Comparing Felt Sense to Cotton Candy

People learning Focusing often ask me, “Is ‘felt sense’ the same as ‘experiencing’? Are they different?” As it turns out, my understanding is that “felt sense” is narrower in meaning, and “experiencing” is broader in meaning. To answer this difference, I often use the analogy of making cotton candy.

When solid sugar is placed in a cotton candy machine and turned on, a fog-like substance fills the machine. This elusive foggy state is “experiencing.”

Then, we quickly insert a stick into the foggy state and spin it around and around. Then you can make some cohesion. As long as you have a stick, you can create as many clumps as you want. These clumps are “felt senses.”

Then, if the stick is something that holds the clumps, can we say that the stick is a “handle”? No, at this stage they are not yet “handles” in the sense that Gendlin means. Just sticks are indistinguishable because they all look the same. A stick at this stage is like a word, like “this feeling” or “it.”

If you paint each stick, put a Spiderman or Batman plastic bag over it, and rubber band it, you can tell the cotton candy apart. So only if the sticks are colored or the bag has a design on it can they be considered “handles” in Gendlin’s sense of the word. This is because Gendlin says that “handle” is a “quality word.” When a word expresses the quality of feeling, it means that it can be distinguished from other words. A handle is a word like a “rasp” in the chest area or a “prickle” in the stomach area.

Once a word is found as such a handle, it is possible to return to the same felt sense later. In other words, the words become reminders of the felt sense.

Note

The text above is an English translation of the following article posted in Japanese almost 20 years ago to the Japan Focusing Association mailing list:

Tanaka, H. (2004, october). [focusing-net: 5368] Comparing felt sense to cotton candy.