Well, you’ve shifted the virtual material properties of the feeling state you originally mapped, and now this part of you is experiencing itself in a new state. Nice job! What we need to do now is to give this new state more of a home by a) inviting new thought and belief connections to other parts of yourself, b) giving it a new name, and c) drawing what you have described as this new state. Another way to think about this is that we want to make this new state grow in familiarity to you and to build easy-to-open doorways by which you can access it from other places in your complex inner world.

Make sure the state you are working with is centered in your awareness before proceeding. If you need to, use the slider test to confirm your access by making small adjustments to the virtual material properties, and notice how these adjustments shift your feeling experience. Set things to their optimal positions before inquiring into the thoughts and beliefs that show up in connection to this ideal state.

Thoughts and Beliefs

And now, turn your attention to the thoughts and beliefs that naturally want to arise from this place. Leave plenty of spaciousness between the following three components of this inquiry.

If this part of you were free to express in words what seems most true, or real, or important, what would it say?

For example, how might this part of you complete the sentence “I am...” or “I have...” or “I can...”? What else do you notice?

What does this part of you most want you to know?

Take some time with this, and capture what comes through in your notes. If appropriate, consider inviting the explorer to substitute “you,” “they,” or “it” for “I.” And if it seems useful, encourage adding the word “because…” or “therefore…” to the end of a statement to see what connection might arise.

One of the most satisfying parts of fieldwork is the moment when you ask about your new beliefs and perceptions from the perspective of the new feeling state. You quickly realize, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

When you have one to three clear statements capturing the general thoughts arising from the feeling state, and it feels like you’ve captured the essence of this part’s reality, it’s time for drawing.

If at any time the explorer continues to draw a blank with these more specific prompts, don’t push it. Move on. Sometimes you are working with a feeling state that took shape before language and has been suppressed ever since, and it hasn’t yet developed a mature linguistic connection with other states in the form of articulable beliefs.

Belief statements and point of view

The explorer will have two choices of perspective available when eliciting belief statements. As one option, the explorer can speak as her whole self, having this feeling state. Something like, “When I’m feeling this, I can easily imagine having what I want most of all.”

But it can be even more powerful to speak in the first person from the perspective of the feeling state itself. For example, the state Radiant Self depicted at the end of this chapter states, “I am a part of the divine. Trust the guidance that’s coming from within, and keep feeling confident.” It speaks to the whole self, advising the self to “trust the guidance.” Sometimes, a part speaking as itself can go so far as use the second-person “you” when speaking to the self as a whole.

I find it is usually most powerful to go with the feeling state speaking from its own perspective. Especially as you map and move multiple feeling states, hearing distinctly from each part playing its role within the whole pattern can lead to terrific self insight.

For some explorers, though, this perspective is more difficult to sustain. Or it can seem strange to have these parts speaking as if they were sub-personalities. Reassure the explorer that this is natural, that all of us have these parts of ourselves interacting with each other to create our experience. At the same time, provide full support for the explorer to generate statements from either perspective. It’s all good.

Inviting a New Name

Once this part of you has been moved to its ideal state and you have had some time to reflect on what’s unique and new about the feeling, it’s time to give the new feeling state a unique name.

Finally, what name would you like to give this new feeling state? What name would it like to be called?

This can be quite fun, because you are naturally in an open, creative space. The names that arise spontaneously can sometimes tend toward poetic descriptions of the feeling qualities or derivations of the new beliefs and perspectives.

You might find some ideas for the new name in the notes that you’ve taken already. You might be drawn to either descriptive words that capture the state’s unique properties, or something from your new belief statements might apply. Sometimes these words can be used verbatim to name the feeling. Other times they will spark new insights and the name will emerge in your reflections about the possibilities. It will help to “try on” various combinations of word choices to sense into what feels right.

When I am facilitating, and the explorer is struggling to come up with a name, if some of their language suggests a name to me, I’ll make that suggestion, making sure to also invite them to reject it or respond with something more suitable. As with all of the questions, it can be helpful for us to have specific suggestions to reject as a way to move toward greater clarity. And sometimes, when offering their own words back to them, this can be a reminder along the lines of, “Oh, yeah, I said that, and it fits.”

Once you have settled on a name, try it on to make sure this is the name that works best. If so, capture the name prominently in your notes.

Drawing

And now, take some time with the drawing, in the same way as you did with the original feeling state map. Stay open to adjustments and surprises that may show up as you draw, including the following:

• Shifts and clarifications in specific properties. For example, you might find yourself adjusting the color, extending the size and shape, or noticing that the substance wants to be a little more airy than it seemed to be when you first moved it. If this happens, make sure to go back and capture your insights in your notes.

• Greater clarity about the essential nature of the part. As you settle into the drawing process, you’re letting go of intentional thought and allowing those connections to reach out and form in ways that you may not have expected. Notice the background rumination process and see if there are some new beliefs and perspectives to capture in your notes.

• Other parts making themselves (more) known. As you draw this new state on the outline of a body, you may find yourself noticing the presence of other states that are spatially or otherwise related to this one. These may be previously hidden reactive states that need to be included in the mapping process. Or you may be gaining some clarity about the relationships among the ideal states. Either way, do what you need to incorporate these discoveries into your process.

How to Know When You Are Done

So how do you know when a particular part has actually achieved its ideal state? The fact is, it’s not important. As long as you are moving feeling states in the direction from more distressing to less, from less functional to more, from reactive toward the general direction of ideal, you’re doing great.

Because each feeling state is interconnected with eight others, there are many times when a first-pass move yields moderate results and it’s clear the state has not achieved its ideal. An example of this might be a state of fear moving to a state of protection. The protection state still presupposes a danger. As long as that danger is represented internally by a feeling state indicating the presence of some kind of threat, the original state of fear will be unable to fully transform.

But after moving through the entire set and transforming the danger as well as others which might play a role in the experience of threat, the fear will be ready to move fully to a state which transcends danger. The protection will be free to become something like strength or freedom. And ironically, in the absence of the internal representation of danger, full access to the inner experience of freedom will turn out to be objectively far more safe in the world than the original configuration was.

Overall, the complete answer to the question of how you know when you’ve found a part’s ideal state has to do with the information covered in the next section on the science. With some parts, you will know right away. For others, it will depend on completing the full set of parts, and seeing the relationships among the ideal states.

Summary

So that wraps up the moving process. You’ve brought a feeling state more into awareness using the mapping, feeling it more fully, creating a clear, tangible image, a kind of visual handle. And then, using that handle, you moved the feeling itself. You invited this part of you to reveal to you what it really wants to be feeling, in a world in which it has access to its ideal, its north star, and it has the full freedom to feel what is real and present in this moment, responding to your world in ways that support your thriving.

Can you see the connection between the first feeling and the second one? This is the same part of you. It is trying to do the exact same thing for you, but in the second case, it’s doing it in the context of possibility, of what could be if your life was truly as it wants to be. In the first case, the state you originally mapped was a response that signalled some kind of action or response that needed to happen in order to restore your access to that world of possibility.

For various reasons, you were likely prevented from taking that action, or even becoming aware of the feeling itself, and thus you became locked into patterns of replaying the original scenario, trying again and again to find a new way through. Now, having regained access to the ideal north star for this part, you will have opportunities to explore and discover new ways to respond to limitations in your world that better support your thriving overall.

The possibilities are wide, but it will require new experimentation, new learning. Fortunately, you now have access to greater resourcefulness, more options, better allies than what was available to you in the original experience of constraint. In this, you have the opportunity to learn how to bring new capacities into your life. Good luck!

Looking Ahead

We’ve wrapped up the essential steps for moving a part from its original reactive state to a more ideal state much closer to its purest truth of being. In the next chapter(s), I’ll offer a few tips for strengthening your move as well as suggestions for how to handle a couple of the ways that parts can seem to resist the moving process. The key to all of this is the fundamental multiplicity of parts — their coexistence as distinct, coexisting, interacting feeling states, and the need to work with the dynamics that show up in order to facilitate the most effective integration of the whole.

Another Example of What You Have to Look Forward To

To support your anticipation for what is to come in this adventure, I am offering before/after examples of feeling states my client Ruby gave me permission to share.

The Little Self

There have been so many times in my life that I’ve felt so small, there’s a shape like my body that is in my body and just shrinking.

What’s happening to me in the Unfriendly World. I’m shrinking. Gas. The shape of my body. My body encompasses it, but the feeling of it. In the experience of the unfriendly world my actual physical body may be standing up but my Little Self is hunched over like it’s covering its face. Like my body but in a protective posture. Seems like it’s a little bit smaller. Cold. Midnight blue, translucent. Gas moves a little bit, like gas would move. But the actual figure can move too. Sounds like a child crying, age 5, my voice.

Feels very sad. (The Little Self’s Heart). I don’t like being this way. I know this isn’t really me. Please help me.

Radiant Self

⟹ Warmer, comfortable warm; lighter, an energy... (this one’s hard for some reason)... image: sitting up really straight, how good that feels, like there’s some sort of weight supporting you from inside. When I’m feeling supported by that infinite energy I feel really confident and present. It feels tempting to have it be the shape of my body because the other one was... but I’m not sure.

I like the idea of there being this energetic me, the shape of my body, made out of energy, coming off my skin, shining out, just a little bit; comfortably warm; the energy within my body is a beautiful, bright blue, and the little shiny part coming out from my skin would be a yellowy sort of color, you could barely see bits of blue within that shiny part that comes out; the energy along the spine is a little darker blue to give me the support to stand or sit tall. Moves with my body and my breath. The sound would be from an orchestra that’s playing very upbeat music.

I am a part of the divine. Trust the guidance that’s coming from within, and keep feeling confident.

(While drawing…) Might have to change the color. Maybe add some luminosity to the blue.

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Whew, finally we’re ready to dig into the actual moving questions. When you’re ready to fully engage the process, make sure you tap into the feeling state you’re planning to move, feeling it tangibly in the moment as you begin working your way through the following invitational moving questions.

The Questions

We’re going to go through the different properties of the image, starting with temperature. Keep notes as you go.

Place your attention on the feeling you mapped previously. You might have the image in front of you to help. I’m going to refer to this feeling as “this part of you,” because as soon as we start moving it, it will no longer be that original feeling. The first image is specific to the feeling you mapped, and as we shift the image, the feeling itself is going to become something different. The old name for it will no longer be relevant. Yet this will remain the same part of you, simply expressing itself through a different feeling state.

Transitioning from Preamble to the Moving Questions

After the preamble, it is helpful to use a clear transition into the moving process. Here is a good example.

Now, in this moment, in the spirit of exploration in a perfect world, where all your needs are met, what would this part of you get to become? Let’s explore the various properties one by one, starting with temperature.

Temperature

We’re going to start with temperature. As we begin, temperature is often the easiest image parameter to shift and feel an instant, tangible result, especially if the mapped temperature of the original reactive state is significantly warmer or cooler than neutral.

If this part of you were free to become warmer or cooler, what would feel better? What would this part of you prefer?

Wait for a clear indication of preference for one direction or the other before continuing.

And in becoming [ warmer or cooler ], if this part of you were free to take on any temperature at all, what temperature would it most want to be? What would be this part’s perfect temperature?

In place of “warmer or cooler” in brackets, substitute whatever shift showed up. Write down the new temperature in your notes, along with any interesting detours along the way, and notice (or encourage the explorer to notice) what it feels like for the virtual material substance to have taken on that shift.

I usually lead with temperature because it’s such a simple quality with a clearly linear scale. You can make small adjustments in one direction or the other to find out which leads to improvement, and then invite further exploration along that same direction to find the optimal value.

Also, I think temperature works well when you’re starting because it is so clearly kinesthetic. There’s no easy way to distract yourself, and it guides you to pay more direct attention to the actual virtual material properties and avoid getting caught up in more mental imagery.

Substance

Now, let’s turn our attention to qualities of substance.

So, [ in taking on that new temperature / in becoming {name the temperature} ], if this part of you were free to become harder or softer, heavier or lighter, thicker or thinner, more or less dense, what would feel better?

Wait for a clear signal in a particular direction.

And [ in moving in that direction / in becoming {name the direction, e.g. harder and more dense} ], if this part of you were free to take on qualities of any substance at all, would it prefer to be more like a solid… or a liquid… or a gas… or some kind of pure light or energy… or something else?

Pause briefly after naming each possible substance type to allow yourself/the explorer to test it out and notice any yes/no signal. Wait for a chosen type of substance before proceeding.

And going into the finer qualities of that, in becoming [ that substance ], would it prefer to be [ hard or soft, heavy or light, thick or thin ]? What other qualities do you want to notice about what substance qualities this part of you most wants to have?

As with all the questions, I usually start with a reinforcement of the progress we’ve already made. The language, “…in becoming…” presupposes the moment has happened or is happening. The presupposition is a powerful verbal technique to support unconscious processing.

First, we move directly into the fine adjustment explorations to identify positive direction. For substance, you’ll want to base your fine adjustments on the substance of the reactive state you’re starting with. For almost all substances, the question “more or less dense” will usually serve well. For solids, “harder or softer” is often useful. For solids and liquids, “heavier or lighter” works well, and for liquids and gasses, “thicker or thinner” can be useful.

Once you’ve gotten the substance moving a bit, transition directly into the open invitation. For substance, it is important to list the options as a way of inviting the explorer to actually “try on” each quality, making sure to consider the full spectrum of possibilities. Often times a substance will make a dramatic shift, for example from solid to pure light, and without considering the full spectrum you might stop the movement with a small shift to liquid because that does feel better. At every point in the process, work to maintain the full “perfect world” treatment.

Finally, after identifying the broad shift in substance category, it’s time to refine the qualities by asking about fine-tuning the sub-properties. It’s kind of like finishing where you began, by adjusting these sub-properties here and there to optimize the ideal substance as a whole.

Capture the new substance qualities in your notes.

Adding the “Laws of Physics” Anti-Frame

One thing I love to add in the process of shifting substance qualities is the following statement:

We don’t have to obey the laws of physics. It is perfectly possible to have a solid gas, for example, or a liquid light.

And this is true. We are working with “virtual” materials here. It is the case that we have spent our lives as material bodies embedded in a material world. This lived experience influences our virtual material fields to interact along general patterns similar to those of the actual material world. But our capacity to generate these fields goes far beyond the laws of physics, and the structure of our inner world is served best by letting go of those constraints.

Color

Next we’ll look at color and other qualities of appearance.

So in taking on these new qualities of substance and temperature, if this part of you were free to become darker or brighter, what would it prefer?

And in shifting in that direction, if this part of you could take on any color or colors of the rainbow, what color would it most want to be?

And would it want to be transparent, translucent or opaque?

And would it want to have any qualities of being luminous, iridescent, shimmering or sparkling?

What other visual qualities of appearance do you notice this part of you wants to take on?

The first question here is optional. Often by the time you’ve reached color in the sequence, the feeling state has already shifted considerably and may already have started taking on new color properties. Starting out with the open invitation question is often sufficient at this point, but if there’s a bit of a struggle, then I’ll readjust by asking an incremental question. Useful ones to consider are “darker or brighter,” “more or less vivid,” or “more or less transparent/opaque,” depending on which seems most relevant to the qualities of appearance you’re starting with.

Make sure to ask about opacity, etc, and invite an exploration of other qualities like iridescence. These can be fun additions to the image!

Write these new visual appearance qualities in your notes.

Location

The next property we’ll explore is location.

In taking on these new qualities of color, substance and temperature, if this part of you were free to locate itself anywhere in or around your body, or in and around your body, where would it want to be located? And what kind of size and shape would it most want to be?

Location can be one of the most powerful properties in shifting a feeling state to its ideal. Many times, a feeling state which starts outside the body will end up on the inside. The opposite also happens, where for example, a tiny crystal inside the body will expand to become a river flowing into and through the entire body.

