We implicitly respond to experience as we live it. These responses can be called self-states. They are a bottom-up, whole-organism response, as opposed to a top-down response (meaning, an analysis of the situation that would then lead to a physical response).
Such a bottom-up, whole-organism response is not an abstraction, but an embodied reality. It is implicit action, i.e. action that is taking place, below awareness, in response to our situation as we perceive it. It happens, to various degrees depending on the situation, in our brain and nervous system, and our muscles: we are getting poised for action.
I use the term Somatic Implicit to refer to the physical sensations that are the “bottom-up” reaction of the whole organism reacting to the situation.
Somatic mindfulness & felt sense
Somatic mindfulness involves being in touch with embodied experience. Essentially, this means tracking inner experience, paying attention not just to feelings but also to body sensations.
As we stay present by tracking our sensations, a felt sense forms, which is the way we experience the Somatic Implicit.
What we call a felt sense is the experience of this implicit action. It gives us a gateway to the implicit movement that is already here: As we intentionally shift our attention from our thoughts to our bodily sensations, we start to sense into the implicit movement that is our whole organism’s response to the situation.
Gene Gendlin famously says that the felt sense “carries forward.” What actually carries forward is the underlying implicit movement that we get in touch with, and process, through the felt sense.
We start with a fuzzy felt sense of how we are orienting in response to our environment. As we stay with this sense, we experience it as an implicit, unfinished response that needs to be completed. As we allow it to complete in an appropriate manner, we can come to an explicit understanding of it.
To put it another way:
– Articulating the connection between felt sense and a bottom-up understanding of the human body/mind: the felt sense as the experience of these somatic reactions.
– How we work with the Implicit: Not to make it immediately explicit, but to make the experience of it more present so that the incomplete response can be completed.