The Body Knows: Ignatian Discernment and Felt Sense

The body is not an obstacle to spiritual knowledge but one of its most reliable channels, a truth independently discovered by Ignatius of Loyola on a sickbed and by psychologist Eugene Gendlin in a Chicago laboratory four hundred years later. Ignatian discernment, far from being an intellectual exercise, is grounded in a somatic attentiveness to the interior movements of consolation and desolation that the body registers before the mind can name them.