One important dimension here is size. Many times, we might be used to a feeling state being rather small, and don’t immediately consider the possibility of expanding it to full-body size or beyond. You can guide this process by asking explicitly what it would be like to have the feeling occupy a larger size. “Try it on.” If it wants to spread through your chest, for example, would it feel good to go up into your head? Down into your belly? All the way down into your legs? If it extends outside your body, how far? (Some feeling states will expand infinitely in all directions.)

Sometimes a feeling state seems to you that it would be beneficial to occupy the whole body, but it just doesn’t want to go into the legs, for example. Sometimes this is because another feeling that hasn’t yet been moved is occupying that space and it doesn’t feel so great to have them overlap. In cases like these, it is often useful to come back around to make final adjustments to the feeling location (and other properties) after you’ve moved the rest of the feelings in the set you’re working.

Make note of the new location, size, and shape.

Movement

After exploring location, we bring our attention to movement.

In locating itself in this new location, how does this part of you want to be moving? Does it want to be flowing, or pulsing, or vibrating? Does there want to be any sense of waves or ripples? Does it want to be radiating, circulating or exchanging in some way? What directions or other qualities of movement does this part of you most want to have?

Most of the time, the movement will quickly suggest itself during the shift in location. By this far in the process, the feeling state has almost completely transformed and is probably already moving in a new way. All you need to do as the facilitator is identify that desired movement, reinforce it verbally, and invite it to go even further in positive qualities.

At this point there is usually no need to ask about “force or pressure” from the mapping phase, because those qualities are almost always a sign of opposition with another state. If they do show up, definitely inquire into what that opposition might be and respond appropriately.

Of course, as with all the properties, explore the details. As with mapping, consider direction, speed, intensity, and variability. Explore qualities of movement in time as well, noticing pattern, rhythm, and randomness.

Capture your new movement qualities in your notes.

Sound

Finally, we dig into the quality of sound.

In taking on all these new qualities, if this part of you were free to generate an inner sound, as a way of more fully expressing its true nature, what would that want to be?

Would it want to be some kind of music or a natural sound? Some kind of voice? One voice or many? Male or female? What age? What would be the optimal inner sound to express this part of you?

For some people, or for some particular states, sound is an especially powerful dimension of the experience. Give some time for yourself to inhabit the new feeling state and allow for an appropriate sound to show up. Once it does, ask clarifying questions to help make the auditory imagery crystal clear. Use the tips in the mapping section for exploring the details of sound or voice.

For some other people, or for some particular states, sound can be less prominent. In these cases, it can be useful to invite the explorer to make a distinction between whether this wants to be an actual silence that is present as a quality of the state, or simply more of an absence of sound altogether.

Capture these changes in your notes.

Anything Else to Notice?

And now, let’s review.

Going back through the different qualities, are there any other adjustments you want to make? Is there anything else you want to notice about what this part of you wants to be?

With this question, you are opening up for any further adjustment the explorer might want to make. Sometimes shifts in properties later in the process spontaneously change the earlier properties even further, or they open the possibility for further intentional change. For example, adding the sound of a choral chant might help shift the substance from a gas to more of a pure light, or shift its color in some way. Check these things out to make sure you’ve fully mapped the ideal state.

Make those changes in your notes.

Looking Ahead

We’ve completed shifting the virtual material properties of the feeling state, following the built-in compass toward what feels best to this part of you. In the next chapter, we will complete the moving process by asking about new beliefs and perspectives, giving the new state its own unique name, and drawing the new state.

Another Example of What You Have to Look Forward To

To support your anticipation for what is to come in this adventure, I am offering before/after examples of feeling states my client Ruby gave me permission to share.

Wall of Fear

When the Fear is activated, it’s not just inside me, it really creates a wall or barrier in front of me. The Wall of Fear.

Three feet in front of me, 6 feet high x 12 feet wide. If I’m feeling encouraged I could walk around it. A foot thick. Solid, very hard, like a brick wall. Cold. Sandstone color, as if carved out of rock. No movement, just stagnant. Sound is like one of those very scary gong sounds.

The wall is a little different from Fear, a little more positive. It’s saying, “I’m here, but you have within you what it takes to get past me.” It almost feels like, just by seeing the wall, and knowing it’s only 12 feet wide and I can get past it, it’s moving the fear.

---

I Am Light

⟹ Warmer, 80 degrees. Softer, lighter, less dense; almost seems like it wants to be like the Infinite, Encompassing Support. Wants to be a positive presence outside of me. These little stars or whitish specks of light, and there’s a whole bunch of them, millions. Each is just a little bigger than a grain of sand, they almost look like little crystals, but there’s light coming out of them. Yellowish white. Three feet away from me, but forming this little circle around me. For about one foot they’re really solid, but after that it sort of fades out.

⟹ Inside and outside, extending pretty darned far. Pulsing and sometimes making patterns, like the Milky Way, becoming more shiny in different places, (maybe to get my attention). Sound of chimes, sounding really nice, higher and softer.

I am light. And that means I can do anything! A very playful sense to this, like Tinkerbell. It’s wanting to remind me of my path, and it shows me the way.

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Volume 1, Table of Contents:

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The preamble is handled. Now we’re ready to get into the actual swoosh of change. As we get ready to examine the sequence of questions used to invite the shifts in virtual material properties that reconnect a part of ourselves to its unique feeling-expression of wholeness, let’s take a step back once again. Let’s look at how, exactly, we facilitate these shifts.

One thing that shows up throughout psychotopology is the central role of feeling in our experience of being. And we have discovered how inserting the lens of virtual materiality over our instrument of awareness allows us to “see” our feeling with much higher and more tangible resolution. This enhanced perception turns out to also bestow the capacity for interaction, where we can deliberately shift the qualities of these virtual material properties in order to transform the feeling experience itself. That’s what we’re about to get into.

Specifically, we’re going to look at the role language plays in helping us make these shifts. In particular, we’re going to look in this chapter at the structure of the invitations we make to the parts we’re working with. How do we shape our language in such a way as to reduce the friction and support the part in making its most effective transition from one state to another?

We’ve already establshed in our discussion about the preamble structure how big is the gap between our expectations and our actual felt experience when we bring a high-quality awareness to that experience. Many times when encountering the preamble, we experience a softening and the beginning of a shift just from that. That framing holds such a stark difference from what we are accustomed to receiving from the world around us, and it so resonates with the truth of what we experience inside of ourselves, that simply hearing it sets things in motion. And actually, simply giving ourselves permission to bring our full awareness to the feeling, by itself, gets the process started.

As we do throughout our practice of fieldwork, we prioritize direct experience over our concepts and language about that experience. At the same time, language is incredibly powerful, and can be very effective when used in service to this core of experience. Throughout the moving process, we need our language to continue to hold a framework within which we can let go of these life-long societal expectations about the nature of feeling.

Let’s take a look at how we do this.

Asking the Moving and Beliefs Questions

As you did with the mapping sequence, read the questions in the following chapters verbatim, and as much as possible, thoroughly capture the important parts of your answers. If an answer isn’t clear at first, invite different possibilities until one feels like it fits.

As soon as we begin asking the first moving question, we enter a new world. In facilitating this process, we abandon all reference to the original feeling name from the very beginning. Instead, we refer to “this part of you.” That’s because a feeling name is very specific, and the name for the original feeling state referred only to the state represented by that specific mapped set of virtual material properties.

As soon as we change even a single parameter of that image, the feeling state is no longer the same, and thus the name no longer applies. Because the feeling state is in a constant state of transition throughout the entire moving process, we choose to refer to the underlying entity undergoing the change as “this part of you.” This part of you is the same from the beginning of the process to the end and beyond. Using this language helps point to the aspect of consciousness we’re focused on, and also helps us let go of any attachment to the original feeling state.

Each moving question has seven important components:

1. Acknowledge progress with each step.

Restate the changes already achieved and reinforce their felt expression in the moment. Key expressions are, “In becoming [ parameter, such as “this new temperature” ]…” or “In allowing this part of you to become [ parameter ]…” where we substitute one or more descriptions of the changes that have already taken place for the “parameter” in brackets. For example, “In becoming this cold, hard solid…” Or we can open the prompt with the generic, “In taking on these changes…”

The idea is to support the explorer in tangibly inhabiting the shifts that have emerged, feeling what it feels like to have the state take on the new values for the virtual material properties that have been shifted before proceeding to the next property.

2. Set the “as if” frame.

It is important throughout the process to undertake it as if it were a simple exercise of imagination. We want the ultimate latitude for movement, and that requires the maximum amount of permissiveness for this part to try anything at all. One way of reinforcing this frame is to use the language of possibility: “If this part of you could become… what would it want…”

This supports a letting go of any attachment to its existing form and an encouragement to experiment.

3. Set the “in this moment” frame.

Another way to support unconstrained exploration is to add the language, “In this moment…” at the beginning of the question. This doesn’t have to happen every time, but is helpful to add on occasion to remind the explorer about the frame of possibility that holds the moving process. Any shift that happens can easily be reversed, so it is safe to move.

This can be further enhanced by adding the phrase, “…in the spirit of exploration…” for the full intro phrase of “In this moment, in the spirit of exploration…” before any of the questions. I often use this in the transition between the preamble and the first questions.

4. Identify a specific direction to begin an initial shift for each property.

Invite trial changes in both directions to very specific sub-parameters to choose a positive direction. For example, ask if the feeling state would prefer to be warmer or cooler, heavier or lighter, darker or brighter, faster or slower, louder or more quiet. Make sure to apply equal or neutral emphasis to any choices suggested, and include the possibility for no movement at all, “…or neither.”

We usually begin the moving process with temperature because it has a generally linear spectrum of possible values, and it is relatively easy to “move the slider” in one direction, then the other, to test which direction feels best.

5. Invite complete transformation.

After getting things moving with a small shift along a specific sub-parameter, we want to invite further shifts toward what feels best. Specifically, ask what parameter value this part would “most want to be.” Occasionally restate the frame “in a perfect world, where all your needs are met…”

Another way to invite the more complete shift is by asking, “If this part of you could take on any (qualities of) [ property ] at all, what (kind of) [ property ] would it most want to be?” where “property” is temperature, substance, color/appearance, location, size and shape, or sound. You’re wanting to open the door wide here, but usually only after the direction for the positive shift has been established.

6. Offer specifics.

As in the mapping phase, the explorer may find it easier if the facilitator provides a selection of possibilities to choose from, including the option, “… or something else.” The property for which this structure is most often applied is substance, where the standard question asks, “…would this part of you prefer to be more like a solid, a liquid, a gas, some kind of pure light or energy, or something else?” But it can also be used for other properties.

This sets up the opportunity for the explorer to easily “try on” various values for the given property, and to feel a simple yes-or-no, toward-or-away-from response to help in the experimental testing of what this part wants to become. It can be a lot easier to say “no” to several options in order to settle on the best direction than to be working with a wide-open spectrum of possibilities.

7. Invite refinements.

After settling on the “best” parameter for the property being explored, it is often helpful to explicitly invite further refinements. Selectively scan various refining sub-parameters to invite the explorer to enhance and improve the feeling state. The easiest example is that of substance, where, for example, a solid can have qualities of weight, hardness, density and texture, among others. Often, these enhancements can lead to further significant shifts as new insights emerge from the qualities elicited.

8. Reinforce part autonomy.

Always in inviting transformation, use the language “this part of you” to refer to the agent in charge of making the shift. A couple common ways to hold that include, “which feels better to this part of you?” or “what would this part of you prefer?” This places the locus of evaluation directly within the part itself, where it belongs.

Gradually Flexing the Structure

When you first facilitate this process, whether for yourself or someone else, you’ll be best served by asking the questions verbatim, as I’ve provided them in the next chapters. Eventually, many of you will find yourself wanting to make changes to better suit your personal style. As you get comfortable with the process, you will also likely loosen up your delivery to better follow the flow of the moment with the explorer. If so, please keep these guidelines in mind, and you’ll remain effective in your facilitation.

As you and others go through this process again and again, over time you and/or the explorer will begin to take on these underlying guidelines as the ground you are walking on. Notice when that is beginning to happen, whether in working with yourself or someone else. That will be the time to ease toward simplifying the questions, gradually paring down the full version into a simple, “What substance/temperature/color/etc. does it want to be?”

Also, don’t expect that every state or situation you are working on will automatically be able to take on this framework. Even after doing the work to the point where it feels as natural as breathing, you are likely to come upon states that do need the explicit full support. When that shows up, it’s easy enough to go back to the full question structure and ease the part with more explicit support through the process.

Another factor to consider as you get more experience working with highly diverse parts involves the order in which you visit the various properties. I almost always begin with temperature, for example, but sometimes a state very clearly has another property that serves as definer of the state. It might be size, or the direction of movement or pressure, or some more or less extreme quality of substance, for example. Sometimes in those cases, it can be helpful to begin with that stand-out property to get things moving strongly right from the beginning. Later in the book, we’ll take a closer look at factors like this.

Working Solo

If you are working on your own, all of these principles apply just as much as if you are working with a partner. Whether you are reading the question, speaking it aloud or internally to yourself, or listening to an audio prompt, you will find it very helpful to include these elements to support the ease of shifting a state. Of course you will eventually find yourself holding this framework implicitly, but as I mentioned earlier, be prepared to access the full framework in explicit language at times when working with more challenging states.

Some Things You Can Expect

Although the experience of shifting a feeling state does often operate on what seems to be a simple slider mechanism, the moving process can actually be quite a bit more complex than that. I’d like to remind you of a few things to keep in mind as you get started with the moving process.

First, as we’ve talked about many times now, feeling states do not exist in isolation. For example, don’t be surprised if that seemingly trivial state you chose to map turns out, when you start moving it, to be linked to the big knot at the center of everything. Because every state is connected strongly to a full set of other distinct but interdependent states, I encourage you to make it a priority to stop from time to time as you go, and to ask yourself, “What else am I feeling?” If you detect something relatively strong that you haven’t yet identified and mapped, make a note of it, acknowledge it internally, and either turn your attention to it or come back to it later.

Overall, I want to encourage you to keep in mind that as you map and move feeling states, you are traveling through a rich, complex ecosystem of feeling. Be prepared for the unexpected, be open to surprise, and make sure you have enough time set aside to take a detour if that becomes necessary to complete what you begin. Sometimes as you move one feeling state, another will come barging into the foreground as if to demand to be taken through the process. Make it a priority to at least acknowledge it and commit to returning to it soon. Consider the possibility that it might be best to turn your attention fully to the new state to map and move it before returning to the state you were working on before it showed up.

Be especially open to surprise as you take your state through the moving process. It is very possible that the part of you that has been holding its form in the feeling state you mapped does not remember what it is like to experience its ideal state. In many cases, you will feel completely and delightfully surprised, arriving at a feeling and state of mind that you never would have anticipated. At the same time, it will probably feel more like your authentic, “true” self than the state you started with, no matter how familiar and pervasive the previous state has been in your life.

Looking Ahead

We’ve completed our preparation for the moving questions. In the next chapter, we’ll delve into the details for each one.

Another Example of What You Have to Look Forward To

To support your anticipation for what is to come in this adventure, I am offering before/after examples of feeling states my client Ruby gave me permission to share.

Critical Self

It’s pretty dark, but it’s hard to know exactly what it is.

The word shame, thinking I feel so ashamed of myself that I have to keep depending on one person, that I’m causing that person so much stress.

Ashamed of Myself

On my back, partly inside, the upper half; a really heavy energy; a little hot; reddish black, translucent; pushing down on me; no sound. It feels like it’s spreading out behind, becoming like the shape of a bat’s wings or something.

The Guilt/Shame was trying to keep the Untrusted Self from messing up. This is the part of me that would mess up.

It doesn’t feel good that it has to hold my negativity. It actually doesn’t like slowing me down. But it has felt like it needed to because it doesn’t trust itself. This is the part that slows me down (I think), the part where all of my negative ideas are.

