Attention & Focus · “You Become What You Hold”
Sensing the Energy
Use the body’s felt response to read the ‘energy’ or felt-shape of a situation and its choices, surfacing information the analytical mind misses.
In 4 lines: Center, then hold the whole situation and feel it in the body — open or contracted, alive or stuck. For a choice, hold each option and notice the bodily shift. Read where the energy wants to move, not just the logic — then name it and cross-check against the facts before you act.
What it is
This practice is the perceptual engine underneath Alan Seale’s inquiry: instead of analyzing a situation logically, you sense its “energy” — its felt shape — in and through the body, and use that felt response as information.
Seale frames change as “engaging life as energy in motion” and tells practitioners to “listen, sense, and feel what is trying to get our attention,” looking for “patterns and flows of energy rather than linear patterns of cause and effect.” When facing a decision, you can also hold each option and notice how it feels — does it open, expand, lighten, or does it contract, tighten, go heavy? — treating that felt difference as data.
It is the same family as Gendlin’s felt sense and Damasio’s somatic markers, recruited here for situational discernment. It works through attention turned to subtle signal (The Inner Creates the Outer), feeling as operative information (The Inner Creates the Outer), and present-moment receptivity (Everything Happens in the Now).
The Method
A faithful rendering, drawn from Seale’s Intuitive Living and Transformational Presence:
- Center into presence first. Breathe down, ground, and drop underneath the mental chatter (see the companion presence practice). The felt sense is quiet; it can’t be heard over reactivity.
- Bring the situation to mind as a whole. Don’t dissect it into pros and cons yet. Hold the whole challenge, opportunity, or relationship in awareness.
- Drop attention into the body and feel. Ask, in Seale’s spirit, “what is trying to get my attention here?” and notice the felt response — where and how the situation registers physically: openness or contraction, lightness or weight, movement or stuckness, warmth or cold. This is “feeling the energy” of it.
- Test the choices through the body. For a decision, hold each option in turn and notice the bodily shift it produces. An option that brings expansion, ease, or aliveness reads differently from one that brings tightening or heaviness. Note the difference without forcing a verdict.
- Read for pattern and flow, not logic. Ask where the energy wants to move — where there is aliveness and where there is resistance — rather than reasoning out cause and effect. “Trust that there are answers present” in how it feels.
- Translate into words, then verify. Name what you sensed (“this direction feels alive; that one feels forced”), then cross-check it against the facts and your values before acting. The felt sense informs the decision; it does not replace judgment. (Sourcing note: faithful summary of Seale’s “sense and feel what wants our attention / patterns and flows of energy / engaging life as energy in motion” teaching; short phrases quoted from his guidance. The option-by-option body-check is the standard felt-sense application, consistent with Seale’s method.)
Source & Lineage
Alan Seale (b. 1954), founder of the Center for Transformational Presence, built his approach on intuitive, energy-aware perception — his first book is literally Intuitive Living (2001) — and made “reading the energy of a situation” central to the tools in Transformational Presence (2017).
It is closely kin to Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing / felt sense, to Damasio’s somatic-marker account of intuition, and to body-based discernment in coaching and contemplative traditions.
Seale’s distinctive emphasis is applying it to situations and choices (not only one’s own emotions) and pairing it with his “what wants to happen?” inquiry.
Common refinements
Confusing felt sense with fear. A contraction can be a genuine red flag — or just anxiety about change. Distinguish a quiet “no” from a fearful one; revisit when calmer.
- Skipping the centering. Without presence first, you read your reactivity, not the situation. Always ground before sensing.
- Treating it as an oracle. The felt sense is a guide, not a verdict. Always cross-check against facts, ethics, and consequences.
- Over-reading. Not every twinge is meaningful. Look for clear, repeatable felt shifts, not faint flickers you have to strain for.
- Refinement: keep a simple log of what you sensed and how decisions turned out; calibration improves discernment over time.