In-Depth Instructions for Rigorous Observation
Fieldwork Mapping Series, #1
Next post in this series:
In this series of posts, we will go into a step-by-step description for how to engage with each of the fieldwork questions to collect the virtual material properties of your experience of a specific feeling state. My intention is to help you understand the full scope of what we’re doing, and to provide strategies for addressing various opportunities and challenges you may encounter.
I’ll be covering the fieldwork mapping process in depth, in part to support you in following along with upcoming articles in The Science series. There, we will take a close look at revelatory new observations about the actual experience of feeling. I want you to be able to confirm these discoveries in your own experience.
Getting strongly established in fieldwork mapping will also set us up for later, when we get into fieldwork moving. One thing at a time, though. For now, let’s take a quick overview of where we’re going and how we’re intending to get there.
In brief, we will be taking charge of our primary instrument for observing inner, subjective experience: our sophisticated attention apparatus. (Read Introducing the Structure of Attention.)
In doing so, we will be directing our field of awareness into the more subtle dimension of feelingmind. (Read The Subtle Dimension of Feelingmind.)
We will be supported in observing feelingmind experience through a series of carefully structured questions designed to guide our awareness for precise observation. These questions will guide us to collect information about the virtual material properties of our actual, first-person, subjective experience of feeling. (Read A New Method for Observing Inner Experience.)
In conducting these observations, you will step into a pioneering role as a first-person scientist of subjective experience. You will observe phenomena that have evaded the sciences of the mind for over a century, and in doing so, you will gain new agency in navigating your own inner world.
Choosing a Context and a Feeling State
The first distinct step toward fieldwork mapping involves choosing a general context to examine. What part of your life are you curious to explore? Some possible directions to spark your own choice:
A relationship.
A work role.
How you are when you are completely alone.
The mode you fall into when visiting your family of origin.
Your mode of creative expression.
Your experience of getting caught in a social media or other technology vortex.
How you experience a community to which you belong.
Another way to think of context is to flip it inside out. Most of us have different modes of functioning, different personas, different ways of being that are sensitive to context. What we are actually seeking is to focus on a particular way of being. We will be looking into your experience of what it is like to be you when you are operating in a particular mode.
As you are getting started with fieldwork, I recommend treading lightly. Don’t dive into your most difficult life issues. In fact, practicing fieldwork mapping can work very well just focusing on positive experiences to begin. Every state of consciousness is eligible for mapping.
Once you’ve chosen a context, you will want to take a little time to list a few key feeling states that are common in that context. At some point later, we will go into much more detail for what I refer to as the excavation process. But it makes sense for you to explore mapping (and moving) first, so you have a little better idea of what you’ll be looking for.
For now, just go with your best intuition for choosing a feeling state to work with. You might want to review the section Choosing a Feeling State to Work With in the Fieldwork Quick Start post. And I recommend choosing a feeling state that feels familiar, that you encounter regularly in the context you have chosen.
Pro Tip: Naming States
You will want to explicitly name any feeling state you take through the fieldwork mapping practice. I want to emphasize that the name for your feeling state does not have to fit any standard lexicon for emotions. Allow yourself to be descriptive and creative. This first step, naming the state, starts us off in giving permission to engage your inner terrain of feeling in ways that respect and affirm what is actually there, removing us from the confinement of norms and expectations.
Names people find useful range widely, from descriptions of sensations, to the effects of the feeling, to the intentions of this part, to the behavior it motivates. Here are a few examples taken at random from my files:
Intimidated
Playing It Safe
Threat
Withdrawn
Hatred
Fog / Shut Down
I Want
I Can’t Have It
Contempt
Rigid Control
Essence
Doubting Myself
Disbelief
Get On With It
Twisted Stomach
Cutting Ties
Mental Fireworks
Catapult
Heebie Jeebies
Bafflement
Simple Me
Quicksand
Disconnecting
Please put aside any training you may have had about what constitutes a legitimate name for a feeling or emotion. Most existing systems of identifying and working with feelings are semantic in nature. Semantic systems rely on careful definitions in an attempt to categorize what is inherently an infinitely complex field of experience. We want to retain access to the uniqueness resident in that infinite complexity. We want to feel free and supported in defining our experience in whatever way is relevant and meaningful to us.