You’re not good enough. You’re lazy, you’re fat, you’re slow, you’re going to mess up, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not as good as them, you can’t do that, you’re going to be able to do that.

(None of that stuff is true.)

Name: Critical Self.

This part has an element of sabotage, of deliberately messing up as a form of rebellion to others imposed standards.

Accepting Self

Lighter, sparkling light; a soothing warm temp; iridescent sparkly, many colors; starting in my heart and shining out so far that it ends up being in all of my body, across the room, across town... infinite. Connecting everything through its sparkles, the way that they’re moving. Singing voices, both genders, a kundalini mantra “wah hey guru.” It wants to sparkle goodness to other people too.

All those negativities I used to believe in were just an illusion. I’m made of goodness. And other people are too. It’s my role now to not only know this but to show others about it.

Name: Accepting Self.

I’m not just a yoga teacher. My job is to remind people of their goodness too.

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Well, after all that preparation, we’re ready for the preamble itself. Let’s take a look at an example of a complete, fully-articulated version first.

Whether you are delivering this framing for yourself or someone you’re facilitating, the “you” (including the implied “you” embedded in the “we” sprinkled throughout) is directed at the part of the self that is carrying out the moving process. It is the part of the self that represents the whole — more of a witness, an observer, or a director, for example — which will be interacting with the feeling state you’ve chosen to work with. If you’re working solo, this wording works fairly well even when directed at yourself. You can read it silently or out loud, or even record and play it for yourself if that seems helpful.

Prelimary Setup

Now we’re going to take a feeling that you’ve mapped and alter the virtual material properties as a way to transform the feeling itself. Return to your notes and drawing of the feeling state you mapped. Read through your notes and refresh your experience of the feeling state. If needed, intensify one or more of the parameters of the image in order to feel a visceral twinge from the tangible link between the properties you mapped and your feeling state.

Moving a feeling state is pretty straightforward but incredibly powerful. So before we start, make yourself comfortable. We want to set a few expectations for your experience before moving forward.

The Full Preamble

Before we begin, take a moment to confirm that you are holding this feeling state in your awareness, with all the qualities that were revealed in your mapping.

As we go through the moving process, this feeling state will change. The name you gave the state will no longer fit, and so we will be referring to “this part of you” as the feeling transforms. When we arrive at the new state, we’ll give that a new name.

As our next step, we want to make sure this part of you considers a few important frames as we get started. First, this part of you took on this current feeling state at some point in your life to serve you. At that time, this state was its best option to support your well-being. And even though it did not get the support it needed, it has persisted in trying to serve you in this way. We want to acknowledge this service, and to thank this part for its effort.

We also want to reassure this part of you that yes, we are going to move it today, and it will gain access to a new and very different feeling state. But at any time, from the moment after we finish through the rest of your life, if it ever needs to serve you in this same way again, it will be free to do so.

What that means is that it is safe to move the feeling state of this part. And because it is safe to move, we want to invite this part to really go for it. What could this part of you become in a perfect world, where all your needs are met, fully and completely, exactly the way you want them to be, and you know how to keep them that way? What could this part feel instead?

Now, this exploration today is hypothetical. We acknowledge that the perfect world may not exist, and it may not be appropriate for this ideal feeling state to stay active at all times. No. What we are going for is freedom, the freedom to respond to whatever shows up in life with sensitive awareness, to feel what is there to be felt while at the same time staying connected to this ideal state, so that this part’s response can serve you best. This is even more reason to really go for it as we explore moving this part.

Now, in mapping this current feeling state, you may have noticed other feeling states, other parts of you, connected to this one. Still more additional parts may make themselves known as we proceed. We want to acknowledge these other parts and invite them to participate in this process passively, as witnesses only, fully supporting this part of you in exploring the fullness of its ideal state, learning from this process what is possible for every part of you.

At the same time, if another part feels strongly that its needs are more important to be addressed, you may notice another feeling state coming strongly into the foreground. If that happens, we will pause, and decide whether to turn attention to that part instead.

Finally, in acknowledging the inter-relationship of this part with others, we also would like to affirm this part’s inherent wisdom about what is best for itself. Rather than bring in expectations or desires from other parts about what this part could or should become, we will trust that this part of you has its own compass, built into its own direct feeling experience. This compass points in the direction of what feels best, and in following it, we will support this part of you in tapping into its own deepest wisdom.

The Impact of Hearing This…

In almost every case of hearing this preamble before moving a feeling state, there is a softening of the part. It is hearing something that resonates with what it knows is true for itself, but which it has had to ignore because of the lack of support for this truth in the world it’s been inhabiting. Hearing this affirmation is healing in and of itself.

This is even more true after going through fieldwork and moving multiple states. Actually experiencing, vividly and tangibly, the truths of which the preamble speaks brings it even more alive as we enter each successive round of exploration.

Reminding ourselves of these key (re)frames usually helps the moving process go rather smoothly. The part goes smoothly through the process, winding up in a new state it most likely would not have predicted, and being quite pleased with its discovery as a result. Although we may emphasize over and over again that the part can always go back to its original state, once it discovers its ideal state, do you think it wants to? Usually not. It most likely will not remain fixed in the ideal state, but having been fully welcomed into and given the restorative medicine of your awareness, it is not likely to need to go back to the fully reactive state you started with. It will be free to express in feeling what is more true in the moment.

And the truth in this moment is quite likely to be more supportive of your thriving than the original conditions which led to the locking in of the reactive configuration of states. You are older and wiser. You have more resources and capacities available to you. You have better support available to you and more agency in accessing that support. And lots more. Enjoy that, and appreciate where you have arrived.

The Preamble in the Context of More Extensive Fieldwork

As you become more familiar with the preamble, and with fieldwork in general, you may begin to encounter parts / states that already “get it” and don’t need to hear the full script. Feel free to condense and simplify to the extent that seems appropriate for each state. Make sure, though, to leave open the possibility that even after you’ve become fully accustomed to this framework, some states you encounter will have been buried so deeply and for so long that they will still benefit from hearing the full version.

If it’s helpful, here is an abbreviated version based on my original three frames, as presented in Volume 1, FO-1: Fieldwork Quick Start.

Before we begin, we need to set three frames.

First, this part took on this feeling state form in order to serve you. You’re going to move this feeling state, but you can always put it back if that is what is needed. Therefore, it is safe to move.

Second, because it is safe to move, you might as well go for it. What could this part of you be in an absolutely perfect world, where all your needs are met, fully and completely?

Third, this part of you is connected to other parts. We invite these other parts of you to participate in this process passively, as witnesses only, learning from the process what is possible for all parts of you, all feeling states.

Also, there is a different longer version available in Volume 1, FO-2: Try It — Your First Time Through. You might read through that one to compare with this one and get a sense of how much flexibility is available to you in delivering this. Feel free to experiment to make it more your own while fully supporting your own or your explorer’s process. In the Substack post, that one also comes with an audio file of me delivering the whole process, so that could be helpful for other reasons as well.

Wrapping Up the Preamble, Looking Forward to the Questions

Well, we made it. Now that we’ve got the preamble handled, and we’ve looked at all that’s packed into it to get a sense of what we’re really up to here, we can move ahead to examine the moving questions themselves. Yes!

Another Example of What You Have to Look Forward To

To support your anticipation for what is to come in this adventure, I am offering before/after examples of feeling states my client Ruby gave me permission to share.

Guilt/Shame

Originally mapped as Guilt: About not practicing as much as I “Should.”

I feel guilty because I didn’t do all the things I was supposed to do, wasted time, etc. Feeds into Overwhelmed and Beating Myself Up.

In my stomach. Size of a canteloupe. Has a protective skin layer with a different substance inside. Kind of solid, but not impenetrable. The skin: rough and dark, brownish black; cold. The inside: more fleshy, dark red; warmer than body temp. The center: seeds of guilt that could be planted; seeds are orange. The weight of the object is pulling down on me. No sound/voice.

The top, the “vine,” goes up through the center of my body, up by my neck, all the way up and connects to the back of my head.

Related to Self Doubt: the vine could actually wrap around the rope. It actually could, instead of going up to the top of my head, be connected to the top, chest part of Self Doubt. Soft of feels like a question again, “Why do you keep doing this? Why are you not doing the things you need to be doing? You know these things are important. You’re wasting time.” etc.

Then, revisited a couple months later and mapped as Guilt/Shame: It’s weird because right now it feels like it’s something that’s wrapped around me and constricting me, from my neck to my knees. Practically solid, black slabs that you could imagine big huge tire inner tubes, some stretch to it, pulled pretty tight around me. Cold. Black, shiny. Sometimes they pull tighter. Sound: like a screeching, some kind of sound you would hear when material is being pulled, an unpleasant sound, not that loud. Like ripping tape off.

Just like the Sadness was a reaction from the Self-Doubt, this one seems to be a reaction to my lack of trust and confidence in myself (Untrusted Self, coming next week).

I think about the last two weeks and how these things have been coming up. It says, “You shouldn’t make decisions. I don’t want you to mess up. What if you make the wrong decision?”

The New Way

⟹ Warmer, 75 degrees; looser, lighter, softer, an energy cloud; silvery white, translucent, luminescent. I see this being connected to the Untrusted Self. Instead of constricting it, it wants to lift it up and help it. (Moved Untrusted Self.)

Wants to be doing something, moving around inside me; more like the Vibrancy Comet, shifting around inside the purple light of Inner Source. Moves within the whole space of the purple energy.

I saw it as a cloud I was standing in or on, but now it seems more connected to the Inner Source. Before it was restricting that source, now it’s helping it. In my body, moving all through the purple energy, rippling and spreading through the whole area. Sound of a breeze.

Similar to Inner Source. It wants me to remember to go to my source for my problems. And it wants to help the source be strong enough to provide answers or support. “You don’t have to live from the past any more. You get to create a new way of living your life.”

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For now, though, let’s just take a moment to reflect on what I’ve laid out in the reframes we’ve reviewed.

The Raw Power of Awareness

This preamble carries a lot. It invites a radical shift in attitude toward our inner realities. This shift rides on the central catalyst for all human power: that of self-directed awareness that is aware of its own self-direction.

I’ve written about this before, and I will return to it again later in this book and the next. Awareness as we experience it, not only as something we inhabit but as something we have the capacity to fold in on itself in order to become aware of our own awareness, sits at the center of what has enabled the human species to step into this strange dominance we have imposed on this planet. Our misunderstanding of this power, combined with the accompanying ways we misuse it, also sits at the center of what cripples our efforts and makes us vulnerable to self-destruction.

Psychotopology fieldwork offers us a giant step forward in the agency we have available to apply — and choose how to apply — this super-power. We experience a hyper-focused form of this agency in the fieldwork moving process.

All of our cultural norms are, at their core, systems which shape the patterns of our awareness to serve the system’s goals. Here, we get to take charge of our awareness, and in doing so, we get to step out of these culturally-imposed systems and to re-align with the underlying power of life itself.

Let me acknowledge here that what I am saying about culture is hardly even scratching the surface of what there is to learn about cultural dynamics from what psychotopology reveals about the inner lives of the people out of whom culture is made. Once you really see it, you cannot un-see it. And inhabiting this altered perspective means that it becomes well-nigh impossible to earnestly participate in so much of what passes for collective activity, community, and belonging in today’s society.

I’m going to say something radical here, and I will not have a chance to back it up right away. That will take the rest of this book, and probably most of the next. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to say it here, to let you know more about where I am coming from and where you are likely to end up if you follow where fieldwork eventually leads. Continuing down this path into the fieldwork moving process definitely moves you down the path, so I want to be clear about where you are heading. This is what I see from my position of having been on this path for over three decades…

The universe experiments, constantly. Some experiments fail, and life has a way of clearing the failures away to make room for fresh starts. Our current western culture is an experiment based on a certain pattern of shaping our habits of awareness using a hyper-focus on “objectivity,” “truth,” “God’s word,” and other such conceptual principles as the basis around which to build our societal systems. The choice to pursue this form arose in response to opportunities to stabilize our relationship with the material world, and it seemed to move us toward greater thriving in its earlier days when it maintained a balance with other forms of pattern-shaping including shared myth, ritual, and other embodied access to mystery.

Today, though, our culture has hyper-focused on the objectivity side of things. In doing that, the experiment is failing by cutting us off from our own direct experience of life.

Consciousness is the ground of all being, all existence. Our capacity for self-directed awareness of that consciousness, and through that awareness the capacity to catalyze dynamic emergence toward greater thriving, represents a new threshold. This threshold opens the way to an opportunity for life to bring forward a higher-order form of itself. By locking our awareness into representational thought and downgrading our direct perception of the field dimension of consciousness, we are directing this new capacity in ways that are sabotaging its potential.

This form we have chosen is a dead-end, and we can see that the dynamics of the culture based on this form are clearly self-destructive. In this, evolution is taking care of things. We are set up for catastrophic failure and potential elimination if we stay locked into our current form. At the very least, life is working to make sure, from many directions, that there will be a collapse of some kind, and in that collapse the conditions will (possibly) be present for a re-structuring of how we are conducting this experiment.

It is up to us when we choose to engage with this. We can start now, and possibly detour around the collapse. Or we can wait until we are swept into it by forces much greater than ourselves, and hope for the best. I am choosing to approach the challenge now, and I invite you to join me.

Back to discussing the preamble as it relates to our human (potential) superpower. In the course of doing fieldwork, mapping and moving multiple feeling states, we begin to access the natural functioning I’m referring to and we become re-acquainted with the field dimension of consciousness that serves as the core medium for all existence. Through mapping and moving, we enact this natural functioning by bringing intentional awareness to the affect fields at the heart of our life patterns. In doing so, we reactivate our natural responsiveness, reconnect with our personal inner truth, and become more creative and alive in all facets of our lives. It’s a big shift, and it helps to have a bit of a preview before going there. That’s the main job of the preamble.

We’ll dig into plenty ofc examples in the course of this book and the next. For example, throughout these chapters on the moving process, I am also sharing small glimpses of one person’s work, showing the shift from the reactive to the ideal state. As you take these in, imagine for yourself what it would be like to experience these shifts. Your own shifts will be unique, but in having a glimpse into others’ experiences, you’ll be able to take on a larger context, beginning to see our shared humanity in a way that is much more hopeful than other perspectives, and much more grounded in the actual reality of conscious experience.

At the same time, I also need to acknowledge that the culture we inhabit is everywhere, and it is not easy to find ways to cultivate this new awareness in isolation. Believe me, I know this from long experience. If you are to continue down the path of doing extensive fieldwork, I strongly encourage you to invite others to join you.

More on Why This Is a Big Deal

OK. I can’t help myself here. I’ve got one more thing to share. I want to make sure you’re really getting what it is I’m talking about before we actually get into the weeds of the method. At the heart of this preamble, really, is a radical trust in the goodness of what lies within ourselves. I call it “radical” because it goes against so much of what we’re immersed in every single day.

Think about this for a second. What does it mean that every single part of us can be trusted to serve our greatest good, no matter what form it seems to have taken in the past and no matter how that form is typically interpreted according to the societal (and personal) norms we inhabit. We’re talking states like rage, hate, shame, terror, judgment, bully, manipulator, mask, sadism — all the things we love to disparage and cast aside. What does it mean that when we give the part expressing with that state the full support and freedom to choose what it wants, instead of imposing our rules and constraints upon it, it steps without hesitation into a state of utmost resourcefulness?

In our society, we have defined what is most human to be what is least trustworthy. We impose that definition through various concepts including (original) sin, nervous system dysregulation, trauma, evolutionary competition, weakness, confusion, unconscious impulses, and lots more. And we have defined what is most good by creating specific rules, laws and principles to which we are supposed to surrender our actions and words. We have placed these rules, laws and principles upon a pedestal and built our societal systems around them. And we reward those who demonstrate clearly their worshipful stance. Say the right words. Enact the right behaviors. Show the right signals. Wealth, status and power are conferred on the basis of these paradigms. And what is most human within ourselves is left to rot.

