Intuition and Felt Sense
These last years a lot has been said about bringing balance between left and right hemisphere, between knowing and feeling, between mental and inner knowing.
Lots of people use the word intuition as opposed to or as counterbalance for the mental knowing. But what is intuition really?
I think it is useful to make a differentiation between intuition and felt sense. The latter is a concept introduced by E.Gendlin, within his philosofical/therapeutic work of Focussing.
I understand intuition as recieving some information: this can be a thought, a feeling, an image… If we want this more feminine side of knowing to take its full place to balance the mental knowing, then this ‘recieving information’ needs refining, and widening.
As Gendlin states: Felt Sense is a “body sensation that has meaning”. “A felt sense is often subtle and as you pay attention to it you discover that it is intricate. It has more to it.” So it is not only a thought, or only an image, but a “….dimension of experience which is not emotion and not thought, which is subtle yet concretely felt, absolutelty physically real”. This I see as the refinement of the concept of intuition.
The broadening exist in the relationship of this Felt Sense with the world around, the context. If the mutual influence between my intuition and the context I am in is not taken into account it can still be (very) useless.