Felt sense dynamics: a practice-based framework for tracking the arc of somatic emotional processing

Abstract

When a felt sense is genuinely attended to, it responds. This paper introduces Felt Sense Dynamics, a phenomenological, practice-based framework that names and maps that response across five recurring phases: Steadying, Strengthening, Spreading, Shifting, and Softening, collectively referred to as the Five S’s. Gendlin’s concept of the felt shift names the destination of somatic processing; Felt Sense Dynamics attends to the journey: the phenomenological arc of sensation between initial contact and that arrival. The framework was developed inductively through sustained observation across several years of somatic practice in grief retreats, coaching, and practitioner training contexts, notably including many licensed therapists, mental health professionals, and somatic practitioners. The framework identifies these phases as observable tendencies that have appeared repeatedly in the author’s practice-based observations when sensation is held with compassionate curiosity without attachment. A distinguishing orientation of the framework is its aim toward participant self-sufficiency. Many somatic models function as roadmaps for the practitioner, organizing the therapeutic encounter through framing, naming, and directed technique. Felt Sense Dynamics cultivates in participants a transferable capacity for compassionate self-witnessing. The practitioner’s role is to teach this capacity, not to be its necessary condition. The paper situates the framework in relation to established somatic modalities, including Gendlin’s Focusing, Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi, Polyvagal Theory, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and EMDR, and in explicit dialog with five adjacent frameworks: Winhall’s Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, Selvam’s Integral Somatic Psychology, Fosha’s AEDP four-state map, the Community Resiliency Model’s Shift and Stay skill, and the somatic reappraisal framework, whose empirical findings this paper extends phenomenologically. The facilitation protocol, including grounded preparation, memory activation, macro-pendulation, and pleasure anchoring, is described in full. The paper is grounded epistemologically in organic inquiry and closes with a preliminary observational structure and directions for future empirical investigation.