So think about it. What does it mean to take on a reframe that says you can actually trust this part of yourself to know what’s best for itself, and you can trust that what’s best for it is what’s best for your whole self, and you can trust what’s best for your whole self to be what’s best for your entire human ecosystem? What does that mean that you do not have to turn to logic? No rationality. No external rules. No imposed principles. No “universal” values. No agreements or contracts. No supreme desired states. No leader, no text, no savior, no external force of good and right. None of these things. The greatest force for beauty, belonging, and thriving lies inherently within every single part of you, and within every single part of every single person.

And yes, I can see that you might perceive that I am creating another principle to impose with this statement of trust. This one is a little different, though. It’s a principle that says, check your ideas at the door, get the heck out of the way, and trust the inherent force of life within you. What shows up will take on different shapes in different people, different relationships, different contexts. It will probably surprise you. The job of your rationality, then, is to make sense of what shows up, for you, in the context of your life, in a way different from how someone else might make sense of something similar in their life. And the “something similar” is important, because what shows up in you will be absolutely unique and irreproducible within anyone else.

This is a principle that says, essentially, that our rationality-and-rules impulses need to be placed in service to the pure experience of life instead of imposed upon and controlling it. It is a principle about the optimal position for all principles in the context of human life: the position of support for emergence, for creativity, for connection, for aliveness, for thriving.

Enough said. I’m pretty sure we’ll be getting further into this later in the book, and even more so in Volume 3.

What’s Next…

This wraps up my presentation of the nine reframes, and some thoughts arising from taking a step back from these reframes to consider where they come from and what they mean. As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, I was not anticipating that what I had to share would grow so wildly into something so extensive. In that, I suspect that this section may turn out to fit best in its own section rather than shoehorning it into these chapters on how to do fieldwork moving.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts and feedback. And that goes all the way from nit-picking critique of the writing flow and clarity to more broad assessments of whether this is just too confusing and might need to wait until after I’ve developed more of the science and topology of things. In this moment, I chose to act on what was showing up as I approached presenting the preamble and to trust that it will find a home even if here is not the place. I welcome whatever you can offer.

And now, to wrap up this sub-chapter before ending next week with the preamble script itself, here is your weekly example…

Another Example of What You Have to Look Forward To

To support your anticipation for what is to come in this adventure, I am offering before/after examples of feeling states my client Ruby gave me permission to share.

Untrusted Self

The bands of Guilt/Shame are containing me, and who I really am, my capabilities.

This is the part of me that is basically so bad that I can’t trust it. It feels similar to other things, like the Little Self, and the Heart and Sadness.

In my heart, and in my stomach, pretty big; a light but thick energy; warm; red, translucent; moving, trying to press against the bands and get out, shrinks and expands too, as the bands get tighter or looser. Kind of yelling, like there’s danger, no words, just “aaaahhh!” My voice.

Feels like it’s a part of me that wants so bad to fulfill its potential, it’s a part that has felt restricted for a long time. “Give me a chance. Trust me, I won’t let you down.”

Feels like it has qualities of when I was a child. When that part of me that is slow or makes mistakes got called out on its incapabilities. It’s the part that learned from watching my parents, and thought that’s how you’re supposed to be.

Name: Wanting to be trusted; Untrusted; Untrusted Self.

Red: Upset that it’s not being trusted.

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Inner Source

⟹ It would relax; a little thinner, an energetic light; warm; violet, a blue-purple, translucent, luminous; in my heart, shining out around, a few feet outside of my body. Doesn’t have any sound, more like a smiling.

It’s happy that it’s free now. It gets to express joy. It gets to guide me. “I know it’s hard for you to trust me. But it’s OK. Things will actually turn out much better this way. Turn to me before you turn to anyone else.”

Name: something about a source of light... solutions, or a place where I make my choices. Inner Source.

Interesting: seems like there’s a container around the source, and I have to go to it. It wants to shine out, but maybe I’m already not trusting it again.

My question to Ruby: “What is keeping you from trusting yourself?” This led to identifying and mapping a state called Critical Self and moving it to Accepting Self. (See the next chapter for these.)

Having Accepting Self available, would be a little brighter, a little more luminous. With beautiful music coming from a smiling cello.

Everything you need is right here. By starting here, within you, all else will be provided for and fall into place.

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We’re in the thick of it now, and I’ll avoid slowing things down with a cumbersome intro. Go ahead and dive into number 6:

6. Make a commitment to responsiveness, not arrival.

Striving to access an ideal state that would accompany existence in a perfect world touches on the next important reframe. We want to affirm very clearly that our goal is not to reach some sublime state and stay there. In fact, psychotopology makes it very clear that such state-chasing is not actually the functionality of true thriving. To thrive, we must be present with what is, whatever that is. And we must be present with our whole selves, with all the relevant parts active and responding with wisdom and vitality in the here and now. Locking our awareness onto a single part of ourselves and locking that part into a single aspirational state locks us out of a true aliveness within ourselves and in the world around us.

What this means is that you are even more free to reach toward that perfect world in seeking the ideal state for this part. You’re not going to set this ideal state as being in any way dominant in your life. Instead, you are choosing to touch into it in order to restore your access to its insight, wisdom, and capacity for thriving.

Every part of you functions best when it has access to its own ideal. You can think of it as a North Star. If you know how to locate the North Star, then if you find yourself lost, you can orient yourself to that north-ward direction, and use that orientation to help yourself navigate toward wherever it is you want to go. We triangulate to navigate. We use the felt sense of where we are in the moment, compare that to the felt sense of our North Star, and choose the third point of where it is we wish to travel, how we want to respond in ways that honor our inner truth.

Nobody who uses the stars to navigate the surface of our planet expects to arrive at an actual star. Instead, the stars provide context by which we are able to sense into what is the right direction for us in any given moment, taking into consideration other factors including the topography of our current location, weather conditions, and more. We regain this responsiveness in locating the ideal state, not an arrival at the state itself. It is important to set this reframe as we begin the moving process so you can be clear about your relationship to the powerful states you will access.

One valuable thing we gain in restoring the responsiveness that comes with regaining access to the ideal state is a much more vibrant sensitivity. When parts of us have been locked outside the boundaries of awareness, the job they are doing becomes much more difficult. They are trying to signal that some essential need is not being met, that something should change within yourself or in your world in order to restore a state of thriving. And because that signal is not being heard, it tends to intensify over time.

Unfortunately, this sets up a vicious feedback loop. The stronger the feeling state becomes, the less we are able to accommodate it, and the more intensely we commit to our strategies to keep it outside of our awareness. Which, of course, results in it intensifying further, which strengthens our defenses, round and round.

When you restore access to the state in its full spectrum of expression from reactive to ideal, and when you have experienced a confident trust that this part of you is working to serve you, no matter what state it is inhabiting as its expression, things get much, much easier. You actually notice when you start feeling some discomfort. Your attention goes to that state, and you have a reference point for what its purpose, its truth, its ideal wants to be.

And so, with little fanfare, you make a small choice. You communicate something to someone. You step away from a situation. You turn inward to connect to your own resources. You do whatever it takes to re-ground yourself, to re-nourish yourself, to respond to the situation in a way that honors your needs and moves you in a direction that serves your life. And it’s no big deal.

7. Invite the background support of related parts.

Every part of you inhabits an ecosystem of other parts. You’ll learn much more about this in the upcoming Science section. But even at this point, after mapping one or more feeling states, you may have a good sense of the fact that the part you have chosen to work with has strong relationships with other parts. You may have mapped one or more, you may have named a few others, while still others may remain in the background, unidentified at this point. Some of those relationships may take the form of enmeshment, others of conflict or separation, while others may collaborate in their pursuit of a particular task or function, perhaps that of protection or alarm, for example.

Always, parts coordinate their activity overall, even when that coordination involves direct conflict between parts. And in their coordination, many parts have a kind of investment in a particular part staying exactly the way it is. To take a simple example, a part that feels a boastful arrogance might might feel that its role is being undermined if the shame it is protecting suddenly goes away. At the same time, the shame part might feel uncomfortably exposed if the protective arrogance is shifted. It is as if the two parts are bonded in a contract, with each performing its role in order to maintain equilibrium.

Add a third part, and suddenly you have three contracts instead of one. With a fourth, the contracts double to six in number. Work your way up to the nine parts generating every full experience of being a self, and you can see that it becomes impossible to re-negotiate these contracts one by one.

All of this is rooted in the past, and this state you’re about to move is anchored in that past. But in the fieldwork moving phase, this part becomes very definitely grounded in the present moment, and it is able to reach forward into the possibilities of the future. This capacity also exists for all the other parts in relationship with this one. We want to invite this shift in focus into the present moment in order to support this part of you in exploring its full range of expression.

To support this, we directly speak to the other, related parts. We invite them to participate in this process first as passive witnesses, learning from the process what is possible for every one of them as well. Second, we invite them to be present in full support of the focal part having freedom to explore and discover its core ideal, affirming that in doing so, it will gain access to wider resourcefulness in serving the whole self, including these related parts. And we want to remind all of the related parts that this part will be free to return to its original state if that turns out at any time to be what best serves the whole.

8. Express openness to other parts’ needs.

At the same time that we want to invite other related parts to be in full support of this part’s shift, we also want to leave open the possibility that one of the other parts may indeed have more important needs that want to be addressed first. In this case, we speak more to the explorer as the one engaging this process, and let them know that if they notice another feeling state coming strongly into the foreground, they should pause and decide whether to turn attention to that part.

Rather than power through and push the intruding state aside, it can be very helpful to pause in order to investigate just what this other part needs. From there, a respectful and supportive decision can be made about how best to continue the work. Sometimes, that might look like a simple affirmation before continuing with the original part. At other times, though, it might make more sense to shift attention to the signalling part, to map it if it hasn’t been mapped yet, and to move it first before returning to this one.

9. Finally, trust this part’s inherent compass to find its own way home.

Moving a feeling state is honestly a big deal. Having access to a virtual slider by which you can shift a state in pretty much any direction, on purpose, defies expectations of all kinds. Because of this, it is common for other, related parts who experience themselves as being more or less “in charge” to step in and try to direct things.

One way this shows up is through thoughts about what a part “should” become. “Oh, that anxiety needs to just chill out and become confident instead.” Another way is through expectations. “Obviously this sad part will become full of joy.” Sometimes the thought or expectation is for a very uncomfortable state to just “disappear” or “go away.”

It is important to invite impulses such as these to step back and to serve instead as support for the part itself in its exploration. We do that by explicitly naming the fact that every part has its own inner compass, and that all we need to do in order to follow that compass is to trust the part itself. By making our virtual material property adjustments solely in directions that result in the feeling state moving toward what feels best to itself, we honor that inner compass.

In this way, we are affirming a deep trust in the wisdom of feeling. We are not acting from a conceptual or belief framework, but instead we are fully trusting that by following what feels good, we will be led to the place of the ideal. Feeling itself is the guide.

One of the best indicators that we are following this inherent wisdom faithfully is that of surprise. Very often, the part arrives at a state we could never have predicted when we started. And yet, when we arrive, it feels absolutely spot on. The right state reveals itself when we show up in full support.

As you get the hang of the fieldwork moving process, you will come very naturally to a place of pervasive trust. You will come to see every part of yourself (and others) as having something profoundly valuable to contribute, and you will trust that contribution to be revealed in its own way. Occasionally, the state the part arrives at turns out to be familiar, something you remember having access to at an earlier stage of life. But more often, you lost your access to this state long enough ago that you do not carry any active memory of it, and it seems both completely new while at the same time providing a felt sense of coming home.

One thing is clear, though. We can’t ever actually know what we truly want unless and until we are free to experience the ideal state of having everything we need. If this has never been true in the course of our life in the context of this part you’re working with, or if this state was lost a long time ago, we can be sure that whatever the perspective of the distressed, reactive feeling state we’re working with, its idea of what we need or want is bound to be mistaken. For that reason, we need to surrender fully and completely to the wisdom of feeling.

To Be Continued…

We’ve gotten through the nine reframes, and it’s time to take a break. Pause for a moment (or a week), and reflect on what you’ve read so far. Some aspects of these reframes do show up, at least partially, in other places. Maybe you’ve encountered them, or even taken them on for yourself, to some extent. What do you notice when you hold all five together?

We’ll be back with some reflections on the reframes next week. In the meantime, here is another sample map-and-move for your delight.

Another Example of What You Have to Look Forward To

To support your anticipation for what is to come in this adventure, I am offering before/after examples of feeling states my client Ruby gave me permission to share.

Dread

Feels connected to the Fear.

Surface of my upper back, around my shoulders, head and face, and the top part of my chest. On outside. Six inches thick. It goes all the way down to the sternum and connects through me to the back part, almost like the rope thing of Self Doubt. Like this huge helmet kind of thing. Seems to be solid, (but that seems too solid), a heavy, very thick gas. A soft solid, like paint that kind of dries up. Black, kind of shiny almost, opaque. On the hotter side. It’s a feeling of weight coming down on me, like there’s something heavy on top of me. It’s like a voice making a sound effect in a low tone, a tonal “uugggghhhhh.”

With the pressure going down, because the bar is going through me, I feel it especially in the heart area.

I’m noticing that the reason I’m dreading doing these preparations (or whatever), is that I’m afraid it’s going to be fruitless work. This part knows these things must be done, but it’s so hard. I’m not sure how to do it. The Self Doubt: Is it going to be good enough?

If this were to come to pass, disappointment (Fear), and a told-you-so tone (Self- Doubt).

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Divine Flowing Breath

⟹ Cooler and lighter, softer; an energy - if you put your hand into it you could feel it tingling; warm; white, translucent, glowing; ... (feeling of a little self- doubt, “am I doing this right?” heavy, pretty lethargic, so it’s hard to get into a real positive place. This feels like the Sadness.)

(At this point, we turned attention to Sadness and moved it to Self Trust.)

⟹ Comfortable coolness; lighter and softer, a vibrating energy, tingly to the touch, like a tangible energy; light blue, translucent, iridescent.

In the lower back, where the kidneys are, I feel it come out through my stomach, out in front of me, and then it goes way back behind me, starts way back behind, goes all the way forward and through; two strands: one through the right, one through the left, of the lower back, each curved into loops, and they circulate back; start close to the spine, go out in front two feet, curves out to the side, back in through my side to the starting place. The origin is three feet behind. Flowing. Sound of flowing water.

I have nothing to dread. I have everything to look forward to. I’m going to be fine. This part wants me to breathe.

Name: Flowing Breath.

What’s different: I’m filled with life, and light. It’s like I have a respect for what’s going on inside me, my feelings. But I realize that I’m the creator here. I have the power to form my life as I wish.

There’s usually a fight within me about teaching my classes how I’m “supposed” to, or really teaching them from my heart and that might mean that I’m teaching them differently than I’m supposed to. There’s still a concern there because I care about my students so much and I want my class to fulfill their needs, but with this Flowing Breath, I trust that I’m guided to teach in a way that will automatically nourish them. Those things I’ve been taught about what I’m supposed to teach are good, but it’s OK to present something different to show a different experience of yoga.

A few months later, after moving a few other states:
⟹ Warm, a little brighter and shinier, likes moving from behind and in the loops, and also circulating through the rest of my body, swells up and down to fill my body, like a mist from water.

Feels like lightness, like when you take a deep breath, “Aaahhh.” And peace. Sound of breath.

It comes from divine source, the same source that we’re all connected to. It’s not just coming from inside me, it’s coming from something greater than me.

It’s a really unlimited source of power and energy. And I feel like if I connect to it, I can bring lightness and maybe even healing to other people. It’s very much like presence as well. Connecting to Flowing Breath gives me presence, thus taking me out of my ego.

