I wrote last time about different kinds of knowing, and how knowledge is more than a transaction or something we possess: knowing is felt.

What does it mean to you to know something? What does it mean to you to know “god/God” or ultimate reality? I wonder if “knowing” is a way of participating in that reality; if by our living and our life we communicate in embodied, enacted ways with the very ground and source of our being.

The existentialist theologian Paul Tillich famously described God not as a “being” among other beings, but as Being-itself—the depth or ground of all that is. In this view, God is not a supernatural entity “up there,” but the ultimate reality that underlies and permeates everything; God is not an object, but the Source from which all arises. We see this ancient orientation in various traditions from around the world; it reflects an old intuition. These metaphysical formulations are not pointing to a “thing” or being to believe in. It’s about an infinite actuality that is intimately near, closer than our own breath, preceding our own self-awareness, pulsing with our own heartbeat. God is not separate from us, but immanent, everywhere.

If the divine is the ground of being, then it makes theological sense that we would encounter the divine, first and foremost, in our own grounded being. If God is the ground of being, then our access point is through our own embodied groundedness: the simple, embodied awareness of being here, now. So instead of being something “other” to reach towards, what if the sacred is something we are always already within and that is within us? We can sense it intricately, when we learn to tune into it.

I think it’s so interesting how many traditions speak of this, in their own ways. Buddhism holds that awakening isn’t a belief (how absurd!) but a shift in direct perception or insight. In Advaita Vedānta, Brahman, nondual reality, is not separate from the self, the ātman; it is That which knows itself through presence. Sufis talk about knowing the Divine through the taste of the Real, through immediate sensing. These are different ways of gesturing towards the ultimate.

On any of these paths, we don’t approach the divine or the sacred intellectually: it’s sensed in the body, in silence, and in liminal awareness. So we might say that this felt sense is not only therapeutically useful: it has theological applicability. It is a kind of prayerful epistemology: knowing by abiding, by listening, by surrendering to the embodied edge of the unspoken. What would it mean for feeling and embodiment to take epistemic priority, then, over abstraction, cognition, mentation, logic, or reason?

Share The Unfolding

Spiritual understanding as inner attunement: the embodied edge of the unspoken

In many mystical and contemplative traditions, true knowing arises from a mode of attunement that enhances life and gives depth to our lived experience. This points to a way of knowing that doesn’t begin intellectually, but in real contact, which is often subtle, and always embodied.

The phenomenal, or what we perceive in immediate experience, is a gateway: a portal to the ultimate. All we really have is experience, so any “answers” we seek must come experientially. This does not mean turning off the brain! Our sense experiences already involve conceptualization, but in daily life attunement to the senses is about as deep as we can get to the ground of pure experience.

For those formed in traditions that privilege cognitive assent—orthodoxy or “right belief” as the epistemological ground—this can feel like a radical reorientation. And maybe it is: radical, as in going back to the roots. For instance, the early desert mystics knew that spiritual discernment could not be outsourced to the rational mind alone; it had to be felt, tested, waited for, and listened to through the body. If we go far enough back, we’ll find this type of embodied “listening” all over the place.

To return to the body, then, is to return to an ancient form of knowing. This is not a regression; it’s an atavistic posture, an opening to something primary and primordial. We might consider it a kind of theological listening.

Images of the ultimate

Our most intimate knowledge is always embodied. If we want to use “god” for the most atomic reduction of experience, we end up with something that feels like a field of possibility, an open potentiality. Our living embodied experience could be considered an image, a manifestation in motion, of the field of potentiality, god/God. The pixels of our experience point us to the edge of what we can know empirically before what some call “faith” kicks in.

How different is our relationship with (and experience of) reality if we view god or the ultimate reality as king or father, mother or ocean. Feminist theologian Sallie McFague wrote about the importance of our choice and use of metaphors (for that is all we have: all we can say about the Ultimate will be with metaphor, analogy, etc)—our metaphors strongly influence our experience of god or the ultimate. If God is a punitive father, or a despotic king, or an all-embracing mother, or the ocean to my wave…—our theology dances with our metaphysics and affects everything we do, because it influences who we are and how we experience ourselves, others, nature, and life as a whole.

Embodied theology: knowing from “within”

So what does this mean for everyday spiritual life?

It means that moments of quiet presence, of deep listening, of feeling into the unspoken center of a question, may not be tangents or merely “preparation” for the “real” spiritual work—they are spiritual work. They are the places where theology begins again, not only as theories about God, but as a felt encounter with something larger, deeper, and more alive than we can fully name. This is the apophatic edge of phenomenological experience.