In addition, semantic systems of working with feelings assume that feelings are a special class of experience, different from cognitions, for example. What we discover in fieldwork — and this is very important — is that every conscious experience has its foundation in the felt sense. Even if you want to map the experience of “thinking,” or “distracted,” these experiences have at their core a feeling state which can be mapped just as any other feeling state. Even something called “numb” — which is often interpreted as the absence of feeling — is itself a feeling state fully amenable to the mapping process.
This part of the process I call excavation, where we identify feeling states to explore. For now we are keeping this bare-bones simple. As I mentioned, I will cover excavation techniques in much greater depth later.
Clarifying: Feelingmind
As we approach the actual fieldwork mapping practice, it is time to apply what we learned in our exploration of feelingmind in the earlier post, The Subtle Dimension of Feelingmind. First, clarify for yourself that we will not be examining the visual, auditory, or somatic channels of your memory. Even that tightness in your chest or that rumble in your gut are of interest only if they assist you in directing your attention to a deeper layer of experience. Instead we are going to be scanning the space in and around your body, using specific filters to highlight certain information to be gathered from the space.
Again, we want to focus on the dimension of experience I call feelingmind. If you have any questions about whether you’re understanding the difference between this and direct sensory information, go back to The Subtle Dimension of Feelingmind and work through the exercise there.
Taking Good Care of Yourself
If you are just getting started as an explorer, as I mentioned earlier, I recommend choosing rather benign and familiar territory to explore. Even so, you may find yourself encountering aspects of your experience that have remained hidden until now. Give yourself plenty of support for getting there and returning with a minimum of disruption to the rest of your life.
I’ve done fieldwork, both solo and with others, in locations as varied as an outdoor park, on the bus, in a coffee shop, or in the quiet comfort of my office. As a rule of thumb, quiet is good, but some people may prefer the anonymity of a bustling public space or the strains of a favorite genre of music in the background. It’s all up to what works best for you.
First, make yourself physically comfortable. In doing this work, there are times when you are fully in what might in other contexts be called a trance. You will benefit from not having to pay attention to niggling things like sitting up straight. If you can, have access to a place to lie back or down, close your eyes, and go fully internal when that feels like what you need. Over the past 15 years I’ve done most of my mapping in a sturdy recliner, (as have many of my clients).
Along these lines, minimize distractions and interruptions. Turn off your cell phone and other pinging devices, and make sure important others know you will be busy and prefer not to be interrupted for the time of your session.
After your session, leave some time to just chill. This can be very hard work, and should be considered as such. You will deserve and benefit from some down time when you finish.
Finally, support your work with appropriate tools and materials. I’ve outlined some options below.
Tools and Materials to Support the Work
We are extremely complex. As you engage the fieldwork practice, you will begin to see just how complex your own inner landscape is. In doing fieldwork, you will be surveying and mapping the key landmarks and features of your inner terrain. Because of the complexity, you are likely to find it very helpful to take detailed notes of your observations.
Our notes become a map, and we can use that map to find our way back to a landmark that might otherwise be difficult to recover. This is especially true when we engage the fieldwork moving practice, in which the landscape itself begins to morph and transform as we do our work. In this, we will find it essential to have captured the details, to enable us to rewind the clock and put things back to their original configuration and reconnect with a part we wish to engage next.
At a later time, once we get familiar with the kinds of features we want to capture in our mapping process, I will talk more about how it might be best to structure your notes. For now, just capture your notes in whatever way feels most intuitively useful to you as you go. As you get more experience, consider the following tips from my own manual and digital approaches to doing the work.
Manual Approach
Back in the day, I did all my fieldwork on paper with colored pencils for drawing. