The meeting had gone well by every available measure — the presentation received, the conversation collegial. Walking back across the Charles River Bridge toward the office in Kendall Square, something was off. Not a thought. Not a conclusion the mind had reached. Something in the body — a quality of unease that couldn't be sourced and, because it couldn't be sourced, was filed under "nothing" and moved past.
Three weeks later, the thing the body had registered became visible as a thought.
The professional culture of Greater Boston has produced some of the most rigorous thinkers in the world, and it has also produced a particular relationship to the body's signals: they tend to be treated as noise to be explained, or evidence of irrationality, or information too imprecise to be actionable. The disciplines that train people here — medicine, research, law, technology — reward knowing that can be articulated and defended. They have very little vocabulary for the kind of knowing that arrives first in the chest or the gut, that precedes any articulable thought, that can't be put in a slide.
That channel doesn't stop operating just because it isn't trusted.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty spent much of his philosophical career arguing against the assumption — inherited from Descartes — that the body is simply a vehicle for the mind. In his account, the body is not an object the mind inhabits; it is a mode of knowing in its own right. We orient ourselves in space, recognize situations, and respond to other people through a kind of bodily intelligence that operates below and before articulation. The body is already in contact with the situation. The mind is still on its way.
Eugene Gendlin named this the felt sense — the body's pre-verbal awareness of something that hasn't yet become a clear thought. The quality of vague wrongness on the bridge. The unease that settles in before the specific problem can be named. His clinical work found that the people who improved most in therapy were not those who talked most fluently about their feelings, but those who could pause, attend to what was present in the body, and allow what was there to become more specific. The channel was the thing.
What tends to accumulate when this channel is bypassed is a pattern of learning things too late — the relationship whose difficulty had been present for months before it became a thought, the job that wasn't right from the first day and rationalized away. These arrive in retrospect with a quality of "I knew that." The body did know. The mind overrode it.
None of this is a failure of intelligence. It is a consequence of having been trained to trust one kind of intelligence exclusively.
Mindfulness-based therapy in this context is less about relaxation than about access — restoring the signal that runs alongside the cognitive one and tends to arrive first. The work is not about learning to distrust reason, but about learning to hold somatic information alongside it: to give the felt sense enough attention that it can become specific, rather than remaining as vague unease that gets overridden before it has been heard.
I work with adults across Massachusetts — in Cambridge, Brookline, Newton, Somerville, Lexington, and Wellesley — via telehealth. Prospective clients are welcome to reach out at jonathanwalsh@hushmail.com or to request a complimentary 15-minute consultation through this site.
Frequently Asked Questions about Mindfulness-Based Therapy
What is mindfulness-based therapy?
Mindfulness-based therapy draws on practices of present-moment attention to help people develop a different relationship to difficult thoughts and feelings. Rather than trying to eliminate distress, it works on changing how distress is experienced and responded to.
What does mindfulness-based therapy help with?
It is well-suited for anxiety, chronic stress, and the experience of being out of contact with one's own reactions — noticing things only after the fact, or feeling persistently numb or disconnected from what is actually happening internally.
How is mindfulness-based therapy different from CBT?
CBT works primarily at the level of thought — identifying and examining cognitive patterns. Mindfulness-based approaches work at the level of attention itself, developing the capacity to notice what is present before it becomes a fully formed thought or reaction.
Who is a good fit for mindfulness-based therapy?
It tends to work well for people who are very cognitively oriented — who think clearly and articulately but find themselves out of contact with what they actually feel, or who discover what they were feeling only in retrospect.
Jonathan Walsh, LMHC, LCMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist offering mindfulness-based therapy via telehealth in Massachusetts and several other states. He is a member of the New England Center for Existential Therapy and has completed core training at the Institute for Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy. Learn more about Jonathan.