| Focusing (Gendlin's full process) | Working a concern all the way through, from first vague felt sense to a felt shift and its meaning. | The full sequence takes more time and guidance; a single questioning step may suit shorter check-ins. | moderate EVIDENCE | Focusing is the complete six-step process Somatic Inquiry grew out of, moving through clearing a space, forming a felt sense, finding a handle word, resonating, asking, and receiving. Somatic Inquiry lifts out the 'asking' step, the moment of posing an open-ended question to the body and waiting, and practises it on its own. So Focusing is the broader method and Somatic Inquiry is one deliberately isolated move within it. |
| Felt Sense Check-In | Quiet, low-effort noticing when you just want to register how the body is without directing it. | Pure noticing may feel aimless when you have a specific situation you want the body to speak to. | emerging EVIDENCE | Felt Sense Check-In is receptive: you turn attention inward and simply notice whatever bodily sense is already present, without prompting it. Somatic Inquiry is active: you pose a gentle, open-ended question to the body and wait for a response. Both keep the body as the primary source of knowing, but one listens and the other asks. |
| Cognitive self-inquiry (talk- or journal-based reflection) | Problems that call for clear logical reasoning, planning, or verbal sense-making. | Head-level analysis can stall on feelings that have not yet formed into words. | emerging EVIDENCE | Cognitive self-inquiry works through reasoning, language, and analysis, asking why you feel as you do and thinking it through. Somatic Inquiry deliberately sets analysis aside and returns, again and again, to bodily experience as the answer, treating shifts in sensation, imagery, or movement impulse as the reply rather than a train of thought. |
| Body scan meditation | Building general body awareness and settling the nervous system through a structured attentional sweep. | Its even, non-directive sweep is less suited to drawing out meaning about one specific issue. | EVIDENCE | A body scan sweeps attention systematically through the body region by region, observing sensation with an even, non-questioning attitude. Somatic Inquiry is not a sweep; it directs a specific question toward a felt concern and waits for that concern to answer through the body. The scan cultivates broad steady awareness, while inquiry seeks meaning about a particular situation. |
| Hakomi and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy | Guided work when trauma, dissociation, or strong affect is likely and clinical containment matters. | These require a qualified practitioner; they are not a solo self-help exercise. | emerging EVIDENCE | These are full therapeutic modalities, practised with a trained therapist, that use body-directed questioning as one element within a larger relational and trauma-informed frame. Somatic Inquiry is the specific self-directed skill of asking the body a question, which those traditions helped shape but which can be practised on its own outside formal therapy. |