Meditation and other practices can “clean the mirror” and allow for increasingly less conceptual interference in our experience. Iris Murdoch writes that moral vision is clouded by self-centered fantasy; we often coast along on storylines that the ego prefers, rather than truly engaging with reality. It’s actually unbelievable how much we live on autopilot and projections. So we must ask ourselves, do we prefer the ego-comforting fantasy, or do we want reality? One is necessarily limited and circumscribed; the other is boundless.

The philosopher Eugene Gendlin wrote that our bodies are not sealed-off containers; they are interactions. Every felt sense is a kind of relational knowing—not just about us, but about how we are living in the world, and how the world is moving in us.

That means the felt sense is theological. It is where we meet the world and the sacred in living flesh and in each breath.

Leave a comment

A practice for returning to ground

If God is the ground of being, then sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is to pause, and feel the ground. Here’s a practice you can try:

Find a quiet moment. Let your body rest in your chair or on the floor.

Gently bring your attention to the sense of contact: feel your feet on the ground and your body on the seat. Notice your hands, and let them be at ease.

Allow your awareness to deepen, and tune your noticing beyond physical sensations to the wider, felt quality of being here.

Ask inwardly: What is the ground of my being right now? Or maybe: How is the sacred meeting me here, in this body? You’re just asking; the answer may not come right away, or might not come in words.

Wait and listen. After sitting with the question, note down what arises for you: a sensation, an idea, whatever it is. What you’re listening for is something quieter and more subtle than thoughts or feelings. Just see if a sense of meaningness forms.

This is not about making something happen; it’s about trusting that the sacred is the very aliveness, the nowness, of this moment.

Subscribe now

Over the centuries, theology—and religion—have frequently treated “God” as a conceptual object: an entity to be defined, defended, or disproved. A lot of theological discourse still orbits around metaphysical formulations, epistemic justifications, and doctrinal boundaries. And as useful as these are, they may be missing something essential: the actual encounter.

We might think of theology as a stuffy academic enterprise: lofty ideas about God, or debates about divine attributes, or mapping the mystery of the universe onto metaphysical grids. I wrote last time that

I’ve learned that what makes a person “religious” isn’t any specific beliefs or affiliation, but the kinds of questions one asks, which fundamentally have to do with one’s ultimate concern. When your ultimate concern fits under the heading of “God-talk,” well, we may be in the realm of theology.

It’s a much broader field than you might expect.

I propose that theology may be—must be—not only written and debated, but felt and lived.

Theology must be practiced and embodied.

We all have metaphysical assumptions: ideas about reality, or about what is real, and so forth. These assumptions influence and affect (and sometimes even drive) our choices, and regulate and shape our lived experience. Our implicit understandings of what we might call “God” also seriously influence our lives. Metaphysics deals with the nature of reality; theology deals with the nature of “God” or what is ultimate.

Knowing God (spirit, the Beloved, the inner teacher, the True Self, the Friend…) is an understanding. Old English used to have different words for different kinds of knowing.1 In modern times this distinction has been lost in English, and we often think of “knowing” almost with a sense of possessiveness: I know XYZ; this information is mine. But of course, so much of our experience is not transactional, possessive, or dichotomous. In fact, most true knowledge, in the sense of wisdom and understanding, is less linear and more embodied than the knowledge of facts.

Knowing isn’t just something we think; it’s something we sense. Have you ever had “a feeling” about a person or place, and knew something was off, or your life was about to be upturned? That feeling is implicit, and our minds are great at rationalizing, such that we usually don’t realize we’ve concocted a story to explain the feeling; we just notice the story and the feeling all wrapped up together. Like, “of course this place gives me the creeps, it’s dark and unfamiliar” or “I bet I’m crushing on this person because they remind me of That Someone.” But before the story and the rationalization, there is pure implicit feeling.

Share

Theology has roots in the implicit. When the philosopher Eugene Gendlin spoke of the “implicit,” he was referring to the deep structure of experience that is already forming in the body. It’s that which is carrying meaning, direction, and understanding even before we can name it. The felt sense is how we touch the edge of that knowing. It is where knowing, in the sense of understanding, actually begins, and where meaning is made: underneath the verbal, conceptual layer; in actual experience, before it thickens into words.

This is the domain of the felt sense—and I propose that it may be where we can most truly know God.

It’s not only individual, personal, or emotional things that we know implicitly. The body is part of the world’s unfolding, and what it senses may include what is most real, most ultimate. The rapid evolution of science, which describes what things in the world do, can lull us into thinking we understand what things are, but if we listen to the body’s knowing, we can learn much more.

Faith is partly an openness to meaning that isn’t discernible in the present moment: meaning is an unfolding, evolving, living process.

