I have a lot to say here but I'll stick to this for now:

I worry that these introspective techniques optimize too much for cathartic eureka moments, and that the resulting feelings far overstate their true value.

There's always the risk of Goodharting on all sorts of things, but I think we should collectively chill out about people getting too excited about stuff. Getting too excited is a perfectly natural part of the learning process (you can tell because kids do it by default when not punished for it); it's what gets you to overlearn things so that they stick with you. The people I know who learn things fastest do it constantly, I do it constantly when I learn math, and I think it's a really important component of learning rationality too.

Umeshism: if you've never gotten too excited about something then you aren't learning fast / deeply enough.

tl;dr: your brain hallucinates sensory experiences that have no correspondence to reality. Noticing and articulating these “felt senses” gives you access to the deep wisdom of your soul.

I think this snark makes it clear that you lack gears in your model of how focusing works. There are actual muscles in your actual body that get tense as a result of stuff going on with your nervous system, and many people can feel that even if they don't know exactly what they are feeling.

There’s this feeling I get where I feel like my eyes are having a hard time focusing, I’m a little tired, and there’s a tingling in my forehead - like a precursor to a headache (almost like someone is hovering their finger between my eyebrows). I get this feeling if I’ve been doing empty, shallow, digital things for too long - glancing at headlines, procrastinating, etc.

I call it “malaise” or “UGH”. Not the most descriptive phrase, but putting a word to it helps me go, “oh I’m feeling that ‘malaise’ feeling, I should do X”.

During 5 minute yoga timer I felt rushed to recognize felt senses.

Most of them were floating tensions in the stomach area.

Somehow even though they felt similarly, I almost always had a good idea which of the Big Life Confusions they are, and when I said their approximate name there was a release of tension in the stomach.

To get to more nuanced names I'd need a longer session for each specific life problem, with current set up I've added some of the discoveries to the bug list, and checked that others are already there

-- Not sure this is helpful, even if on-topic --

I find this CFAR version of Focusing surprising. It seems to skip steps 3 and 4 of Gendlin's version. I had a well-developed felt sense before Focusing but I was poor at naming emotions.

Doing Focusing with Gendlin's process allowed me new access to emotions.

A few days ago, we were talking about the ability to read others emotions at an LW event. Together we had an idea of how Alice could make progress on an issue by getting better at reading the emotions on other people.

Bob asked Alice to guess his emotions.

For myself "curious to mind in addition to being excited. Bob then also used the word curious to describe his state emotional state. Curious wouldn't have been a word that my system II would have used given situation to mentally model Bob's state. It still matched Bob own sense of what he felt. Before I did Focusing I just had an ability to perceive the body of the other person well and could use that information to model their emotional state but I had no direct access to emotions as entities like curiosity or sadness.

Does CFAR have a script for doing what Gendlin refers to as "fitting"? That's the hardest part by far, for me anyway. It's easy enough to know that something is wrong, but I've almost never achieved the felt shift that supposedly accompanies correctly fitting and resolving the felt sense.

Note: the link for "Conform! Every time you walk outside the norm" doesn't seem to be working.

When I attempt the focusing check, it immediately brings to mind the things in my life that are most good, or that make me feel most accomplished. Is the idea to iterate until you've pared it down to things you don't enjoy and don't feel satisfied with? Step 5 seems vaguely to imply the opposite.

As for felt senses, I've had the thought before that right after or right before talking to certain people, I feel like someone broke into my veins and replaced my blood with powdered sugar and helium. Uh, in a metaphorical-poetry way, not in a sciencey-agonizing way.

I think I've already been doing something sort of like Focusing, except more like Duncan's post - relying a lot more on trying on words and phrasings than on bodily felt senses. In particular I've noticed that I can do a useful kind of processing by thinking aloud while walking (or, as I recently discovered, kayaking) and noticing which things I say do or don't feel right, and if something doesn't feel right, trying various other things and seeing what does.

I hadn't tried the focusing-on-bodily-senses thing before, though, so I tried that today. The check described here doesn't work very well for me because there's just too much. So instead I tried to hone in on specific types of feelings (emotional, bodily, or both, hard to tell the difference honestly) and see what they were like and what they related to.

I didn't get as far as I wanted on my first try, partly because the feeling in question included a strong desire to hide from it, partly because my roommate walked in and I no longer felt able to really freely introspect and feel stuff. So then I decided to try focusing on the effect that having another person in the room has on me. This was really interesting - I found that I could feel this in the left side of my body (my roommate is sitting to the left of me) as a heightened alertness and a directional pull to the left - my left ear is paying extra attention, there's a pull at the corner of my left eye to pay attention to what my roommate is doing; I think I also have more tension in general on the left side of my torso than my right. If I turn my head to the right, then the back of my head feels the alertness. I might be breathing a little less freely than when I was alone in the room? Not sure about that, though.

(soooo this is a large part of why I tend to want a lot of alone time I guess.)

I'm not sure I know yet how to use bodily sensations to get insights about something other than bodily sensations. I do expect to try this more. (though this is for sure the scariest of the techniques in this sequence so far.)

Ok, I'm kind of new to the whole LessWrong Buissness, so can someone please explain to me:

What is your thing with Jordan Peterson? I get, that he is a Psychologist and so on, but there are a lot of people out there, who not just take his 101 life advice by heart, but also his political .... Ideas?

From the way he is quoted in this sequence and the fact that there seems to be no discussion about this in the comments, you seem to see him as a legitimate expert on rationality? Or do you seperate between his psychology and politics? Or does no one know him here except alkjash? I'd love to hear from you all!