Feeling techniques Making methods to articulate bodily practices

Feeling does not just naturally occur to all humans, but it is rather something that people actively practice in different ways. I demonstrate this by unravelling exemplary practices of diverse feeling experts, such as teachers of yoga and Pilates, and physio- and haptotherapists. Each of these experts appears to employ their own set of feeling techniques – such as wording, touching, and movement techniques – that help to bring into being diverse feelings, feelers and bodies. Carefully attending to these techniques shifts feeling from an internal, solitary experience into an observable, sharable practice. But how to attend, observe and share feeling? The research methodologies that I use to detail this, and to do this, are methodologies in the making: rather than following a pre-set list of rules, I tentatively adapt my research techniques to the specificities of the practices that I study. This means that I do not take words and drawings for granted, but that I attune them to what happens in my field. My words and drawings are performative techniques, informed by, and therefore substantively informative of, the practices they help to articulate. Crafting adaptable, fine-tuned research tools asks from the researcher that she performs herself as a sensitive research instrument. Turning research into a sensitive practice made it possible to not just learn about but also from the feeling practices I studied. This way of working helped me to reach, and exemplified, my main research goal: breaking through the dualisms that oppose feeling and thinking.