From a spiritual perspective, this is profoundly significant because it suggests that the sacred is not accessed by escaping the body, but by entering it more fully and listening for what emerges prior to our cognitive interpretations.

In other words, embodiment is not a distraction from spiritual knowing; it is its ground.

Next time, we’ll talk about the ground of being, the way in which we might view God not as an ultimate being, but as Being itself: the depth dimension, the first and final source.

Subscribe now

You can read part four here.

Leave a comment

Last time, I wrote about how the felt sense is a doorway, and how there are ways of knowing that aren’t intellectual or conceptual. Our direct, embodied experience can tell us so much!

Embodied metaphysics investigates how bodily felt experience grounds and informs our understanding of lived reality and being. And, I’m also curious about what we can know or understand about the nature of reality and the ultimate (that‘s the metaphysics).

What is ultimate or most important to us plays an obviously large, though often unrecognized, role in our lives. I’ve been experimenting with reclaiming the term “God” for what’s ultimate for me. Here’s briefly how I mean the term God, from my article, God is a Verb:

The ever-unfolding, always-becoming, here-and-now is all that is. Anyone can experience this directly, no belief required. In fact, you might need to lay your beliefs down for a moment in order to access this experience.

For shorthand, we can call this ever-unfolding Allness “God”. It may be helpful to think of God as a verb —a happening, a becoming— rather than a person or person-like being, or an entity, or noun of any sort. God: the great unfolding.

I know the term “God” is a loaded one. Lots of people squirm at the word, and if that's you, that's ok. I still take issue with the word “god”, as it's been used and abused for centuries, but I find it a useful word and am in a personal process of reclaiming it.

So, let’s talk a bit about ultimate concerns and what “God” actually is/might be. This is important for understanding our metaphysical assumptions, which influence our embodied experience and understanding of life.

Subscribe now

We all have gods, whether we call them that or not. What you value most in life is, for all intents and purposes, your god. The philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich wrote1 of one’s “ultimate concern,” and we all have an ultimate concern. It may be all too easy in daily life to get swept up in prioritizing that which is only worthy of a partial allegiance, rather than putting front and center that which is our true ultimate concern: the infinite and eternal.

There is an existential reality at play here, which leads many people to neurotically avoid “nonbeing by avoiding being.”2 Full living—full being—includes coming to terms with what is ultimate. Again, this ultimacy may be different for different people, or at different moments in life, though I think there tends to be a process by which we eventually settle into one general view of what our ultimate concern is. Eventually, seeking and searching slows, and we no longer have that eager hunger for an ever-distant shore: we’ve found our ground.

I’ll be using the word theology, a word we ultimately get from the Greek θεός/theós, meaning “god,” and‎ λόγος/lógos, which means word or speech. So, God-talk. I bring theology in because I’ve learned that what makes a person “religious” isn’t any specific beliefs or affiliation, but the kinds of questions one asks, which fundamentally have to do with one’s ultimate concern. When your ultimate concern fits under the heading of “God-talk,” well, we may be in the realm of theology.

It’s a much broader field than you might expect.

Share

An important aspect of spiritual maturity involves questioning what is ultimate for you, examining what’s real, and choosing your moral values and systems with integrity and coherence. To be fully mature, we must move towards standing on our own feet with regard to our inherited concepts. Personal experience is fundamental and must not be ignored, but it is not the only story.

Jung wrote that “when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”3 And Plato’s Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”4 That which we ignore or refuse to examine will still drive much of our lives. This is true of metaphysics, theology, and more. Let’s get curious about what’s behind the curtain.

To many, theology seems like an intellectual game. Religious traditions have developed vast systems of doctrine, metaphysics, apologetics, and philosophical argument. There’s a long and illustrious lineage in many traditions of well-known theologians.5 But for many people today (especially those seeking an honest and intimate spiritual life), the God of doctrine, systematic theology, scholarly treatises, or institutions more generally can feel distant, abstract, or irrelevant.

An embodied experience is an understanding that our processes of cognition, including thoughts, emotions, and perceptions, are grounded in and arise from the interactions between the body and the world. The epistemology of embodiment tells us that the body and its environment are not really separable; there is constant communication and interaction going on. This interaction or interbeing has deep and wide roots that connect us and our lived experience to the One, the Mystery, the Ultimate. This is what I call the theology of the felt sense.

What if God (spirit, the True Self, etc) is more than a belief to have, but is a reality to participate in? What if God speaks not just in words and ideas, but in direct experience? What if God is not primarily a concept to believe in, but a presence to encounter? And what if the body, the very ground of our felt sense, is the place where that encounter begins?

You can read part three here.

