Last March, I met Sondra Perl at the National Council of Teachers of English‘s Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco. We talked about her book Felt Sense: Writing with the Body and I recognized the aspects of writing that she was addressing. I took my copy of the book home and excitedly began reading Peter Elbow’s forward. His praise for Perl’s adaptation of the work of philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin was also a welcome articulation of the aspect of the writing process that brings discovery, matching what I’ve experienced in the workshops I teach. Participants often say they experience an increased willingness to write on topics that surprise them and a decreased fear of opening up on the page. I thought this was because I designed exercises that make finding material easier and because I am enthusiastic about writing as well as look forward to listening to newly created writing. Although I still think these elements are crucial for a successful workshop experience, after reading Perl’s book, I also think that even though I didn’t have a name for it, I had learned many ways from my own experience to invite felt sense into the writing process.I am sharing Perl’s guidelines with you here because I believe they will help you get the most out of your writing time outside of the classroom by helping you quickly reach the point where the unsaid becomes “sayable.”

Introducing the book, Elbow calls felt sense “an aspect of our experience that often accompanies us when we are involved in a creative act” and “a felt experience we can access and learn from, an aspect of being human, available to all”. He says:

Gendlin and Perl give us guidance in learning to attend to that felt nonverbal sense triggered by a word. It may feel like a discouraging experience–a negative buzzer going off yet again saying, “No, that’s not the word I want.” But it’s not the discouragement we need to dwell in, it’s the vein of rich meaning that the discouragement often tries to hide: “What I’m trying to say is…” it is here, in this nonverbal space, that we can dwell with a positive and hopeful sense of expectation. And this here turns out to be rooted in the body. In short, the experience of “Uh oh, wrong word” is good news–if we know what to do with it. It means that now the leverage is available for finding words for exactly what we do mean.

 I wanted to learn more about how Gendlin and Perl approach leveraging what is available to express true meaning.So before I turned further into Perl’s book, I did a Google search on Eugene Gendlin. Online, I found material in which he addresses that sense we have as writers that more is always possible, that our writing will teach us what that is, and that images lead to other images and take us into a special kind of unexplored territory, one we feel we actually recognize, as if we are returning to somewhere we have always known existed but didn’t previously know how to get to. Here are excerpts from what he writes in some of the articles posted by the Focusing Institute:

We find that when people forgo the usual big vague words and common phrases, then — from their bodily sense — quite fresh colorful new phrases come. These phrases form in such a way that they say what is new from the bodily sense. There is no way to say “all” of it, no sentence that will be simply equal, no sentence, which will simply “represent” what is sensed. But what can happen is better than a perfect copy. One strand emerges from the bodily sense, and then another and another. What needs to be said expands! What we say doesn’t represent the bodily sense. Rather it carries the body forward…

… once one experiences this “speaking-from,” the way it carries the body forward becomes utterly recognizable. Then, although one might be able to say many things and make many new distinctions, one prefers being stuck and silent until phrases come that do carry the felt sense forward.

Hooked on a way of analyzing what goes on when we allow our writing to lead us, I searched for more about Gendlin online and found this further explanation of “felt sense” in Wikipedia:

A felt sense is quite different from “feeling” in the sense of emotions; it is our body’s awareness of our ongoing life process. Because a felt sense is a living interaction in the world, it is not relative the way concepts are. A felt sense is more ordered than concepts and has its own properties, different from those of logic; for example, it is very precise, more intricate, and can be conceptualized in a variety of nonarbitrary ways. Much of Gendlin’s philosophy is concerned with showing how this implicit bodily knowing functions in relation to logic. For example, Gendlin has found that when the felt sense is allowed to function in relation to concepts, each carries the other forward, through steps of deeper feeling and new formulation.

Gendlin underlines that we can (and often do) “progress” in our understanding, and that this does involve transitions in which existing conceptual models are disrupted, but that we can “feel” when a carrying forward in insight is, and is not, occurring. We can “feel” this because our logical conceptions are dependent on a more intricate order, which is living-in-the-world. Useful concepts derive from and are relative to this more than logical, intricate order, not the other way round.

