The Four Windows of Knowing

This article was written by Anastasia Priyamvada.

Ways We Make Sense of Experience and Wellbeing

When I first came across the idea of the Four Windows of Knowing, I felt relief. That relief came from realising that there is not one correct way of knowing the world, and that different ways of knowing are not placed in a hierarchy, none is presented as better, more advanced, or more valid than the others.

The idea resonates with earlier psychological work. Carl Jung described thinking, sensing, feeling, and intuition as different functions of consciousness, distinct ways through which experience is perceived and given meaning.

Building on this, Eligio Stephen Gallegos articulated the Four Windows of Knowing as thinking, sensing, feeling, and imagining, translating Jung’s psychological functions into an experiential framework that can be observed and worked with in practice. Each window offers a partial view, and understanding deepens when they work together.

I find myself returning often to Gallegos’ formulation, while recognising its roots in Jung’s work, especially when I work with groups. It helps me remember, and sometimes helps others experience, that there is more than one way to approach experience, meaning, and care.

This article grows out of personal experience and professional practice. It brings together examples from life and from my recent work with the EU-funded comPASSION is sexy practices for wellbeing, to show how different ways of knowing can support or limit us, and how they can be engaged with consciously.

The Window of Thinking

Conceptual Maps That Steady the Mind

Thinking has often been my starting point, the map that steadies me when I need to make sense of the rest. Sometimes I call it mind candy, ideas and frameworks that give a busy mind something to chew on, so the rest of experience can be met more fully.

At certain moments, concepts were as necessary as practices. Coming across Corey Keyes’ work gave language to something I had long sensed. He describes mental health not simply as the absence of illness, but as the presence of wellbeing, which he calls flourishing. He distinguishes three dimensions: emotional (how we feel day to day), psychological (how we grow and make meaning), and social (how we connect and contribute). This view confirmed a quiet hunch I already carried, that wellbeing is layered. It is not only about calm or pleasant emotions, but also about growth, meaning, and connection.

Compassion researchers offered further maps. Kristin Neff’s three elements of self-compassion, mindfulness, kindness, and common humanity, and Paul Gilbert’s model of three affect regulation systems, threat, drive, and soothing, helped clarify why practices such as visualisations and body-based awareness can be supportive. Rather than “fixing” experience, they tend to reduce threat activation and support states associated with safety and regulation. They also create space for kindness toward ourselves and remind us that struggle is not a personal failure, but part of a shared human condition.

Thinking does not replace direct experience, but it can steady it. These theories act as maps that reassure the mind while the body, emotions, and imagination do the real travelling. At times, that reassurance makes it possible to stay with the process.

Of course, thinking has limits. Left unchecked, it can spiral into over-analysis, keeping attention in the head and away from lived experience. This is why the reminder matters: maps are not the territory. Thinking can orient, but it cannot replace contact with life.

The Window of the Senses

Listening Through the Body

Sensory experience is always present, sometimes intense, sometimes confusing, stems from the body before it can be organised into meaning or use.

Mindfulness practices can feel frustratingly simple, and often unexpectedly effective. The first time I tried a body scan, I remember thinking: Is that it? Close the eyes, notice the feet, then slowly move the attention through the body? It felt repetitive, almost boring.

Yet something else was happening. Body scans train attention to stay with sensation rather than move away from it. Research suggests that such practices are associated with changes in the insula, involved in tracking internal states such as heartbeat and tension, and the somatosensory cortex, which maps touch, pressure, and movement. Together, these processes support a more differentiated awareness of bodily experience.

This helps explain why body-based practices ease stress and the intensity of pain. When the amygdala—the brain’s ‘alarm system’—is triggered, shifting our focus calmly to physical sensations can interrupt automatic reactions. This creates more space for the prefrontal cortex (the rational part of the brain responsible for regulation and meaning-making) to engage. Breathing often slows down, signaling the nervous system to shift toward rest and recovery. In this sense, a body scan is not a technique for control, but an invitation for the nervous system to pause.

Not every scan feels calm. For trauma survivors, focusing on the body can feel unsafe. For others, lying down simply leads to sleep. For most people, there will also be days of irritation, numbness, or nothing at all. Even that, noticing that this is not working today, is awareness.

Our conscious connection to our senses is not always clear, yet they are always present—whether as a sting, a tingle, a burn, an ache, or a throb—often collapsing into a single, vague word like “pain.” Even a small, conscious opening in this window, noticing the breath, warmth, or the weight of the body on a chair, can shift how we meet ourselves.

