I Feel, Therefore I Am…
There is a WhatsApp group I am part of — Being Masterful Coaches — and recently someone dropped a question into it about Knowledge, Experience, and Wisdom. The kind of question that looks simple until you actually try to answer it.
Almost 10 years ago, I spent two years at APU trying to learn Phenomenology and Epistemology. Fr. AMA added Hermeneutics to that mix. I let go of Ontology and Logic ( as such I am not that logical )— Prof. Kaustav Roy had said something that stuck: regardless of the reality out there, what lands in us is what matters. So I let that be my anchor. This is an attempt to put together the little I know — and the little I have felt — about all of it.
So here we go. Take knowledge first.
“Fire is a process of combustion.” “All beings are mortal and die.” Knowledge comes dressed in words. Maps. Recipes. Symbols. It is the finger pointing, not the moon. Useful, yes. But distant.
Experience is something else entirely. It is the body’s trace — warmth on skin, the smell of smoke, a chest tightening at the thought of a last breath. It is givenness, not concept. Even imagination can do this. The Jesuit practice of memento mori — sitting quietly and rehearsing your own dying — trembles in the body as if the thing is actually happening. Not metaphorically. Literally.
Wisdom is harder to locate. It is the horizon where both — knowledge and experience — meet and dissolve. Not the map alone, not the terrain alone, but the art of walking. Aristotle called it phronesis. Zen calls it the Middle Way. Knowing when to light a fire. Knowing when to sit in the dark. Living with death at one’s shoulder and still acting with care.
Epistemology debates the conditions of knowing. Phenomenology describes how knowing appears. Ontology asks what is there— apart from me. In practice, they blur into each other. The finger, the moon, the sky. Not two. And surely not three.
Memory holds all three — but differently for each.
Knowledge lives as semantic memory: facts, concepts, meanings, spread across the neocortex. Abstract, transferable, recallable without context. “Fire is the combustion of fuel with oxygen.” You can say that in a library. You do not need to have ever sat by a fire. There are many who have really mugged up the spiritual text to the last syllable. But with very little spirituality.
Experience lives differently — as episodic memory (personal events, feelings) and procedural memory (skills). The hippocampus carries it. The basal ganglia. The cerebellum. Sitting by a fire, feeling its warmth, learning to light it with wet wood and three matches. That kind of knowing is embodied, contextual, tied to emotion and sensation. You cannot transfer it with a sentence.
I have my own small proof of this. Almost twenty years ago, I learnt Yang style Tai Chi — 100+ forms — from Sifu George. Last year, I tried to relearn it with Francois at the Zendo. The moment I started, the flow and rhythm came up from somewhere in the depths of my muscles and bones. Not from my brain. My brain had no idea. Francois corrected many of my steps — and that was the hard part. Unlearning what the body already knew took enormous effort. You cannot just overwrite a twenty-year-old trace with an instruction. The body holds on. And here is the other thing — the moment I stopped, even for a millisecond, to reflect or think about the next move, I lost the step. Lost the flow entirely. When the mind was empty and still, it moved. The moment the mind arrived, it stumbled.
And lastly wisdom is not stored so much as emergent. It arises when semantic and episodic memory integrate with emotional regulation and judgment — in the prefrontal cortex, if you prefer the neuroscience. In phenomenology, wisdom is the horizon of meaning: memory not as recall, but as discernment. I keep listening to Fr. AMA sharing the serenity prayer. There are many versions to it from Epictetus to Buddhist scholar Shantideva. I prefer the AA one. “T God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”
Now coming back to the way we experience, here is where it gets interesting.
The brain cannot reliably distinguish between real and imagined. Both leave felt traces — the same neural pathways fire, the same body responds. A pilot in a simulator feels flying — not a version of it, but flying itself, as far as the nervous system is concerned. The sage who mistakes a rope for a snake gets the same tremor as if it were actually a snake. The Jesuit imagining his own death shakes as if it is real.
This faculty can make or mar us. It can traumatize us in perfectly ordinary life situations. And it can also help us bootstrap out of real trauma.