This makes great sense to me. After finishing Elbow’s forward and my research on line, I turned back to Sondra Perl’s book with a sense of anticipation. Here is a paraphrase of her first chapter summary of felt sense:

Felt sense is located in our body.
It must be given room to form.
It might at first feel murky or unclear.
We may experience this murkiness as discomfort.
To dispel that, we often write any word rather than wait for the right word.
If we pay attention to the discomfort, our felt sense becomes clearer and the right words come.
Once the right words come, we experience relief, excitement, surprise, and pleasure.
Felt sense is connected to meaning.
There are steps to take to help us work with felt sense.

This list describing felt sense resonated with me, and I eagerly read to learn the steps to working with felt sense. It seemed to me that they might guarantee quicker access to whatever it was that frees my students up in my facilitated writing classrooms.

Perl calls the process she teaches for allowing felt sense to guide one’s writing “Guidelines for Composing” (a CD of these guidelines comes with Felt Sense: Writing with the Body). The guidelines contain opening questions, deepening questions, surfacing questions, and reflecting questions. She states that one valuable function of the guidelines is the creation of an experience of having one’s hand held, of knowing one is not alone in the writing process and that one has permission to compose. Some comfort with not yet knowing what the writing will be arises.

Her opening instructs the writer to get in touch with the body:

Get comfortable.
Look away from distractions.
Sit quietly for a minute or two.
Inhale and focus on where you are sitting.
Close your eyes.
Exhale and focus on letting go of tension.
Inhale and put attention on oneself.
Ask how you are right now and if there is anything in the way of writing right now.
Jot down what comes to make a place for the obstacles to stay while you go ahead and write.

Next, Perl advises asking yourself what is on your mind and what you are interested in right now and making a list. Then, she says to allow particular people and images to come to mind and ask, “Is there anything I am overlooking that I might want to write about?” This answer might come to you in images, a song lyric, or bits of dialogue among other snippets.

Perl says to look over your list and ask yourself which item draws your attention most right now. Write this topic at the top of a clean page or new document on your screen. Jot down associations you make with this image or topic. What are the parts you already know about? What of that comes to mind?

Next, she says to put the jottings aside and ask, “What makes this topic or issue interesting to me?” Wait for a word or a phrase to arise from your felt sense of something important about to come. Write it down when it comes.

Perl says to write whatever wants to come next. As you do so, ask what the writing is about and if it is right and if you are getting closer. Notice any body feeling that lets you know the words do feel right. If they don’t feel right, Perl advises you to ask yourself what makes the topic hard for you to write about and then to write whatever answers arrive.

Finally, Perl says to ask yourself what is missing and what you haven’t yet said. You might ask yourself, “Where is this leading?” and then write down an answer. Eventually you’ll ask yourself if the writing you have done feels complete. If the answer is yes, write about how you know that, where in your body you can say you found the answer. If the answer is no, ask what is missing or what more you need to write about to feel complete.

What you create in response to the questions, Perl says, will form a strong basis for a piece of writing. Reading it over you may be able to identify whether it will lead to a poem or an essay or a story. You may find a good first line for that piece of writing.

Next, Perl advises taking a moment to write a description of how you experienced the process of writing from these questions.

According to Perl, you will experience “embodied knowing.” You will have proven to yourself that as a human being you can “make new sense,” can come up with statements, ideas, words and phrases that speak freshly, compellingly and provocatively.”

In Gendlin’s philosophy, Perl notes, there is a space inside of us that “holds within it all that is not yet said, what waits implicitly before words come.” We must learn to allow it to open up, and from that place in the body new ideas and fresh ways of writing will come. The blank is not filled in when we sit down to write. We must pause and wait patiently as we are writing.

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Use Perl’s guidelines and you will enter the “fruitful murkiness” of the “not knowing space” more easily, more frequently and with happy anticipation.

Moreover, according to Gendlin and Perl, the articulations writers make from felt sense become part of them as “knowers.” It’s no wonder then that so many of us long for writing lives and feel unmoored when we don’t create the time to write.

Here’s hoping you sit down with the guidelines and let your own experience of felt sense open into words that put your experiences on the page.