A felt sense is something that happens really fast, below the radar of awareness. It’s in the same general category as a hunch, an intuition, a gut feeling. Here is a video about how to get in touch with your moment-by-moment experience of life. Amazingly enough, as you shift from being somehow cut-off from yourself… within moments you can regain a sense of aliveness and well-being.
John Le Carre describes such a thing in his novel, A delicate truth(Viking, 2013, p. 156):
…until at some point in the interminable dawn he discovers that an unconscious mental process has delivered him a seemingly spontaneous decision.
The term felt sense was coined by Eugene Gendlin:
There is a kind of bodily awareness that profoundly influences our lives and then can help us reach personal goals. So little attention has been paid to this mode of awareness that there are no ready-made words to describe it. I have to coin my own term: felt sense.
– – Eugene Gendlin