Over the last month or so particularly, working with between 15 and 20 people each week, doing inquiry work with them, I have been struck by the value of the “felt sense”.

In terms of the neuroscientific “story” behind the Odoki Method, this is all about predictive processing, and how we aim to trigger prediction error events in our clients, particularly in their “top level priors”, such that they have experiential shifts that reduce their suffering.

However, there’s a certain amount of preparation required to get to a place where this is possible, and this is where the felt sense seems to kick in.

The term “Felt Sense” was coined by Eugene Gendlin in the 1950s. I first heard of it in the early 1990s, and quietly, it inserted itself into my approach to meditation, and has remained there ever since.

What has happened in the last month, however, is that it has come to the fore in guiding inquiry. For the full inquiry, it is clear to me that it is the felt sense where we conduct our inquiry. If we don’t do it there, it’ll be just an intellectual game. So establishing a clear relationship with the felt sense is a crucial precursor to full inquiry.

However, it seems to have quite profound implications outside of this. I have had a number of clients that have presented with significant anxiety. To begin their work, I ask them what their anxiety might be trying to achieve. They, likely, say “to protect me”. In which case, I ask them, faux-cautiously, “So, does this mean that it is a good thing??” I love watching the look on their faces.

This begins an important change of direction. From viewing anxiety etc as necessarily bad, and therefore to be removed, to the possibility of it being a good thing. If it is a good thing, then it doesn’t need to be removed. Then, we start to pay more attention to it, including some really simple exercises where we welcome it, ask of its needs, offer it support, then thank it.

Repeatedly, I’m seeing clients that have only completed two (30min) sessions with me reporting significant changes to their experience of anxiety. Actually, that’s not what they tend to say. They tend to say, “This has been a quiet week”, only sometimes seeing the connection.

Them learning that their anxiety is actually there to protect them, and that their anxiety is just the felt sense which, having been ignored for a long time, has felt the need to become loud, seems to bring a much more compassionate relationship with their inner experience and less fractious experience of life.

To the point where I wonder if there is an Odoki Lite intervention - two 30 min sessions in which we’ll turn around your experience of anxiety. Hmm.