Leave a comment

I think we’ve all had a particular kind of moment, the experience of which we instantly recognize, even if we don’t have ready words for it. It’s a feeling of “that whole thing” when you consider a situation, or a sense of whether you like a particular person or place. This isn’t about a thought, or an emotion; it’s something more like a subtle, bodily “about-ness.” Something feels more present, or the air feels thicker, or there’s just something… It’s the feeling of meaning itself, forming just under the surface of your awareness, or just out of the corner of your eye. You aren’t sure what it is yet, but there’s something there.

It’s like a doorway has appeared. This is what philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin called the felt sense.

The felt sense isn’t a hunch or a gut reaction; it’s more nuanced than intuition and more embodied than insight. Gendlin described it as a bodily knowing: it’s an inner sense of a situation, experience, or question that is not yet in words, but carries its own kind of wholeness, truth, and direction.

For those of us with an active spiritual life, this quiet opening is often where the sacred starts to speak.

Share

More nuanced than intuition, more embodied than insight

To clarify what the felt sense is, it helps to understand what it isn’t. It’s not the same as an emotion, like sadness or joy; it’s not just a feeling like anxiety or anticipation; and it’s not a thought like “I should do this” or “better think twice.” The felt sense is what you sense before thoughts, feelings, and emotions arise clearly. (I describe it a little differently here.)

The felt sense is often fuzzy, body-based, and may be hard to pin down, but if you stay with it, gently and with curiosity, it often begins to shift, to reveal something, or offer a next step that feels surprisingly right.

Imagine you’re facing a life decision. You’ve made pro and con lists; you’ve talked to friends; you’ve thought about it from all angles; yet something doesn’t feel resolved. You pause, drop inward, and feel into the tangle, the “whole situation.” There, maybe in your chest or belly, you sense a tightness, or maybe a flutter, or something else. If you sit with it, without analyzing it, but just letting it be, it might eventually speak to you: maybe This path feels safe, but it’s not right for me. Something clicks for you, and the pros and cons don’t matter; you now know what you need to do.

This moment of clarity didn’t come from logic or emotion: it came from the felt sense.

Subscribe now

The inner sanctuary: spiritual dimensions of the felt sense

In many religious and spiritual traditions, truth is not just something we think or believe; it’s something we encounter. It arises through listening, through waiting, through surrender, through presence.

Mystics across traditions describe moments when something larger moves within them. It goes by many names: spirit, the Beloved, the inner teacher, the True Self, the Friend, God… These encounters are often quiet, subtle, and hard to describe. They aren’t arising intellectually, but from somewhere deeper: the body, the silence, the liminal spaces of our being.

This is why the felt sense matters spiritually. It is not just a psychological tool. It’s a threshold experience: a place where something real, meaningful, and sacred begins to take shape or make itself known.

In Sufi practice, the felt sense is related to dhawq, the taste of truth that arises in the heart-mind. It is direct, experiential knowing. In the nondual Shaiva tradition, this might be called pratibhā. In Christian contemplative language, this might be the still small voice, and in Quaker tradition, it might be how the Inner Light makes itself known.

In all of these, something real, alive, and trustworthy is felt before it is explained. This pre-conceptual knowing can be cultivated, and has been by many mystics and practitioners, through different practices of prayer, meditation, and contemplation. It’s our human birthright to touch into this wellspring of wisdom.

Share

Practicing the listening

We live in a fast culture that rewards fast answers, clarity, and certainty. But we know that spiritual life rarely (if ever!) moves that way. It tends to unfold on sinuous, subtler timelines, in multiple recursive layers. The felt sense invites us to slow down and stay present with what is not-yet-clear, and to listen for what is forming.

Gendlin called this kind of listening Focusing, in the sense of a camera lens bringing an image into view. In Focusing, we bring gentle, inward attention to what is wanting to be known. In the spiritual life, this kind of attention can be a form of prayer.

To practice it, you might just take a moment to pause and let your attention drop into your body. Notice your breath and the seat or support beneath you. Then bring to mind a situation, a question, or even just the sense of being you right now. Notice: is there a place inside that feels meaningful, but hard to describe? Stay with it. Let it show itself to you in its own time.

This is not about “figuring it out.” This is listening with your whole self.

The sacred may speak in silence first

In the weeks ahead, I plan to share more about how the felt sense relates to spiritual discernment, to intuition, and to transformation.

If this embodied spiritual listening speaks to something in you, please let me know in the comments!

Sometimes God, or life, or truth speaks in ways we might have forgotten how to listen to. We can always tune in to that quiet something in the body, our felt sense of what’s arising.

There is always a doorway, and we’re lucky to have the key.

You can read part two here.

Subscribe now