Ancestral Felt Sensing
Imagine you are walking through a lush, green forest. As you move through the trees, you observe the light breaking through the branches. You feel a cool breeze entangle your hair. Each footstep falls with a small crack or crunch beneath your feet. Your eyes widen as you take in every plant, every fractal repeating itself again and again in nature. As you stay present in your body, breathing, you come to a clearing. You stand with your feet planted firmly at the edge and look out into the open expanse. How does your body feel now? What do you see? Who is with you in spirit? You take a minute or two to let your felt sense form. You have brought an offering. You take a small wound object from your pocket and slowly place it at the edge by your feet. Do you receive a response? You gently rise and continue on, making sure to look over your shoulder as you depart. Taking one final deep breath.
It is a well-established truth in the psychological field that sometimes our feelings do not belong to us. We call this experience empathy. For example, you may be overcome with a deep sadness when a friend shares a personal loss or experience joy in the presence of a smiling child. In this way, you are accessing your “relational felt sense”, to glimpse the other’s experience. Afterall empathy, in the original German, Einfühlung, literally translates as “to feel into”.
What is less well established is the idea that this relational felt sense can extend beyond the two bodies present in the room, and maybe even encompass feelings from the past. This is at the core of the theory of Ancestral Felt Sensing.
In a literal sense, you are a product of your ancestors. Intergenerational Trauma is passed down in epigenetic codes. We are both our family’s DNA and our family’s past experiences. However, in Ancestral Felt Sensing, this idea takes on a more spiritual component, believing that we can sometimes access feelings from the past. Like in Toni Morrison’s beautiful book Beloved, our body has a “rememory” (defined as a “recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past” (Morrison, 2019)).
Resmaa Menakem also discusses this idea in My Grandmother’s Hands, his treatise on racial trauma. Here he explores how ancestral pain is carried in black, white and blue (police) bodies, contributing to unrest and brutality. He also suggests that re-connecting to an ancestral felt sense might be paramount in healing.
While this theory was not a central tenant in my work as a therapist (especially in the beginning), I have been surprised by how often client’s report some form of ancestral felt sensing manifesting in them. They report feelings that don’t quite belong to them, or a presence along side them during Focusing. In this way, it has become an area of understanding I have grown more open to over time. If you are interested in learning more about healing intergenerational trauma through somatic therapy, please feel free to contact me: Jennifer@homebodycounselling.ca.
References
Jan Winhall, Felt Sense Polyvagal Model. (2023, Novemeber 1) ‘Ancestral Felt Sensing: Working Transgenerationally through the Body' with Marika H and Stevie JL [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK5WISMr7tc
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands. Central Recovery Press.
Morrison, T. (2007). Beloved. Vintage Classics.
Morrison, Toni. “I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and race-free: an essay by Toni Morrison.” The Guardian, 18 Aug. 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/08/toni-morrison-rememory-essay. Accessed 2 Feb 2026