The Window of Feeling

Naming Emotional Meaning

Another challenge follows, naming emotional experience. While sensations register what is happening in the body, emotions speak to what it means. That distinction is not always obvious.

There are entire “wheels” of emotions, with Robert Plutchik’s model among the most well-known, mapping complex variations of feeling. Yet it is common for emotional vocabulary to collapse into broad categories such as “pleasant” or “unpleasant.” Becoming more precise does not always come easily, and relating to emotions with equal openness can remain a challenge.

Without language, experience can remain undifferentiated, harder to stay with, and easier to push away. This is why, as Eligio Stephen Gallegos has noted, people often believe they are “bad at sensing,” when the difficulty actually lies in naming emotional meaning.

Emotional meaning often emerges through experience rather than instant recognition. In practices such as the Emotion Journey, participants move through space carrying specific emotions or responding to guided bodily sensations. As they walk, approach, withdraw, or encounter others, they begin to discern different qualities within their experience:  A weight in the chest may gradually be recognised as anxiety or fear, a tightness in the stomach as sadness or irritation. Meaning forms through movement, encounter, and contrast.

In practices such as Labels of Emotions, this process becomes visible in a more playful way. Participants carry emotion labels they cannot see. Meaning emerges through interaction rather than explanation. Only later, through reflection, do participants identify what they have been carrying and how it was expressed and mirrored.

Together, these practices suggest that feeling as a window of knowing is not about categorising emotions, but about recognising the relationship between sensation and meaning, and how emotional meaning shapes behaviour, relationship, and choice.

The Window of Imagining

Working With Inner Images

Growing up, my family seemed to use different windows to understand the world, which made life interesting.

It felt almost unfitting to our family dynamic when a small blue book appeared in our apartment. My father, not someone inclined toward methods or self-help, had brought it home after a client’s recommendation. The book was filled with visualisation exercises.

It was through this unlikely arrival that I first realised how differently people experience imagination. One exercise asked us to visualise a watermelon. For me, it was effortless. For my mother, it was nearly impossible.  Her absolute inability, and what we perceived as resistance, became a recurring inside joke in our family. Years later, I would learn the term for this: aphantasia.  This contrast opened an early insight, that imagination, and knowing more broadly, does not function the same way for everyone.

For me, the imagining window was wide open. I remember a recurring childhood image from when I was five or six: a cage that trapped me, made of wreaths of flowers and fruit plants. My inner world was fascinating, sometimes frightening, sometimes playful, always alive. I remember the chair in my room transforming every night into a towering, terrifying monkey; there were prisons I had to escape from, invisible friends, higher beings that would either imprison or set me free. It was an internal passage into other worlds. But as I grew older, with academic performance stress and anxiety on the rise, and with the constant stream of violent or confusing images from the news and films replaying in my mind, those worlds became less pleasant. My imagination turned against me: catastrophic scenarios on repeat, shaped by whatever pressures were inside or outside me.

This points to imagination’s double nature. The same capacity that makes it a powerful ally can also make it overwhelming. Images carry emotional charge, cultural material, and personal history. In practice, imagination often appears where sensation or feeling needs form. An image gives experience shape, something that can be related to rather than simply endured.

In Gallegos’ framework, imagination is not fantasy or escapism. It is a way of knowing through images, symbols, metaphors, and inner rehearsal. This is why practices such as guided visualisations, compassionate imagery, and symbolic art-making can be effective: they offer a contained and relational way for inner material to take form. Working with imagination allows what is inside to move outside: a sensation or emotion becomes a drawing, a collage, a movement, an object. This shift creates distance without disconnection. What was internal and diffuse gains edges. Once externalised, it can be observed, reflected on, and transformed. Imagination, in this sense, becomes a practical bridge between feeling and understanding, between experience and choice.

Not everyone visualises easily. Not everyone works with images in the same way. When imagination is less accessible, other windows can lead. And when imagination is vivid, it needs companionship. Knowing does not come from one window alone, but from their dialogue.

Intuition

Trusting the Quiet Voice

From an early age, I sensed a quieter way of knowing, sometimes simple, sometimes elusive. I may not have known its name, but intuition was present. Compared to imagination, it was subtle, easy to overlook. I often doubted it, assuming that if something mattered, it should feel harder.