New name: Divine Flowing Breath.

The part that swells up into my body goes out more than just to my skin; it shines, turns into light and shines out. The yellow light is Encourager (see a few weeks ago).

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Next post/chapter in this series on fieldwork moving: (coming)

Volume 1, Table of Contents:

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In the last post, I offered a preview of what’s coming this next few weeks. The preamble has been a fixture of the fieldwork moving process for decades. Think of it as an onramp to a very different way of interacting with what’s inside. We’re accustomed to thinking about and interacting with our interior in certain ways. Deliberately shifting a feeling from one state to another through its virtual material properties kind of messes with the assumptions that support those longstanding habits.

The preamble leads you step by step through a series of reframes that open things up so the part you’re moving has greater freedom and agency as it goes through the process. And at the same time, taking a careful look at these reframes shines some light on the persistent, omnipresent gap between what we believe and say about our inner lives and what we actually experience on the inside if we pay closer attention. This gap is where the disruptive power of psychotopology points, and it is very helpful to open our eyes to it as we begin using the moving process.

Nine Reframes

The preamble contains the following nine elements, each of which sets a crucial reframe for the moving process. At the end of this chapter, I will offer a baseline script you can use, whether facilitating your own practice or that of someone else.

1. Confirm access to the feeling state and set expectations for the moving process.

The fieldwork moving process absolutely depends on directly and tangibly feeling the state as you begin working with it. You shouldn’t be moving into the moving process until you’ve revisited the mapping details for the state you’ve chosen to work with and revived the presence of this state as the focus of your awareness. This section of the framing script acknowledges that this has been done.

Of course, the main reason to establish contact with the feeling state is to be able to undergo the moving process. Just as important, though, at this stage before we begin, you need to have direct access to the state in order to set the reframe in a way that supports an easeful process. To get the setup underway, we need to verbally affirm that we are entering the moving process, and that the feeling state will change and become something different.

2. Acknowledge “this part of you” as the host for the feeling state.

The second section of the framing script is anchored in the topology revealed by fieldwork (as will be described in the Science section). This topology is modular in nature, with each module anchored by one specific feeling state in any given moment, but having access to a wide spectrum of feeling states as it serves its core function in the context of the whole self.

How we attribute “thing-ness” in our maps of reality strongly influences how we navigate. Typically in the modern way of thinking about emotion, we attribute thing-ness to either the emotion itself or to what we attribute as the cause of the emotion. We treat depression or anxiety, for example, by assuming that the nervous system pattern, or history of trauma, or whatever, is the defining “thing” that needs to be corrected or managed in some way.

Psychotopology fundamentally brings a new approach. The module is identified as the “thing” underlying all emotional expression, and the specific feeling state is one among many possible expressions of the module. The feeling state in no way defines the module.

We affirm this modularity as the underlying reality or identity and choose to use the wording “this part of you” to refer to the module that has expressed itself as the originally-mapped feeling state. As soon as we start the moving process, this module will no longer be expressing as that specific feeling state, but will be engaged in a wide-ranging exploration of a full spectrum of possible expressions. If you start by mapping “sadness,” as soon as you shift the substance toward being lighter or softer, for example, it will no longer make sense to refer to it as “sadness,” and the farther the moving process goes, the more true that becomes.

One thing I should note here is to make a distinction between parts as they are referred to in psychotopology and “parts” as they show up in various other modalities of inner work. Typically, “parts work” involves something more like sub-personalities or personas, each with a kind of job to do, a personality with which it does that job, an age at which it shows up, etc. This work tends to meet the “parts” where they are and to work with them as they show up, on their own terms, through dialogue of some kind.

The parts we work with in fieldwork are more fine-grained and fundamental. In fieldwork, it is likely that a “part” worked with in one of these other modalities would turn out to be made of multiple modules of consciousness. Taking these modules through the mapping and moving process would typically result in the original “part” being completely dissolved and replaced by something more organically integrated into the whole person. This is not to say that standard “parts work” as it exists today is not useful. But psychotopology is working at a very different level in its approach to inner experience.

Getting back to the flow of our framing script, by affirming that we are working with “this part of you,” we free the part from its attachment to either the state it has been holding or the interpretations of itself or its context that led to its choosing that state. It gets to reconnect to its original agency and wisdom as an integral, functioning, semi-autonomous participant in generating your full experience of being a thriving self in the world.

3. Affirm the part’s positive intention and persistent service.

Ultimately, every feeling state is an experiential signal about how well we’re doing in a complex, interconnected system of inner parts, outer people, physical well-being, material resources, environmental factors and more. Every part of us has a particular role to play in meeting specific needs and delivering specific capacities within that encompassing system.

Unfortunately, our modern culture often ignores or dismisses the fundamental functionality of feeling experience. Instead, it interprets feeling as peripheral to rational thought, and it handles expressions or indications of feeling as something to be managed carefully and curated appropriately. In addition, our culture also has a poor understanding of our essential needs and often ignores or suppresses these needs as a standard practice. “Big boys don’t cry” is a good (albeit simplistic) example of this.

The impact of the collision between our inherent nature and our cultural maladaptation is that most of us carry parts of ourselves that have been locked away from the normal healing and restorative power of our awareness for a very long time. In this separation, these states have become rigidified, locked into reactions from long ago.

These exiles carry the beliefs laid on them long ago. Often, the feeling expression was locked away because it was labeled as shameful, hurtful, sinful, or otherwise a marker for compromised value of some kind. We needed to hide it because of how it was interpreted by others around us, and eventually we took on these judgments ourselves as we attempted to navigate the world we shared with others.

These judgments are universally false. All of them. What psychotopology reveals unequivocally is that every single feeling state is attempting to serve the thriving of the whole. The whole includes the precise part expressing through that feeling state as well as a number of other parts in intimate relationship with it. The whole also includes many more parts of ourselves (we’ll get into this later in the Science section) that make up our entire, complex being. This whole extends further, out into our world, including those close to us, the world around us, and all of life. All of it. Every feeling state is attempting to serve the whole of life as it manifests within our individual selves and echoes throughout the universe.

We need to remind the part we’re going to work with of this truth. We need to affirm that no matter how dark or distressing the feeling state it holds, it originally took on that feeling state in order to serve you, and for no other reason. We want to acknowledge that service, to explicitly thank it for taking on this most likely very difficult job, and to let it know that we absolutely trust this essential purpose it holds. It has always been here for us, it is here for us now, and it will continue to be here for us far into the future, for as long as we exist. This we can trust, wholly and without hesitation.

4. Reassure the part that it can always return to serving in this way again, even after it transforms.

Next, we need to let this part know what’s coming. Often, it has been locked into a particular feeling state, perhaps for decades, maintaining a strong commitment to the service it originally took on before being abandoned by our generative awareness. But as we start to interact with it in the moving process, its state is going to change — swiftly, and often dramatically. We don’t want it to freak out about abandoning its post.

All we need to do here is to let this part know that, while it is true that we are going to interact with it in ways that invite it to change, it has full agency about whether and how much to engage with that process. Not only that, but it also maintains its full freedom to return to the exact state we started with, at any time after we finish doing the work.

The fact is, in moving a feeling state, the part gets to explore a far greater range of possible expression. After this exploration, the part is able to choose to express as the ideal state it discovers, or the original state we mapped, or anything in between. Stating this reassures the part that moving the state is safe. There is no risk, only gain in the form of freedom and agency.

5. Encourage the part to reach for a “perfect world” scenario.

After establishing that it is safe to move the part by transforming its feeling state, we want to invite the part to reach as far as it can to find an ideal. To do this, we introduce the idea of “a perfect world,” and we center the definition of “perfect” on the needs of this specific part and of yourself as a whole. A perfect world is one in which” “all your needs are met, fully and completely, exactly the way you want them, and you know how to keep them that way.”

The purpose of every part, expressed as a feeling state, is to meet specific needs. If those needs are well met, the part signals this satiation with pleasurable feeling states. Taking on this reframe encourages the part to reconnect with the feeling state associated with this fulfillment.

It is important to affirm that this exploration is of an ideal, a hypothetical reality that may never actually exist, but is nevertheless very useful to identify, to feel, and to establish as a touchstone for what is most important. We are taking on the “perfect world” reframe in order to give this part permission to find its own North Star, its most essential truth, its clearest resonance with its identity and purpose.

In this process, we are focused on this moment only. We are exploring the full extent of the terrain available to this part of you, not committing to any particular state in that terrain. In this moment, we are reaching for the ideal, but we are doing so only within the safe container of our perfect world hypothesis. What could this part be, what could it feel in such a world?

To Be Continued…

We’ve gotten half-way through the reframes, and it’s time to take a break. Pause for a moment (or a week), and reflect on what you’ve read so far. Some aspects of these reframes do show up, at least partially, in other places. Maybe you’ve encountered them, or even taken them on for yourself, to some extent. What do you notice when you hold all five together?

We’ll be back to finish the series next week. In the meantime, here is another sample map-and-move for your delight.

Another Example of What You Have to Look Forward To

To support your anticipation for what is to come in this adventure, I am offering before/after examples of feeling states my client Ruby gave me permission to share.

Sadness

Painful realization of the Self Doubt part of me that is so mean and discouraging.

It feels like it’s within my whole torso, from the throat down into the lower abdomen. A heavy gas. Warm. Greenish black, translucent. It’s going in a slow circle, down the front and up the back. It sounds like sad music, instrumental. The whole gaseous part of it is strongest and thickest in the throat. It makes it hard to talk.

It’s asking a question: “How can there be such a self-defeating part of me?” It just doesn’t feel right.

Noticing another thing, now again it feels strong in the heart. In addition to the circulation, there is a pulsing, but it changes places where it pulses, sometimes in the heart, sometimes in the throat.

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Self Trust

⟹ Lighter, thinner, a light; a refreshing coolness; white light, glowing; a ball at my heart radiating out, and about a foot and half away from my body it would outline my body all the way around. The outer band becomes thicker at times in response to my sadness on one hand, but on the other hand as an expression of my happiness. Would sound like a woman’s choir, singing “aahhhhh.” A floating upward, uplifting.

You are complete and whole as you are, and on the right track. Trust yourself. I love you.

Name: Self Trust.

What’s different: I’m excited about what I have to do instead of dreading it. Because I trust myself, there’s a real connection to within myself rather than a dependency on what’s outside of me. It’s huge because it actually makes everything possible. So rather than looking for solutions to health problems and all these other things outside, where they may or may not exist, I can solve those things just by connecting within myself. That’s what this gives me, the confidence that if I start within, everything else will fall into place.

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Next post/chapter in this series on fieldwork moving:

Volume 1, Table of Contents:

Get your printed (or PDF/ebook) copy:

You’ve likely encountered the preamble of the fieldwork moving process either as a very concise version in Volume 1, FO-1: Fieldwork Quick Start or as the longer script version offered in FO-2: Try It! (also in the Try It #3: Fieldwork Moving post). In preparing to deliver this again for Volume 2, I took the opportunity to step back and look at it with fresh eyes. The preamble has been so embedded in the process for so long that it has become almost automatic for me when I facilitate, just part of the water I swim in. But in looking at it more carefully, I can see that this brief little onramp to the moving process is quite significant, and it deserves a more thorough introduction.

Over the course of many years as I was developing this work in the early days, the preamble took on a three-part structure, and it has kept that structure for at least 15 years, probably more. It took shape as a way to soften the entry into the moving phase of the work, and to set things up so that the parts we’re working with have an easier time with it. Those three sections of the preamble were centered on three places that can often generate a kind of resistance or doubt around inviting any kind of change to a feeling state.

• Inherent goodness: The first section took on the typical belief that a dark or negative state needed to be controlled because it was inherently bad in some way. We conceptually merge the reactivity of the state into our beliefs about the underlying motives. This first section separated that conflaction by acknowledging that the part took on this state to serve in the original context, and thanking the part for doing so.

• Opportunity for positive exploration: The second section reassured the part that even though we are going to move the state, it can always be returned to its original reactive state if that’s what’s needed. Therefore, it’s safe to move it, and because it’s safe to move, it’s a good idea to really go for it, and to discover what the part could become in an ideal situation.

• Recognition of related parts: The third section acknowledges the presence and invested relationships of other parts/states coexisting with the one being moved, and invites them to “participate passively, as witnesses only,” to support the moving part and absorb the learning from the shift.

But as I’ve listened to myself delivering the preamble more recently, and also in the course of simply facilitating the process of both mapping and moving, I’ve noticed those three sections of the preamble seem to be branching out and getting a little more complex. There is more that I am trying to communicate to these parts we’re getting ready to move, and I’ve decided to unpack that “more” to make my understanding, baked into my intuitive ways of working, more explicit and easier for you to learn.

As I have unpacked that complexity in writing this chapter, I have begun to realize that this preamble grew out of an intuitive reckoning with the significant gap between the deeper currents of our inner world and the surface norms by which we typically communicate with ourselves and one another. We are constantly using surface constructions of language based on our shared agreements about what is “real” in this inner world as we go about our days and share our experiences with one another. In the everyday, it’s easy enough to ignore the gap, at least when we’re with our closer friends and family.

But when we are digging into what is actually there with this kind of deep inner work, we experience this gap much more tangibly. This is the case with all kinds of inner work, not just fieldwork. And some methods do better than others in supporting the navigation of that gap by prioritizing direct experience over interpretions and concepts.

In the course of this chapter, I’ve broken this gap down and spelled it out as best I could. This serves a double purpose. First, of course, it explains why we do the preamble, and why it takes on its very specific structure. But this understanding goes beyond the preamble.

These elements unpacked here need to follow you throughout the work. They need to show up in the interactions between the explicit moving questions, in the attitude you hold toward new parts as they show up, in the overall grace and respect you offer to every part as you encounter it.

As you gain experience with fieldwork, both in working solo and in facilitating others, I suspect you will find, as I have, that these deeper structural parameters will begin to inform all of your experience far beyond fieldwork itself. This is the DNA of conscious experience, and as such, it lives with us in every moment. I hope you have good opportunities to notice this resonance and to benefit from it in your everyday life.

And. No worries, we’ll be digging far more deeply into all of this later in this book and the next. Take in what you can for now, use the preamble in its complete form when you do the work, and trust that all of this will make more and more sense over time.

Digging in…

Optimally at this point, as you get ready to move the feeling state, you (or your explorer if you’re in the facilitator role) have chosen a specific, already-mapped feeling state to work with, and you are ready and able to center this feeling state in your awareness, to bring it alive in your inner experience so that you are able to work with it. But we’re not quite ready to start the actual moving process.

Every feeling state you will ever work with has complex relationships with other coexisting states, with your life history, with the people around you, with the web of beliefs and knowledge you hold, and with the cultures (and sub-cultures) you inhabit. These relationships often impose constraints on the freedom of this state. These constraints can be thought of as rules governing what the state is free to do or be.

We want to respect these constraints. At the same time, we want to provide a free and open space within which the part underlying this state you’ve selected can explore what is possible.

The fieldwork method, along with the topology it reveals (which you will read about in the Science section), combined with my lived experience of many thousands of hours of actually doing this work, have all coalesced into a new understanding of human experience. This new understanding sits upon a very different foundation than the one we’re used to occupying.

Now, it is completely possible to do the steps of fieldwork without noticing or examining how the experience of mapping and moving feeling states contrasts with professional and societal norms to which we’re all accustomed. The practice will still get results, and you’ll still experience benefit. But at some point along the way, if you continue doing the work, you are likely to experience a mind warp, where it becomes clear that your expectations do not line up with your experience. This is the zone we’ll be unpacking here as we enter into a more thorough treatment of the moving phase of the work.

In short, what we are about to do in engaging the fieldwork moving process represents a rupture in the reality we commonly believe we inhabit. The “laws” we assume to govern our “psychology” are about to be warped rather significantly. We will address a few of these governing expectations as we begin.

