You Don’t Have to Find It — Let It Find You
A Different Way to Understand Felt Sense — and Why “Where Do You Feel It?” Can Miss the Point
By Haekyong Visneski, LMT, MMT | Intense Lotus Massage
I want to be honest with you from the very beginning of this article.
I am a Licensed Massage Therapist, a Master Myoskeletal Therapist, and a trauma-informed breathwork facilitator with over ten years of clinical experience. I have studied somatic healing across multiple modalities — Thai massage, Myoskeletal Therapy, Ashiatsu, Reiki, sound therapy, breathwork. I have sat with hundreds of bodies and nervous systems.
And for a long time, I could not feel inside my own body.
I could feel the surface of my skin. I could feel pressure, temperature, texture. But that deeper interior awareness that somatic practitioners talk about — the felt sense — it was not there for me the way the textbooks describe it.
During my breathwork training, my fellow practitioners would ask me during practice exchanges: “Where do you feel it in your body?” Every single time, that question made something in me want to disappear. Not because I was not trying. But because the honest answer was: I do not know. I cannot find it.
That experience changed everything about how I approach this work. And it is the reason I am writing this today.
What Is Felt Sense, Really?
The term felt sense was developed by philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin in the 1960s and formalized in his 1978 book Focusing. It describes something many people have experienced but few have words for — a whole-body, pre-verbal knowing about a situation, memory, or emotion that lives below language.
It is not a clear emotion. It is not a specific thought. It is more like a texture — a heaviness in the chest, a tightening somewhere you cannot quite name, a sense that “something is off” before your mind has caught up to why.
Felt sense is the body knowing something before the mind has words for it.
In somatic healing, practitioners guide clients to access felt sense because trauma, emotion, and the body’s accumulated experience are stored there — in the body’s felt knowing — long before they become conscious thought or memory. This is why the body matters in trauma healing. Not as a metaphor. As a literal archive.
Why “Where Do You Feel It?” Can Fail
Here is the clinical reality that many somatic training programs do not address directly enough.
For people with trauma histories — especially chronic early developmental trauma — interoception, the ability to sense the internal state of the body, is often neurologically suppressed. This is not a choice. It is not resistance. It is not a lack of effort or awareness.
Bessel van der Kolk’s neuroimaging research shows that trauma significantly reduces activity in the insula — the region of the brain that processes interoceptive signals. The body is still sending information. The fascia is still transmitting. The nervous system is doing its job. But the brain has learned to turn down the volume on those signals before they reach conscious awareness.
The body is speaking. The brain learned not to listen — because at some point, listening felt dangerous.
When we repeatedly ask a dissociated client “where do you feel it in your body,” we are asking them to access a pathway that trauma has suppressed. It is like asking someone to read a sign in a room where the lights have been turned off. The sign is there. But the conditions for seeing it do not yet exist.
And most people who come to breathwork are not coming because everything is fine. They are coming because relaxation is hard. Because stress is constant. Because their emotions feel overwhelming or completely inaccessible. They are coming precisely because their relationship with their body is already complicated.
To greet that person with “where do you feel it in your body” — before any safety is established, before any regulation has happened — is not an invitation. It is, without meaning to be, a test they were never told they would be taking.
The Hidden Harm: Shame, Anger, and Faking It
I want to speak plainly about something that almost never gets discussed in somatic and breathwork training circles. Because it needs to be said out loud.
When a facilitator asks “where do you feel it in your body” and the client searches inward and finds nothing — and then the facilitator asks again — and the client searches again and still finds nothing — something begins to happen in that client’s mind that has nothing to do with healing.
They begin to think: everyone else in this room can answer that question. I cannot. That must mean something is wrong with me. Maybe I am too broken for this. Maybe I am the problem.
The repeated question does not just fail to work. It can quietly convince a person that they are the reason it is failing.
Some clients respond by withdrawing. They go quiet, disengage, and do not come back. They leave carrying one more piece of evidence that healing is not available to them.
Some clients respond with frustration or anger. They push back, or they simply leave. Honestly — this is the healthier response. Their nervous system correctly identified that something was not right, and it protected them. The anger is not the problem. The anger is information.
But there is a third response that I believe is the most common — and the most invisible.
They fake it.
The facilitator asks again. The client does not want to be the problem. They do not want to disappoint the person holding the space. They have heard others describe their sensations — tightness in the chest, warmth in the belly, pressure in the throat — and so they borrow those words. They say something that sounds right. The facilitator nods and moves forward. The session continues.
They performed healing instead of experiencing it. And nobody in the room knew.
The client leaves knowing they faked it. They sit with that privately. And now the wound is deeper than before — because even in a room designed for healing, even with a trained facilitator, even trying their hardest — they felt nothing real. And they had to pretend they did.
This is not rare. I believe it is extremely common. And it stays invisible because the facilitator never finds out, and the client is too ashamed to say it.
The modality gets credit for a session that never actually happened.
