Felt Sense Part Three: Being the Experience

In Parts One and Two, we looked at the collision between raw sensation and the stories our minds tell, the narratives that we mentally overlay onto our experience, which then shape not just our perception but also our biology, and how the narrative serves as armor.

Underlying it all might just be the grief that sits at the center of that tension, which is simply part of the human experience of being alive.

This is Part Three, the pause to notice something we can’t really explain, but only experience.

Darryl, my Diné friend and elder whom I have the privilege of knowing and being known by, often conveys the sense that we are experience. Not that we are ‘having an experience.’ We are not collecting moments or measuring them. We are it as it unfolds. That is our true nature on a biological level.

What we usually call experience, the thing we “have,” is really our brain’s interpretation of things, the sensations in our body, the memories we carry, and the beliefs that shape us.

Everything we live through is part of this experience. The narrative overlay is the lens built from memories, beliefs, and cultural agreements, many of which, if not all, are built on fear.

It’s how the mind tries to make sense of what’s happening, and it keeps us at a distance from what is alive in its attempt to keep us from dying.

To really experience is to inhabit the moment fully. To be in it without trying to own it, label it, fix it, or even become it.

Noticing our belly, our breath. Noticing that we are noticing. Aware that we are aware and feeling how our mind is processing, how the story wants to take over, and what it’s like to choose to stay with the living, breathing sensations anyway.

This is where choice begins. Not after we’ve sorted the story or mastered the narrative, but right in the middle of the raw experience. We sense what is happening and let our interpretation move alongside it, without assuming it defines the whole thing.

We can hear these words and think we understand. We might nod or try to apply them in our lives. But understanding isn’t something that comes first. It comes after we have felt it, after we have been it. That’s the quiet, stubborn truth at the heart of all of this.