To do so, we will of course rely on language, doing our best to describe the differences between what we expect and what we are actually going to experience as we go through the process. At the same time, though, we are not confined to engaging this intellectually. Not at all. We are working here with a deeper reality of being.

As we step into this new paradigm, expanding our conceptual boxes to welcome more of our direct, inner experience, the typical experience is one of reunion, of recovery, of restoration. We get to reconnect with something we have always known and felt beneath the surface of everyday awareness, but never had words to express. In its inability to speak up for itself, it was exiled from our many shared realities. In this work, especially in the moving phase of the practice, this deeper reality gets to return home to the center of your lived experience.

To support this homecoming, we want to build a gentle bridge from the old reality to the new one. In service to this bridge-making, I have designed an elegant preamble to the moving process. This preamble sets several frames — perhaps I should call them reframes — that expand what we allow to be possible. These reframes enable each state to enter a different way of being that activates its full freedom to transform itself and restore its most natural functioning. Let’s take a look at these essential reframes.

To Be Continued…

This chapter got way too long to fit into a single Substack post, so I’ve split it up. But I’m still going to offer another example of a state shift from Ruby to keep that going for you. And next week, we’ll start into the nine reframes embedded in the updated preamble.

Another Example of What You Have to Look Forward To

To support your anticipation for what is to come in this adventure, I am offering before/after examples of feeling states my client Ruby gave me permission to share.

Self-Doubt

First encounter: This is about myself as a teacher - “Am I good enough?”

Six weeks later: In my heart, more like encapsulating the front of the heart, the size of the front two-thirds of a softball; feels more solid, the bottom part of it has a thick rope that goes down and connects to a smaller ball in the pit of my stomach, a thick, solid ball the size of a golf ball. Both made out of the same stuff and the rope too. The rope is a little softer, thickness is a half-inch thick. Pretty hot. The balls are pretty hard. Yellowish dark brown, opaque.

They kind of move up and down a little, away from each other and back together, pretty slowly, like the Fear (see last week’s post) is slow. Voice is like the Overwhelm (another state mapped the same day), saying all that stuff, “You’re not going to be able to do this, you’re not qualified, etc.” Also, a laughing sound, how someone would laugh if they think you’re full of crap and know you’re going to mess up, male, like one of those scary movie kind of guys.

At the core of it is very hurtful, saying, “I don’t believe in you.” It makes me want to cry when I hear that part of it.

It’s hard to believe there’s something inside of me that could be that mean or discouraging. I didn’t realize it was that bad. This is Sadness [see next week’s post]. It’s very painful.

A few days later: This is the core of the Fear. When the balls move closer together, the feeling gets more intense. This happens in coordination with the pulsing of the Fear. When the Fear intensifies by expanding, the Self-Doubt intensifies by contracting.

---

The Vibrancy Comet

⟹ Slightly cool. Softer, an energy, it would be expansive. Red-orange, translucent, luminous. It moves, circulates, but it starts in the shape of a ball, but behind it is all this luminous, glowing energy that sort of follows it, pretty much like you would think of a comet; it’s quite long. Ball is a little smaller than what’s coming from it. Ball is a higher-density energy. Ball is the size of my fist, primarily moves within my body, in a somewhat circular motion, can go out a foot from my body (because the tail is so long, it has to). The tail can grow, varies between one and five feet long. Tail is more translucent and sparkly. Sound of a really beautiful instrument, maybe a harp sound but even prettier, (an angel’s harp). Sound is in accordance with the movement.

It wants me to know it believes in me. “I want to help you. I want you to shine and be energized.” And that’s why it has that shape, so it can fly through me and give me energy.

Name ideas: The Energizer, Vibrancy, ...Comet...

New name: The Vibrancy Comet

What’s different: I’m really happy. I feel this source from within me, a source of joy. I’m very present, and live my life as though this is the only moment that matters.

---

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At this point, I’m guessing you’ve mapped at least one state, and perhaps a few or more. If you still haven’t done so, make sure to dig into Volume 1: Fieldwork Mapping section, and if it helps, use the Try It! page(s) to complete mapping for at least one.

Now, before beginning to actually walk a specific feeling state through the moving process, we’ll need to set things up in a way that helps the move go smoothly. Here’s what’s most important for the setup.

Choosing a State to Move

Now, one thing to keep in mind as we go forward here is that every part of you is strongly interconnected with other parts. We’ll go deeper into the topology of that in the upcoming Science section, and that will give us the understanding we need to navigate the complexity better. For now, we’re going to keep things relatively simple.

If you’ve mapped only one state so far, just go for it and take that one through the moving process. Often, the first time through goes very smoothly, in part because you’ve never experienced it and don’t know what to expect. So any parts that are connected with this one will most likely go along for the ride.

Later, after you’ve gained some experience with moving, other parts related to the one you’re moving may have higher priorities and require being moved first. For now, if you’ve mapped more than one state, let me give you two rules of thumb for choosing which one to move.

Option One: Go for the Easy One

As you enter into practice with moving states, I recommend starting with a mapped state that is easy for you to access. Choose one that you feel very tangibly, the map for which feels clear and accurate to how you actually experience the state. Avoid states that seem ambiguous or vague.

Option Two: Go for the Most Uncomfortable One

If you have two or more states mapped, often one will feel more uncomfortable than the others. This one is likely to offer a more satisfying moving experience, so it’s a good place to start.

Option Three: Go for the Pivot

Two or more states that are related to one another often have dependency relationships. In other words, one state is a reaction to something you experience as outside of your control, while another state is a reaction to the first. If the first is not reacting, neither is the second.

Here’s an example. Let’s say I’ve mapped Anger and Shame. If I feel aShamed about having lost my temper, for example, the Shame is likely to be a secondary state reacting to the Anger, rather than a primary one. In contrast, if the Anger shows up in situations in which I have lost connection with someone important to me because of something I did about which I feel Shame, and the Shame gives rise to the Anger, then it is the Shame at the center.

I call these reactivity hubs pivots. Start with a pivot, and you’ll have much greater leverage in moving the group of states. The moving process will proceed with greater ease than if you try working from the outside in.

Entering the Felt Experience of the State

As you approach the moving process with the state you’ve chosen, it will be very important to start from a place where you are clearly and tangibly feeling the state, in the moment. If you’re having any trouble with that, take some time to read through your mapping description. Carefully place your field of awareness over the space occupied by the virtual material properties of the state, taking in the full size and shape of the feeling object.

Then, review each of the properties, revisiting your experience in the moment with an openness to noticing how your current experience may be a little bit different from what you mapped. If needed, use the slider test (see Volume 1: FM-11: Pro Tips) from time to time in order to confirm that yes, this state you are experiencing right now is the same part you originally mapped.

Choosing to Intensify Slightly Before Setting the Container

If you’re able to access it easily, and you feel it strongly and clearly, you’re good to go. If it feels a little “meh,” not so tangible, then I recommend going for a little intensification before you start. To do this, use the slider test again, but this time, deliberately shift one or two key properties that seem to have a strong effect on your experience of the feeling. Shift them in the direction that intensifies the feeling state in your experience. You always have the option of reversing the intensification, and you might just practice that if you have any concerns.

At this point in the process, you will want to intensify only to the point where you can feel the state very clearly. This will help make sure the next step in the process works well and the container can be strongly set. We’ll do that in the next chapter. Feeling the state clearly and distinctly makes it much easier to communicate with it about what is about to happen, and to set its expectations and intentions to best support the process.

Going for More Intensity to “Set the Hook” Before Actually Moving the State

Looking ahead to slightly later in the process, after setting the container, for some states it can be very helpful to use the property sliders to further intensify just a bit before starting to work through the properties. I call this “setting the hook,” as if we’re catching a fish and we want to make sure we really have it on the line.

By setting the hook and intensifying the felt experience of the state we’re moving, we activate it strongly enough to influence the physiological systems of the body. The heart pounds a bit, the stomach tightens, the breath gets more shallow — that sort of thing. This lays the groundwork for a full-body experience of the shift when we work through the properties and transform the reactivity into resourcefulness. It’s a powerful tactic, and it sets things up so your entire being experiences a profound shift that can’t be mentally explained away.

When the full body is more involved in this way, other states related to the one you’re moving will often experience a bit of a shift as well, so you’re getting a broader effect for your work.

Again, though, make sure as you begin that your intensification is fully within your capacity for agency, and that you have the ability to ratchet it both up and down, completely by your own choice. This strengthens your position as occupying a strong witness outside of the state itself, and solidifies your position as the facilitator of your own inner experience.

More…

After you have more experience with both mapping and moving, and after you’ve had a chance to begin to understand the underlying topology of how these parts connect to one another, you’ll be in a position to bring much more skill and agency to your fieldwork. Later in the book, you learn about the topology of a set in the first Science section. Then, I’ll go more deeply into some of the more advanced skills and strategies of this practice. There’s a lot to this work, and it’s quite an adventure to gain the agency and capacity to observe that enables us to more fully explore this inner terrain.

Another Example of What You Have to Look Forward To

To support your anticipation for what is to come in this adventure, I am offering before/after examples of feeling states my client Ruby gave me permission to share.

Fear

Goes hand in hand with Self-Doubt (to be shared in the next chapter).

Especially arises before starting a new class, becomes a barrier I have to get through to even start the planning process for that class. It also comes a little more subtly before any class I teach.

I’m planning two new classes coming up, in a new space, new set of people, starting in August. With that a lot of fear has been coming up, to the point I haven’t even started planning it and it’s coming up in just two weeks.

Whenever I feel any of these emotions, I get a sensation around my heart.

Fear is in heart center area, starts to go up into the throat. Gas, thick, heavy; seems mutable. Pretty hot. It’s almost a metallic color, but dark like when silver gets really old, silver-grayish, translucent. Both circulation and a very slow outward growing, then back in a little. It’ll go out a little, then come back in a little, increasing fear with outward movement. Kind of like a creaking sound that you’d hear in a scary movie when they go to a scene in a forest. Shape is in the throat and chest, but when it expands out, it goes out the back of the chest and I feel it throughout my rib cage and stomach area, goes a little outside my skin, just a little.

Very negative. It tells me that I’m not going to be able to succeed in these things. Something’s going to go wrong. Therefore, why even try if it’s not going to work? And... “You don’t know what you’re doing,” etc.

---

Support

⟹ Cooler, a comfortable warm temp; lighter... it would be light; an emerald green, shimmering, translucent; still in throat and heart, but more free to expand, and when it expands it can go out of my skin a little bit. It can expand all the way down to my hips. Radiating out, particularly from the heart, and it goes all the way to a foot outside of my body; I’m picturing these rays of light radiating, but within the rays is a shimmering, wavelike movement. Sound of singing, an “aahhh” sound, a male choir.

It still wants to warn me, because that’s its job, but in a nice way.

[If nothing to be warned about?] ⟹ It would want to support me.

I keep hearing, “We are here for you.” It’s like they are my spirit guides.

New name ideas: support, guidance

New name: Support.

[What’s different?] It’s amazing; it’s like, I can truly go out in the world as myself, free of that fear of loss or failure. And I can just... there’s no restrictions as I go about my life.

I have had a hard time planning new classes because of that Fear, but if Support is there instead, not only is it easier to do it, but it’s so much more enjoyable.

I’m feeling the Support really wants to see me touch other people’s lives.

---

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When we worked our way through the sequence of mapping questions in Volume 1, for each parameter trying on this value or that one until we found the right fit, it felt as though we were merely applying an instrument of perception. Mapping seems like using a fancy telescope to view something far away, or passing x-rays through a body part and capturing the image on film in order to reveal the contours of the broken bone.

In mere perception, you can’t interact with your perceptual representation to directly alter what it is you are perceiving. For example, you can’t take a white pen to the x-ray film and color in the gap between the broken ends of the bone, and expect the bone to heal itself as a result.

The Bizarre Power of Direct Interaction

However, here’s where things get weird. With the type of perception we have created in our mapping, we can do exactly that. Namely, we are able to directly manipulate the virtual material properties of the mapping image we have created, simply imagining them to be different, “trying on” different values for specific properties, running the “slider” one way or the other, and the feeling state itself will transform as a result. If you take an anger that mapped as a hot, erupting liquid, for example, and simply imagine it cooling down, you will experience the anger itself “cooling down” as a result, most likely transforming from anger into something less volatile.

I can understand if this causes you to take a step back in skepticism. Nothing in our conventional understanding of feeling, mood, and emotion suggests that such a thing is possible. In my very first experiment with this method, my map was very crude, consisting only of the observation that a feeling of depression in my chest seemed to have a strong, gravitational pull downward. I reversed the direction of the gravity, imagining a strong push upward instead, and the feeling transformed instantly into a pervasive cheerfulness that shifted my mood for the rest of the day.

I was so stunned that I backed off, and did not attempt another such experiment for a couple of weeks. In the background, my mind was freaking out about what it might mean if my experience was actually what it seemed to be. At that time I was strongly invested in the methods I had been using to attempt to get control of my moods, namely self-hypnosis, journaling, reframing my thoughts and beliefs, and other approaches oriented around rewiring traumatic memories and the beliefs formed around them. I had invested hundreds if not thousands of hours in training and practice along these lines.

In contrast, in this experience I had made no effort to connect to the past, to memories, to ideas or beliefs, to any kind of thought structures or memories whatsoever. I had brought my attention, focused on the pure present moment of my experience, exclusively to this absurdly trivial and nebulous quality of the downward pull. A “downward pull” seemed irrelevant to the meaning and feeling of my depression, yet the impact of shifting it was impossible to deny.

The bizarreness had to do with a disruption of the fundamental, unconscious and unexamined assumptions I held, and we all hold, regarding our own experience of feeling. The baseline for these assumptions could be summarized like this:

Feeling is a product of a) our somatic physiology and b) our cognition including thoughts, beliefs, and interpretations of our perceptions. If we want to change how we feel, we must manipulate the underlying causes of the feeling by changing our physiology or our cognition.

This is something so close to home, so much a part of the air we breathe, the water we swim in, the ground we walk on, that we don’t ever consider questioning it. All of the science of emotion is built on these assumptions, as are most if not all of current psychotherapeutic, spiritual, and other practices.

When we encounter something that behaves in a way that goes completely against our most fundamental assumptions, the experience can be disorienting. It was for me, and it is for many people. Here is what my client Louise wrote about her experience of shifting her first feeling state:

“The experience of shifting the feeling left me stunned. It moved quickly and the feeling of relief and lightness was sweeping and overwhelming.”

Be prepared for your own experiences of “Huh?” as you begin to move your own states, and give yourself enough open time and space to integrate, especially with your first few times through.

A Brief Overview of the Process

In this Fieldwork Moving section of the book, I want to lead you step by step through your own experience of shifting a feeling state. The process I describe is the result of over three decades of incremental refinement. My intention here is simply to lead you through the experience as best I can.

Direct experience will be key to your understanding. Afterwards, we can begin to dig more deeply into how to skillfully apply the method. And we’ll be in a better position to apply our skills to more rigorously investigating what it is we are working with here, and continuing to assemble what our work reveals into our new science of subjective experience.

The fieldwork moving phase has six steps. Make sure to continue taking thorough notes as you go through the process. What comes up along the way may play a role in completing your move with this part, and it may also turn out to be helpful in working with other adjacent parts.

1. Choose a State

Every feeling state you will ever map exists in relationship with multiple other states. Each state is a unique expression of a module of your whole self, a part of you with its own function, purpose and intention. These interrelationships mean it can matter quite a lot which state goes first in the moving process.

2. Prepare the Container

Because of the tightly interwoven relationships between the state you choose to move and the others in its family, it is very important to set the space in such a way as to give the part you’re moving a maximum sense of freedom and support to follow its own inner compass.

