Body Shift designates the discrete, physically palpable moment in which a felt sense alters its quality — loosening, releasing, or reorganizing — in response to the right word, image, or inner attention. Eugene Gendlin, who coined and theorized the term most rigorously, insists that the body shift is not metaphorical but experiential: a definite somatic signal, invariably experienced as relief, that marks genuine psychological movement rather than mere cognitive rearrangement. The broader depth-psychology corpus receives this concept with varying degrees of emphasis and theoretical framing. Jan Winhall, working at the intersection of Focusing and Polyvagal Theory, translates the body shift into neurophysiological terms, identifying it as a change in autonomic state — what Porges calls neuroception made felt. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing literature approaches analogous phenomena through the lens of pendulation and titrated discharge, describing involuntary trembling, breath changes, and sensory relief as functional equivalents. Sensorimotor psychotherapists (Ogden) locate related dynamics in postural reorganization and arousal regulation. What unites these otherwise divergent frameworks is a shared conviction that genuine therapeutic change must register somatically, not merely conceptually — that the body’s alteration is the index of transformation. The central tension in the literature concerns whether the body shift is best understood as the cause, the criterion, or the consequence of psychological change.