Over time, through encounters, teachers, practice and experience, it became clear that knowing through the mind alone is not enough. Reason can offer a safe base, but sensing, feeling, and imagining bring us into contact with life. Intuition here is not a separate faculty, but what becomes available when these windows are already open and in dialogue.

Sometimes the simplest practice is the most difficult: silence. Creating space free of constant input, pausing before reacting, walking without distraction, sitting quietly, removes some of the noise that drowns out intuition. What surfaces in that pause is often what was already there, waiting to be noticed.

Some researchers describe intuition as unconscious pattern recognition, the brain’s ability to register patterns and meaning faster than deliberate reasoning can. Others speak of the “somatic marker hypothesis”, the body’s capacity to remember consequences before the mind does, sending signals that shape our choices. That is why a hunch can feel immediate, even if we cannot explain it.

Across wisdom traditions, intuition is understood in a wider frame, not as an inner voice to obey, but as an attunement, a sensitivity to meaning that arises not only within us, but in relationship with the living world.

Intuition has shadows, too. It can be confused with impulse, wishful thinking, or bias. What feels like inner guidance may sometimes be habit or fear in disguise. That is why intuition works best when held with care, grounded in bodily awareness, informed by emotional clarity, steadied by reason, and enriched by imagination. When trusted this way, intuition does not shout or command. It nudges. And when followed, it can bring a sense of quiet alignment.

Compassion

A Way of Navigating the Windows of Knowing

Different people rely more easily on different windows of knowing. Some feel one wide open, while others experience it as narrow, blocked, or even sealed shut. At different moments in life, the same window can feel accessible or unavailable. What I came to recognise is that there is something that helps us see more clearly through whichever window is available, and something that supports our capacity, both individually and relationally, to navigate the world of knowing.

For me, that something was compassion, toward the self and toward others.

Not as a technique or solution, but as a way of relating to experience. Compassion allows thinking without becoming rigid or harsh, sensing without being overwhelmed by what is felt in the body, and feeling without overidentifying with it or pushing it away. It allows imagination to remain alive and creative without escaping from reality, and without being crushed by the intensity or harshness of images. And it supports intuition without confusing it with impulse, fear, or wishful thinking.

Looking back, compassion emerges as a silent thread running through my journey, guiding me quietly and steadily: from a wild childhood imagination with monkey-monsters on chairs, to the ‘monkey mind’—restless and mischievous, forever leaping from branch to branch, from thought to thought, as described in Buddhist and Hindu traditions.

This understanding continues to shape my approach. I continue to learn, often just as much as I share. What remains essential are the shifts I witness in others and in myself. These internal and external changes are what make this work meaningful and, in a way, more ‘flavorful’—like the juicy watermelon my mother still cannot visualise.

I have not encountered a stark case of aphantasia in my workshops, at least not one openly shared. But when one window feels less accessible, another can offer a way through.

Knowing does not belong to a single channel. And for me, compassion remains not a conclusion, but a way of staying in relationship with experience as it is, and a path forward

Further Reading (indicative)

The following references reflect some of the traditions and research strands that inform this article, without implying a single unified theory.

Psychological frameworks

• Jung, C. G. Psychological Types

• Gallegos, E. S. The Four Windows of Knowing (lectures / writings)

Wellbeing and compassion

• Keyes, C. L. M. Flourishing

• Neff, K. Self-Compassion

• Gilbert, P. The Compassionate Mind

Embodiment and neuroscience (introductory)

• Damasio, A. The Feeling of What Happens / Descartes’ Error

(These references are offered as entry points rather than exhaustive sources.)

About the Author and Project

Anastasia Priyamvada Charitidou is an  experiential educator, theatre pedagogue, and founder of Olotites. She is also a project manager and creator of EU- funded initiatives focused on compassion, wellbeing, and empowerment. With a background in embodiment, compassion- based education, and international youth work, she explores how inner well-being and social change are deeply interconnected. She currently co-leads the Erasmus+ project “comPASSION is sexy” across Greece and France.

About this article :
This article was written in the context of the Erasmus+ KA210- YOU small-scale partnership project “comPASSION is sexy” (Project Code: 2024- 3- FR02- KA210-YOU-000295806), co-funded by the European Union. The project is a collaboration between Les Philentropes (France) and Olotites (Greece), focused on compassion-based approaches to youth empowerment, inclusion, and well-being.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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