3. Invite a Shift

In moving the state, we prioritize and support the part’s own autonomy in choosing what it prefers. One by one, we work our way through the virtual material properties, inviting the part itself to choose what feels best to it. Eventually, we reach a point of optimization, where it seems that no further property tweaks will make it feel any better.

4. Notice New Thoughts

From the new state that arises in the course of adjusting the virtual material properties, we gain access to a new perspective. In the course of moving the actual felt experience, we discover that our perceptions, thoughts and beliefs have spontaneously shifted in ways congruent with what we feel.

5. Name & Draw

After arriving and settling into the new state, it’s time to sit with its presence and find a new name for the feeling of it. At the same time, drawing the state with its new configuration of virtual material properties can further feed into the adjustment and refinement process as the visual representation brings the state even more tangibly into your felt experience.

6. Integrate What’s New

After a part has regained access to its ideal state, a phase of integration opens up. This part has recovered a more complete range of expression, and through that, a deeper sense of its identity and purpose. The emerging sense of new possibility invites you to establish new relationships with the other parts with which it is connected, and with your life as a whole.

Looking Forward

Over the coming chapters/posts, I’ll walk you through each step to help you get the best results. If you’re eager to begin, in Volume 1, the chapter FO-1, Fieldwork Quick Start takes you through a very concise presentation of both mapping and moving. Here on Substack, you can visit the Try It! page for links to that and several other posts that will lead you through the process using audio, body outline templates for drawing, and other support.

Also in Volume 1, make sure to review the question of whether it will work best for you to work solo or with a partner. Chapters FM-2: Working as a Solo Explorer and FM-3: Working with a Partner cover these complementary approaches.

An Example of What You Have to Look Forward To

To support your anticipation for what is to come in this adventure, I will be offering before/after examples of feeling states my client Ruby gave me permission to share.

Should

A looming feeling; a shield the shape of my body in front of me, especially my face & forehead; heavy; dark. I can feel it in front of my face, and weighing down on my chest. It’s not completely solid, more like a gas, but it’s heavy and dense, and more dense in certain areas; black, kind of translucent; moving like a shadow with me as I go around, moving as one whole unit; kind of warm (uncomfortable).

“You have to practice yoga every morning and you can’t eat until you practice, because you’re not going to be a good teacher unless you practice yourself.”

Encourager

This becomes lighter in density; a little cooler, so it’s a comfortable warm; an energetic light; whitish/yellowish, translucent, iridescent, sparkling; all around me, touching me, and I can feel it in my heart too; radiating/glowing, moving out from me in all directions out from my skin, and there’s a little ball of it in my heart, radiating out a little bit too; a high, singing sound, like an angel’s voice, kind of hard to hear.

Wants to be something that is supporting or guiding me in a positive way, “I’m OK how I am, and everything’s going to be OK.”

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The New Experience of Being Hugged

Susan: So in the moments right as I saw my new drawing, and as I experienced my feeling state shift, there was a very palpable, distinct opening in my heart. I could really feel that steel plate moving, and I could feel an openness that I would really... It’s like that barrier that I had always been aware of inside of me, that really was gone. It was just gone.

That in itself, of course, was a lovely thing. But the thing I really want to emphasize is I began to experiment. Like, “Oh, what does it really feel like?” So one thing I have done very differently -- I don’t always remember to do it, but I mostly do -- is when I am hugging people, I deliberately relax my body even more. I really think, “OK, open and receive.” And while I’m hugging the other person, and they’re hugging me, I really think, consciously, “Receive this hug. Receive this love.”

And I didn’t realize until we had this session how, when I was hugging people and they were hugging me back, of course I was aware I was being hugged back; I couldn’t miss that. But the distinction, the contrast that I saw was how I never really let the hug in. You know? I was so focused on hugging the person and sending love to them, and accepting them, and all that, that I just was oblivious, is the truth, to “Oh, my goodness; I’m also being hugged here. I could receive this.”

So it’s been really interesting, and I would say the result of me doing that is I notice I have experienced a very consistent feeling of being loved, in a way that I hadn’t in the past.

A World Full of Love

Susan: It was also that recognition – and this came like a couple of days later, and it was in the context of a circle, but I know that our work together opened the space for me to have that – is how much love there is in the world. And that really, I mean like my head of course has known forever that the world is full of love, but the contrast was a visceral experience of, “Wow, there is lots of love everywhere all the time if I open myself to it.” I mean, there is always the love of the divine. And again, my head of course has known that my entire life. But it feels like I have more of an awareness of it, rather than just, “Oh, of course God loves me, of course he does.” It’s like, “Oh! God loves me!” I feel it. I can tune into that. It’s like, without that steel plate, and with that radiance, that opening, it’s like, “Oh. I can feel this any time. I can tune into this any time.”

I Create My Circle

Susan: In circling, my experience has been that I am now aware that I create my circle. In the past, my idea – which is one of those 20:20 hindsight in retrospect how could I have been thinking that – up until we had our session, I had put the feeling of the circle kind of outside on the circle. Like this is something outside of me that’s happening. And now when I go in a circle, it’s like, it’s here. The circle is here. The love is here. It looks however it looks. It may, depending on where people are in the circle, there may be somebody there who’s upset, (not with me), but just who comes in with a fit, or who comes in kind of guarded, or with some protection or holding back, it’s like, “OK. I know you are love. Whatever is happening on the surface right now is happening, but you, yourself, are love. And I can open and receive that.

Love Is

Susan: And so another part of it is, I see, it’s like love is. Contrasted to doing-ness. It’s just, “Oh! It’s always here. It’s always available.” It’s a matter of tuning into it, not creating it, not doing something, not making it happen. It just is. And knowing me, you can know how significant that feels for me.

Infinite Love

Joe: A lot of what you’re describing, it sounds like a big part of your experience is the state you called Infinite Love.

Susan: Yes. Yes.

J: And that it’s always available, always present.

S: And kind of like breathing, it’s not something I have to have conscious thought about. We’re not saying, “In...[breath] out...[breath]” You know? We just breathe.

J: Right.

S: And I don’t say, “OK heart, beat... beat.... It just does.” So it’s in that category.

J: Yeah, yeah.

S: Which, as you can imagine, is a significant upgrade in my life experience.

J: That’s exciting.

S: Yes. I agree! [chuckle]

“You’re Different.”

Joe: Has anyone spoken of noticing anything different in you?

Susan: So pretty much everybody that’s seen me has said, “Wow, you’re really different.” And nobody said, “Wow, you’re really different; you’re so much more loving.” I mean, nobody has said what’s really different, but pretty much to a person, it’s been like, “There’s... you’re... clearly something’s happening with you.” [chuckles]

And it’s not surprising because I think people experience me as loving, so I wouldn’t think people would say, “Oh, and you’re so loving.” I mean, that’s what they think I am anyway. That’s their experience anyhow. So I think what they’re feeling is how I feel different inside. Like it’s so different for me inside that my energetic outside, it’s like, “Something’s different,” without there being a precise thing.

J: And I imagine, my sense is, that there’s... when I feel that my love is being received, that feels different.

S: Yes. And again, no one has said, “Oh, you’re really receiving me now, aren’t you, and you never did before.” Or, “You’re receiving me much more than you did before.” I think it would take a finely tuned perception for somebody to get that, or to notice that. Because I am quite tuned in about my hugging, I can feel when people are letting me in or not. But I don’t think most people have an attentiveness to that or a discernment, a distinction about that.

And actually, the comments come before they’re hugging me. It’s like they walk in the room and say, “Wow. You’re different.” [laughing] “You’re different.”

J: Wow.

S: And I mean, I have been in many ways on a very accelerated path of transformation. So I don’t think people need to think they can tell exactly what it is about me. You know? It’s just like, “Oh, more!” [chuckle] “More of that.”

Original Fear to Love

Joe: I’m curious, it sounded like there was a specific memory you had about what happened that made the Fear show up. It was like, this was appropriate to show up, but then it stayed around for too long.

Susan: Yeah.

J: It should have been something that I let go of, but I hung on to it, and the Shame was about having hung on to it.

S: Yeah, it was like, why did I think that was a good idea. Give me a minute and it will come...

I’m pretty sure that this would have been put in place when my mother died, with that decision, which I clearly remember making. I didn’t make the steel plate thing, that wasn’t conscious. That was more like a consequence or result, because when my mother died, and I have a vivid memory of this, I consciously said -- I was 13, sudden, completely unexpected death -- I said to myself, in my intense grief, “I am never going to love anybody that much again, because it is just too devastating to lose them.” And I can remember consciously deciding that.

So that was when I was 13. When I was in my mid-30s, I was vividly reminded of that decision when I met an older gentleman at church who was grandfather age that I just happened to sit by in church one Sunday and we really clicked. When the service was over he said, “Well, you probably need to eat. Would you like to come to lunch with me?” And I said, “OK.”

During that lunch, he shared with me that he had a diagnosis of prostate cancer, and back then the very best prognosis you could have was to live about eight years after your diagnosis, even if you did all the treatments you could do and they worked as good as they could work, eight years. He was about at year four. So of course, as evidenced by my mother, anybody could die at any time, but this was a person who was absolutely going to die, and sooner than later. I remember thinking that decision I had made, and I thought, “Susan, you can do this however you want to, but there’s such a loving, precious connection that’s available to you here. Your own grandparents died when you were eight, so here’s a lovely opportunity to have grandparent love and attention, and you can have this, and you can totally open your heart, and you can love this person with all your heart, or you can stick with your decision. And it’s up to you.” And I thought, “You know what? That was not the best decision I ever made. Let me unmake that one.”

Original Fear of Being Loved

Susan: What I didn’t realize until around the time we were having this session... Oh, it was right before this session because that’s how it impacted me so much. In a circle, I saw that was a corollary decision I had made at the same time, that I didn’t realize I made, that I wasn’t conscious of, which was, “And I am never allowing anybody to love me that much either, because it is too devastating to lose being loved.” When I saw that, it was like, “Wow. OK, didn’t know that. Now that I do, let me be aware and rethink that one.” And that’s the thing that, when we did our session, like I had always, any time I would feel it, I would feel that steel plate. You know? I could feel that it was there. I just hadn’t paid much attention to it. It was just part of who I was. And I certainly hadn’t examined the origins of it. But when I saw that, and then we did the feeling state work, and I felt the steel plate, it’s like, that’s what that is. That is the thing, that I, without any consciousness at age 13, 52 years ago, put into place to protect myself from the pain of losing.

And so when all that kind of came together, it was like, “Oh, and you know what? I don’t have to do that any more.” You know, I can receive. I choose to receive. Even though, yes, when that person or that relationship ends, am I going to notice it? Will I feel grief? Will I feel the loss? Of course I will. And why not have all the love in the world I can have, I can experience, why not receive all of that every minute I do, and when it’s not there, it’s not there.

And there’s also that Infinite Love that’s always there. So while I might lose a specific relationship, and would certainly have the natural, normal grief about it, it wouldn’t be the devastation that I had erected that to protect myself from, because now I know there’s an infinite supply. Whereas when I put that up, it was like, that specifically came from my mother, and now I don’t have my mother, and so, you know, 13-year-old mind, grief, shock, whatever that had me decide that, now I’m many, many years older, and I can make a different decision.

Origin of Shame

Joe: What’s your sense of how the Shame found its way in there?

Susan: So the Shame is that I know how I feel it when I love someone and they don’t accept it. And so the Shame is, “Oh my goodness, completely obliviously, unintentionally, but nonetheless truly, have I been not receiving people’s love.” And not trusting it. Like there was the whole mistrust thing. And the impact I had been having all these years, these 50-plus years, on all the people who loved me. You know? And feeling the embarrassment, and the Shame, that I had pushed them away.

J: So it seems like the Shame, what you’re describing is, that is pretty recent, it really showed up as you became aware that you had been doing that?

S: Yeah.

Shame + Marriage

Joe: Seems like the Fearful Fear would leave if it knew how, but it doesn’t know how.

Susan: Right.

J: So it’s not a shame that Fearful Fear appeared, but that it was meant to be temporary and somehow it got trapped. That it never meant to stay.

S: Yeah. It’s that, yeah, that’s the Shame. That I didn’t know, and the impact that has had. And it was like, I would like to think that I’m loving and that I allow myself to be loved. And I can look back, like for example in my marriage, where in the beginning at least, (and there’s a story around that), where I was loved as much as my husband was capable of loving me. And I can remember pushing it away. Part of the pushing it away was, I had a sense which turned out to be correct, that he was loving an idealized version of me, contrasted to me. So I wasn’t off on that one. But still, I was pushing it away.

Something that was true in my marriage was, both my husband and I were pretty exquisitely attuned to the energetics in our relationship, whether we were consciously aware of them or not, or whether we spoke of them or not, we were both really tuned in to that. And so I’m sure he felt my guardedness. And that cannot have felt good. It just cannot have felt good.

I’m not going to say that ruined our marriage, there’s a million factors about what worked and didn’t work in that. But my shame is that he loved me and I didn’t let it in. And the impact that had on a tender heart that was very open and giving.

J: Do you think that shame was present then?

S: No, I don’t think I knew it at all. I mean, the Shame came up out of the realization. I mean, was it present somewhere at some deep, completely unknown level? I think yeah, it would have had to have been. But there wasn’t the consciousness of it.

That’s why when we were doing it, and it showed up, it was almost kind of a surprise to me. That’s my recollection, in the session it was like, “Oh! And then there’s this, this unexpected thing, and what is it when I feel into it? It’s Shame. And it’s Shame that I would have been doing that, that I would have been pushing, or keeping, making a barrier to receiving love.

And until I processed and forgave myself for that, nothing could move.

Opening to Something New (Another Month Later)

A month after our followup call, (two months after the session), Susan and I were talking, and she shared the following story about the further unfolding of the work we did.

Susan: My ex-husband called after a mutual friend died. While we were talking about her I said, “You know, I really miss talking to you.” Because it’s been his choice for us essentially not to communicate.

A little later he shared that a book he’s always wanted to write about his family’s history is finally about to be published. I was saying what great news that was, and really celebrating with him that this is coming to pass. And I said again, “I just want to be sure that you heard me. I really miss us being in communication like this. I really treasure us just being able to be friends and talk.” And he said, “I know. And I acknowledge it was my anger and my hurt and the way I was being that stopped this, but I think I’ve moved past that now, and I miss you too. And I’m willing to be in communication with you.”

As far as I’m concerned, that’s just a miracle. I have so longed for that, but it’s not anything I could make happen. You know? It had to be his choosing to do that. And so he has sent me the final draft of the book for me to read over. A year or more ago I had said I’d be happy to read over a draft of the book, and it was like, “Nope.” So he’s now sent it to me to read, and he said, “You always have great comments. Here are the things I want you to look for and comment on.”

So it just, it feels wonderful, to have that. It does really feel like a shift, and for me, what I’ve noticed is that, (and this sounds paradoxical), what it feels like is that I now feel like I’m free to pursue another relationship. It seems funny. I don’t want to be anything except friends with my ex-husband. The marriage part of our relationship is done, and I’m not looking to rekindle that. But what I’ve noticed is that for me, the not-friendship was like an incompletion, and I was holding out for that. It’s kind of like all the relationship space in my head was taken up with, can I just get him to be friends with me please. And now that I have that, it’s like “OK, cool. That’s complete. Now I can move on to the next thing.”

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Audio:

J: All right, so, any final thoughts?

S: No, I mean, it does feel like there isn’t any boundary or barrier any more to letting love in. I mean like, I’ll find out the next time somebody hugs me or whatever.

J: Right.

S: But just checking in with my body right now, I don’t feel any barrier.

J: Right. Well, this seems like it was a great little tour here, little excursion.

S: And what I noticed is, and I think you pointed to this before, but actually getting to what the heart of it is, getting down to it, as soon as I got there it started shifting without me even making any effort to shift it.

