**\#️⃣ Tags:** #Psychotherapy #Somatic > **🌱 Planted:** Sat 8 March 2025 --- > [!quote] > When the great Tao is forgotten, > Kindness and morality arise. > When wisdom and intelligence are born, > The great pretence begins. > > — Tao Te Ching, Chapter 18 The mind instinctively searches for explanations, theories and abstractions to make sense of our experience, but true transformation only emerges when we can drop the need to theorise and know and instead stay with our direct bodily experience. [[Eugene Gendlin]] who worked at the University of Chicago did a tremendous amount of research on what makes a successful therapy client, and therefore what makes for successful transformation. What he found was that it had nothing to do with how intellectually clever someone was, nor did it have to do with the amount of knowledge one has. He found transformation occurred when clients could surrender their need to analyse, theorise or know and instead stay with their direct bodily experience and [[The way we experience ourselves is through the Felt Sense|Felt Sense]]—the subtle, pre-verbal intelligence which arises in the body. If we ask ourselves "What am I feeling in my chest right now?", and we stay with that bodily felt sense and get curious about it, we engage a fundamentally different mode of awareness than if we ask "Why am I feeling this in my chest right now", and then think about what it might be instead. The first question invites us into direct contact with our experience and the second pulls us into analysis and abstraction where we can remain stuck in our process rather than experiencing a [[When we name what's true in our interiority, we experience a felt shift|Felt Shift]]. Intellectual insight or knowledge alone can't transform us because it doesn't reach into or shift the deeper patterns which organise our experience. This is also a good example of why [[The mind can never know reality as it truly is]] and [[We can only know who and what we are through direct experience]]. --- **➡️ Next:** [[]] **⬅️ Back:** [[When we name what's true in our interiority, we experience a felt shift]]