I am not writing this to criticize practitioners. I am writing this because I have been that client. And because if we are serious about trauma-informed work, we have to be honest about the harm that well-intentioned questions can cause when they are asked too soon, too repeatedly, and without first creating the conditions that make a genuine answer possible.
A Different Starting Place: Rhythm, Vibration, and the Body’s Own Pathway
After years of clinical practice — and my own personal experience of interoceptive disconnection — I have found a different starting place for clients who cannot feel inside their bodies.
Rather than asking them to find something, I help create conditions where something can find them.
The approach is simple. It begins with rhythm and vibration.
Self-Tapping
When a client tells me they cannot feel inside their body, one of the first things I offer is gentle self-tapping. I ask them to tap their own body — lightly, rhythmically, with their own hands.
The person is touching themselves. There is no external contact to navigate or feel threatened by. Agency is fully with the client from the very first moment.
Tapping creates rhythm. And rhythm is one of the most powerful nervous system regulators we have. A predictable, repeating pattern tells the nervous system: you know what is coming next. Predictability is a safety signal. The body begins to settle.
Most importantly — tapping creates vibration. Not just on the surface, but traveling through fascia and bone into the interior of the body. Vibration does not ask permission. It does not require the client to find anything. It simply enters, and the body responds. The sound of tapping also feeds back through the ears simultaneously, creating a multi-channel experience — tactile, proprioceptive, and auditory all at once.
Self-Hugging, or Holding a Bolster or Ball
While tapping, I invite the client to hold themselves — a gentle self-hug with arms crossed over the chest, or holding a bolster or soft ball against the body.
Compression adds something tapping alone cannot provide: containment. One of the experiences common to dissociation is the loss of a clear sense of where the body begins and ends. Gentle compression re-establishes that boundary. It says, in purely physical language: here is your body. These are your edges. You exist here, inside this.
The combination of compression and rhythmic tapping — the body held from the outside while vibration moves through the inside — creates something quietly profound. The person is not asked to feel anything. But the conditions for feeling become available.
Following the Lymphatic Pathway
The areas I invite clients to tap are not random. They follow the body’s lymphatic pathway — and this is where the approach becomes something more than a simple grounding technique.
I begin at the ankles, then move upward: behind the knees, the groin area, the armpits, and finally the clavicle. These locations correspond to the body’s primary lymph node clusters — areas where the lymphatic system is most concentrated and most responsive to gentle stimulation.
Starting at the ankles — the place furthest from where trauma is most often held — is the safest possible entry point.
Gentle tapping over lymph nodes activates lymphatic flow, which is directly connected to parasympathetic nervous system activity. In simple terms: moving through the lymphatic pathway helps shift the body from a stress state toward rest and restore. Not through force. Through gentleness and sequence.
The bottom-to-top progression also matters neurologically. Beginning at the ankles allows the nervous system to receive the work gradually. We are not going near the threat. We are starting at the edges and slowly, gently moving inward. The nervous system gets to decide, at every moment, how far it is willing to travel.
By the time we reach the clavicle — close to the heart, the throat, the breath — the body has often already begun to shift. Not because we forced it. Because we followed it.
A Note to Fellow Breathwork Facilitators
I want to speak directly to those of us who hold space in breathwork sessions, somatic sessions, or any healing container where we invite clients to go inward.
We need to ask ourselves an honest question before we ask our clients anything at all:
Does this nervous system have the conditions to feel anything yet?
Here is a clinical distinction I have found essential in my own practice. If a client can access felt sense — if they can go inward, locate sensation, and track it — then their nervous system already has sufficient regulation and safety. You can work with what they find. The door is open. Walk through it with them.
But if a client cannot find felt sense — if they go inward and encounter only blankness, numbness, or confusion — that is not failure. That is not resistance. That is the most important clinical information they can give you. It means somatic awareness work and nervous system regulation must come first — before felt sense exploration is even possible.
The tapping, the self-holding, the lymphatic sequencing, the rhythm and vibration work described above — this is not a lesser version of somatic healing. This IS the somatic healing, for this person, at this moment.
The absence of felt sense is not an obstacle to the work. It is the beginning of the work.
And even clients who CAN access felt sense still need ongoing nervous system regulation. Interoceptive access is fragile, especially in early healing. Regulation is not just the bridge to felt sense. It is what keeps the bridge standing.
So perhaps our first question as facilitators should shift. Not “where do you feel it in your body?” — but rather: “what does this nervous system need right now in order to feel anything at all?”
That shift — from technique to genuine assessment, from instruction to invitation — is the difference between somatic work that accidentally retraumatizes and somatic work that actually heals.
We are not trying to make people feel more.
We are trying to make it safe enough that the body remembers it always could.
About the Author
Haekyong Visneski is a Licensed Massage Therapist (MA60711068), Master Myoskeletal Therapist, and trauma-informed breathwork facilitator based in Lacey, Washington. She is the founder of Intense Lotus Massage, where she offers individual somatic healing sessions, breathwork, and women’s healing circles. Her work is informed by over ten years of clinical practice, extensive specialized training, and her own lived experience of trauma and healing.
intenselotus.com | haekyong@intenselotus.com