J: Right, right.

S: When I got to the Shame, which I didn’t know was there, and I think the key point was when you asked me, “if you feel into the body of the Shame,” as soon as I located the heart, and it started pulsing, it was already done.

J: On the way.

S: There was the exploration, the doing of it, but it was like, “Oh!” The love that I thought was out there, that I needed to be cautious about receiving was already inside.

J: Yeah, yeah. And its natural state is, there’s love everywhere.

S: Yes.

J: No shortage.

S: Right. Yeah. And I think the sensation that I will carry with me is the expanding infinitely out and then flowing back, and then even further out, which means there’s more to come back, which is there’s more to give out... so, which is consistent or congruent with how I think love is anyway. The more you give, the more you can receive, and the more you receive, the more there is to give. That’s just how it works. But actually experiencing the sensation of that.

J: Great.

S: So I would say it’s moving it from an intellectual idea to a felt sensation.

J: Right.

Anticipating the Future

J: Projecting forward, imagining the next time somebody hugs you, or expresses...

S: Well I was thinking just going to the grocery story. I mean, that’s the next task outside my home I have to do. And it’s like, Oh, I could just be standing in the checkout line at the grocery store, or going up and down the aisles, or whatever.

J: Yeah.

S: It’s just like, Oh! I could just be sending love out into whole grocery store, and receiving love back, and it doesn’t even have to be love that’s specifically meant to be for me. But just the love that’s inside the hearts of the people in the grocery store. The Heart Math people have figured out that the electromagnetic field of the heart is somewhere on the average 20 to 40 feet.

J: Wow.

S: So it’s like, wow, the grocery store is full of these electromagnetic fields of 20 to 40 feet of all the people in the grocery store intersecting one another.

J: That’s a nice image.

S: Yeah.

J: And now, without that barrier, that’s available to you.

S: Yeah. So like moving through a field of love, an electromagnetic field, an energetic field of love.

J: Right, right.

S: Which feels really safe. So that’s the Exquisite Safety. A very different emotional state or feeling state.

J: Mm hm. Would you anticipate it will affect your experience of circling?

S: Yeah, I would, actually, because, I mean like recalling that idea about the electromagnetic fields, it’s like yes, we’re all on the computer screen. Yesterday on a call we happened to have somebody in Norway and someone in Australia, a huge geographic distance, and then us in Texas, in the middle. But I mean it was a huge geographic distance. And yet, you know, we could feel that field amongst us. So I think it does give me an even deeper way to connect in this global community that has quite a great, a lot of geographic distance.

J: Yes, that’s great.

S: And just remembering that our hearts are sending, I mean, this is not something we control. I don’t say to my heart, “OK, only a 10-foot electromagnetic field now. OK, now you can have a 30-foot one.” It’s just doing what it’s doing. So it doesn’t even have to be that I’m having loving thoughts. My heart is out there doing that, just like I’m breathing, and I don’t have to think, “OK, In. Out.”

J: Right, right.

S: It’s doing that. That’s a very different world view.

J: What’s cool is it sounds like, like you said, this has been an idea. You’ve known this.

S: The facts, yes.

J: But it hasn’t been a felt experience.

S: Right.

J: And now you’re actually already feeling the difference of actually having it be embodied.

S: Yeah.

J: That’s great.

S: Yeah, I mean, there’s seven point three billion people on the planet with hearts that all are having electromagnetic fields. And even the ones, I’m assuming even psychopaths or whatever, their heart does this too, not in their conscious control. You know? There’s nothing that I’ve read about the electromagnetic fields of the heart that says, “OK, if you’re a psychopath or if you’re a really mean person, then you don’t have an electromagnetic field on your heart.” I think you do anyway. Which expands my understanding of The Course of Miracles, which is my spiritual path, which is, there is only love. (And... it can seem like there’s a lot of other stuff.)

J: Yeah.

S: You know, which is real enough in the physical plane. But in the meta view...

J: Right.

S: Yeah. So a lot to think about and be with.

J: So you’re going to have these thoughts running...

S: ...percolating...

J: ...through your whole body as you go to the grocery store, and go there...

S: Drive on the highway or whatever.

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Audio:

Moving Love

J: We could draw Receiving right now. Or we can go ahead and move one of the other ones.

S: It almost feels like this did move everything else.

J: Yeah? Well let’s just check in and see what happened, see where the other things went. Let’s check in with the Love. Now that Shame has become Receiving, what does the Love get to be?

S: The Love just gets to be more and more and more. It stays Love, but it’s free to be as big as the universe. It can be as big as it wants to be. There are no restraints on it.

J: So in a perfect world, with access to Receiving, if this part of you were free to be as big as it wants to be, how big would it want to be?

S: Truly as big as the universe, like out into the galaxy, beyond the Milky Way. Huge, it wouldn’t have any boundaries at all.

J: OK. And in becoming beyond-galaxy, infinite universe size, if it were free to take on qualities of any substance at all, would it want to be more like a solid, liquid, gas, pure light, energy, or something else, what would it most want to be?

S: Pure light, I think.

J: And this pure light, what temperature would it want to be?

S: I don’t think it has a temperature, really. I mean, definitely warm contrasted to cold, but it doesn’t feel like light really has a temperature.

J: OK. And what color does it want to be, if it could be any color or colors at all?

S: Iridescent, like all colors.

J: Is there a certain pattern, or a way that these colors are distributed?

S: No.

J: OK. And is it moving at all? Is this light flowing, radiating, pulsing, vibrating, circulating?

S: It feels like it’s going out to infinity, however far that is, and then coming all the way back to me, like to my physical body. And then like all the way out, and then all the way back. Like bringing everything back and then putting it out, and each time it goes out it goes further, brings more back, sends more out, constantly expanding.

J: Great. OK. And what about sound: if you listen to this, what sound wants to be there as a way of more fully expressing its nature?

S: It’s kind of back to the music of the spheres. I think the stars are supposed to sing or make some kind of a sound, so whatever that sound is.

J: All right. Anything else to notice about what this wants to be?

S: I don’t think so.

J: All right. And so from this new place, what feels true, or real, or important?

S: Well in this space, Shame and Fear and No! are not even concepts. They don’t even exist. It’s like they don’t even make sense. They’re not even present. It’s like if it’s August and it’s summertime, the concept of snow is completely irrelevant, you know? It’s 100 degrees, there’s not going to be snow.

J: Right. So what’s important to you about that?

S: Just the expansiveness and the freedom and the possibility.

J: Anything else to notice about what this wants to be?

S: I think that’s it.

J: What name would you like to give it?

S: Infinite Love.

Note: This drawing was made later in our process, after moving all four parts.

Moving Fearful Fear

J: Let’s check in with what happened with the Fear. So now that you have access to Infinite Love and Receiving...?

S: It’s like, if it were fog, it’s like when the sun shines really brightly the fog just disappears, or dissipates.

J: OK. So let’s follow it. So this part of you has a gift for you. And let’s say that the fog does dissipate, but it has the opportunity, from that dissipated place, wherever that is, to contemplate how does it want to come back into the space in and around your body in such a way as to offer you its greatest gift?

...And in doing so, if it were free to take on qualities of any substance at all, would it prefer to be more like a solid, or a liquid, or a gas, or some kind of pure light or energy, or something else?

S: It feels like a soft blanket. Very, like cashmere, very light weight. Not even a blanket; like a cashmere shawl that’s literally, you notice it’s on your skin but there’s no weight to it. And it’s very soft.

J: Ahh. So the temperature is like a neutral temperature, or warm? What temperature would you say it seems to be?

S: Neutral.

J: And if it were free to be any color at all, what color would it most want to be?

S: Kind of a cream color, an ivory.

J: Opaque, translucent, transparent?

S: Opaque.

J: And so the location is like a shawl, or if it could be free to locate itself anywhere, where would it most want to be?

S: It’s maybe six inches away from my body. So it would be as if I could feel the presence of it, but I’m not at all wrapped up or bound in it.

J: Ah hah. Great. And around your whole body? Is it like a...?

S: No, just from my waist to my chin. Kind of like overall where everything else was before.

J: OK. And does it want to be moving in any way?

S: No. It seems to be still.

J: OK. And does it want to have any kind of inner sound to express its nature?

S: Like some kind of soft humming, almost like a lullaby sound or a soothing sound. It doesn’t necessarily have a melody, but just some kind of comforting hum.

J: Anything else to notice about what this wants to be?

S: No. I don’t think so.

J: And so from this new place, if this part of you were free to express in words what feels true, or real, or important, what would it say?

S: You’re safe, and protected.

J: Mm hm. OK.

S: Before, in the very beginning when I was saying it felt like if I let the love in it would just be too much, or overwhelming, this is like, “No. It will never be too much. However much it is, you’re safe, you’re protected. You can let it all in and it won’t be too much.”

J: OK. And what new name would you like to give this?

S: Spaciousness..

Note: This drawing was made later in our process, after moving all four parts.

Moving No!

J: All right. Should we check in with the steel plate, the No!?

S: Yes.

J: All right then. So, you’re getting the hang of this, I’m just going to open up the...

S: Well it feels like the steel plate has gone down under my feet, like it’s this very solid foundation.

J: Mm hm.

S: So if we’re doing the floating out in the universe thing, it’s like the steel plate, now its job is to be the foundation. There’s something to come back to. There’s something solid.

J: Right.

S: So I don’t just expand expand expand expand and never stop expanding. This is when the energy comes back, it comes back and it’s got the home base, so to speak.

J: Got it. So let’s explore, what does the substance want to be? Does it still want to be steel, or...?

S: Yup. It’s the same as it always was.

J: OK.

S: It’s just completely re-purposed.

J: So the same substance and color?

S: Yep, same everything.

J: How about temperature? Still cold?

S: Cool. Yeah, it’s still a little cool. Everything else is warm, so it’s like the cool is a contrast to be the homing beacon or something. It needs to be just slightly different than everything else so it can be easily located.

J: Mm hm. And what about the size and shape of it? Is it the same exact...?

S: Still the same. It literally is that same steel plate. It’s just completely re-purposed.

J: But it’s horizontal now.

S: Right. Now it’s horizontal as if it’s under my feet.

J: OK. And now, any inner sound that comes with this?

S: It’s that same kind of low tone that it was before, and again, the purpose is like a homing beacon or like the signal.

J: And so from this new place, what does part of you bring? What does this part of you most want you to know?

S: That I’m safe, that there’s a place to come home to.

J: Right.

S: No matter how much everything goes out, there’s a big, solid place that it can come back. So it’s really just an exquisite safety. I’m not going to be lost.

J: Great. And what new name would you like to give this?

S: I would say Exquisite Safety, just what it feels like.

J: Great.

Note: This drawing was made later in our process, after moving all four parts.

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What’s Next:

In the next post, Susan will reflect on the journey she has made and how she anticipates these shifts will influence her experience moving forward.

Volume 1, Table of Contents:

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The audio:

J: So does it feel to you like it would be more of a relief to shift the Shame first or one of the others?

S: No. It’s definitely from the inside out in this case.

J: Mm hm. And the Shame, that could shift and the Love would be OK with that.

S: Well, it’s like the Love wants to expand...

J: Wants to expand, right...

S: ...yeah, it wants to... I mean, it’s kind of like, sort of vaporize or... I think vaporize would be the right word. It’s not like blow it up, but it’s just like dissipate it, disappear it.

J: Yeah, yeah. All right, well let’s see what happens with shifting the Shame.

Preparing to Move Shame

J: So before we shift this I want to just establish a couple of frames. One, I want to acknowledge this part of you, this Shame. It took this form at some point in your life when it seemed like this was the best way to serve you. So I want to thank it for doing that. And I want to reassure it that if it ever needs to serve you in this way again, it can do so. Yes, we are going to move this today, but it’s safe to move because you can always put it back. We’re adding to this part’s repertoire of feeling, not taking anything away.

And so because of that, because it’s safe to move, you might as well go for it. What could this part of you be in an absolutely perfect world, where all your needs are met, exactly the way you want them, fully and completely, and you know how to keep them that way?

Also, I want to acknowledge that, as you see, this Shame is connected to the No! and the Fearful Fear and the Love, and there are other parts it’s connected to that we haven’t identified. I want to invite all the other parts of you to participate in this process passively, as witnesses only, to experience for themselves what’s possible for every part of you. But if there is some other part of you that is needing to contribute something crucial to the process, you’ll notice another feeling coming to the foreground, and just let me know. All right?

S: Yes.

Moving Shame

J: So in this moment, in the spirit of exploration of what’s possible in a perfect world, if this part of you were free to become, oh let’s say harder or softer, bigger or smaller, warmer or cooler...?

S: Definitely softer, no more porcupine quills. And it would change color. It would be yellow, kind of like a glowing light, like a sun.

J: OK.

S: But really, very soft.

J: Yes. OK. And so in becoming softer, and changing color, if this part of you were free to take on qualities of any substance at all, would it prefer to be more like some other kind of solid, or a liquid, or a gas, or some kind of pure light, or energy, or something else?

S: Pure light or energy I think.

J: And in becoming this pure light or energy, if it were free to take on any temperature?

S: Comfortably warm. Like maybe a hundred and two degrees, like a little warmer than body temperature, but you know, you could still have your hand on it for a while without being burned.

J: Mm hm.

S: Maybe only a hundred degrees. You know, just a little bit warmer.

J: OK. And in taking on this new quality of being pure light or energy at 100 degrees or so, to confirm the color, if it could be any color of the rainbow...?

S: Sunshine yellow, or maybe lemon yellow, or egg yolk yellow. Like the heart was the reddest red? This is like the yellowest yellow.

J: OK. Great. And would it want to have qualities of being transparent, or translucent, or opaque?

S: Translucent, maybe. Like transparent, it really likes being yellow, and it wants to be noticed.

J: Ah hah. And obviously it’s luminous, this light? Any qualities of being sparkling or shimmering, iridescent, anything like that?

S: Shimmery or sparkly.

J: OK. And if this part were free now to located itself anywhere in or around, or in and around your body, and occupy any size and shape at all, where would it most want to be?

S: Well, the center of it would be right where the porcupine was, but then it would definitely go, like covering all the parts that were gray before. Almost like a circle except there’s not sharp, defined edges. So it would even go up to my chin, probably an equidistance down which might be the top of my thighs, and maybe out to my arms...

J: How about forward/back, also? Would it be a sphere or more of a circle?

S: It’s kind of a shape like this , so however far back the gray fog went before, it’s like that far back, and then however far the steel plate was, it’s like just past the edges of that. So sort of encapsulating.

J: Right. All right. And does this light want to be moving in any way? Is there any kind of a flow, a pulse, a radiation, vibration?

S: No. It’s just glowing. But it’s not... The fact that it’s light means that there’s activity.

J: OK.

S: Without any overt activity.

J: OK. And if you listen internally, does there want to be any kind of inner sound that arises with this feeling?

S: It’s kind of tinkly bells or wind chimes. I don’t know, celestial sounds, angelic sounds, music of the spheres sounds... I mean I can hear them in my mind because I have CDs that have music like that.

J: All right. So you know what that means.

S: Yes.

J: And is there anything else you want to notice about what this wants to be?

S: No. I think that’s it.

J: And so from this new place, this new feeling, what seems true, or real, or important now?

S: It seems very expansive.

J: And what’s important to you about that?

S: That I’m very open, so it’s like I am open to let the love in. It feels like it made that expansiveness.

J: Great. And what new name would you like to give this?

S: Receiving.

J: Mm. Great.

Note: This drawing of Receiving was made later in our process, after moving all four parts.

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What’s Next

In the next post, we’ll have an opportunity to see what Susan’s Love wants to become. We might assume that, well, it’s already “love,” so what more could it want? Well, hang tight. You might be surprised.

Next post in this series:

Volume 1, Table of Contents:

Get your printed (or PDF/ebook) copy: