyond what we perceive as the physical limits of the body
It’s what is happening in your body–mind system right now, not what you think about it.
When we are able to be aware of this felt-sense in our daily life, we can give our attention to that feeling. This strengthens our connection with the arising of the feelings and our ability to be aware of them in each moment. Then we are able to access the positive qualities of our felt sense of Field of Care or Field of Joy at any time in our daily life.
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