This faculty of simulation is powerful, but it does not automatically make one a teacher. Just because one has experience — or even experience plus knowledge — does not mean one can help a client. This is where the gulf of translation comes in. Maradona, one of the greatest players, struggled as a coach. His episodic memory, the felt sense of genius, was not easily translatable into words or teaching. Only two people have ever won the World Cup both as players and coaches. Many eminent coaches never had top-level playing careers, yet they succeed because they can translate, structure, and communicate. The dumb mirror reflects, but sometimes the mirror must also point, or strike, or embody presence. Experience alone is not enough. Translation matters.
In coaching and counselling, I have seen this play out. The mind wants to narrate. To manage. To control the body with language. But unless the client feels it — the tremor, the tightness, the warmth — nothing quite lands. The moment sensations are lifted too quickly into words, the wound is bypassed rather than met. Reflection without embodiment is a detour. Healing begins when the body is allowed to speak.
Evidence-based therapy (EBT) often works by protocols: a symptom is judged, classified, treated. But process-based therapy (PBT) insists on something subtler: one symptom can be the manifestation of many processes, and one process can manifest in myriad ways. Silence, for instance, is not always reflection. It can be grief. It can be shame. It can be avoidance. I have seen coaches exult at silence, writing that the client must be reflecting. But silence is not evidence. The mirror must be clean enough to show, but humble enough not to judge.
Some spiritual traditions exalt jnana marga — the path of knowledge. But Zen insists on something more uncomfortable: this very body is Buddha. Not the abstraction of thought, but the immediacy of breath, posture, sensation. The gate is not in the head. It is in the body.
And then — the paradox of machines.
The “higher” gifts we thought were uniquely ours — reason, language, intelligence — turn out to be the easiest for silicon to mimic. Chess. Logic puzzles. Intelligence tests. Circuits handle them with ease. But the elemental capacities we share with animals — balance, touch, feeling — remain stubbornly resistant. Hans Moravec saw this decades ago: abstract thought is cheap to compute, but sensorimotor skill, perception, emotion demand enormous resources. A one-year-old outstrips the cleverest machine in crawling, grasping, sensing.
The higher order is easier. The lower order is deeper.
Descartes said, cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am. It helped. It gave us a scaffold for reason, for science, for machines. But it also narrowed us — into heads without bodies, concepts without felt sense.
Maybe he had it backwards.
I feel, therefore I am.
It is the warmth of fire, the tremor of imagined death, the tears that arrive before you know why — these are what make existence real. Thinking alone can be mimicked. Feeling remains stubbornly human. Animal. Ordinary.
The map is simple. The territory is vast. Coaching, Zen, phenomenology — all point to the same gate. Not bypass. And surely not abstraction. Ordinariness. The body as Buddha. The felt sense as the way in.
Three questions that remain, even after all this:
First. Can wisdom ever be taught, or only revealed? If a coach has no wisdom to offer, and cannot teach it, what is their role when the client is stuck — not in feeling, but in meaning? A client who feels everything, raw and present, but cannot decide what to do. Does the mirror simply hold longer? Or is there a moment when the coach points — not as an expert, but as someone who has walked the terrain?
Second. What of collective or inherited trauma? The child of a refugee who has never crossed a border but trembles at the sound of a uniform. The body speaks, but the experience is not “mine” in the episodic sense. Can the dumb mirror reflect what was never directly lived? Or does something else need to happen first — a naming, a story, a lineage?
Third. Is the dumb mirror a sustainable identity for a coach? In principle, emptiness is the ideal. But in practice, a coach with no presence of their own — no character, no conviction, no edges — may become a void, not a mirror. The client needs to feel that the person holding space is there, not just a technique. Zen masters are empty, but they also hit you with a stick. The stick is wisdom-as-action, not just reflection. How to hold that tension?
Closing reflection:
If the body is Buddha, and the felt sense is the gate, then coaching is not problem-solving. It is not even healing, if healing means returning to a prior state. It is initiation — the kind Joan Halifax speaks of. The client crosses a threshold, not because the coach knew the way, but because the coach was willing to stand at the edge and not know. And in that not-knowing, gave the client permission to feel their own way through.
So perhaps the three questions are not problems to solve. They are koans to sit with. The answer is not a sentence. It is the next breath, the next session, the next tremor felt and named or not named. The mirror does not need to be perfect. It only needs to be clean enough to show what is already there.
The body as Buddha. The felt sense as the way in. The rest is just walking.
