In 1979, psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin coined the term "felt sense," which refers to "an ongoing understanding of an ever-changing now. Persons are experiencing processes. We apprehend the world moment-to-moment through our experiencing of it. A flow of experiencing is always ongoing in a living human being, which you can every moment attend inwardly, if you wish."
A fruitful question to ask yourself in your yoga practice might be: What is the felt sense of my body right now? Through this dialogue one can become intensely and passionately curious about things like: Where is the edge of this sensation? Where is the boundary between what I know and what I don't know in my body experience? If I didn't have the word "stretch," how might I describe and experience that sensation?
Yoga is meant to induce a state of being more than it is meant to create a "perfect" body, whatever that might be. By allowing the perceptions of sensation to widen, we can become better friends to our inner experience. Qualities of friendship include acknowledging, allowing, respect, patience, warmth, generosity, understanding, compassion and love.
As Eugene Gendlin said, "What are the characteristics of experiencing? Experiencing is bodily felt, rather than thought, known, or verbalized. It is a concrete, lived experience rather than constructs, abstractions, or generalizations about experience. It is there before concepts. It has implicit richness. There is always a "more" in any experiencing than can be made explicit at any moment."
And all that is a far more fascinating and fruitful exploration than perfecting your butt!
A bow of gratitude,
Denise
Gendlin, E. T. 1978. Focusing. Bantam Dell, New York, NY
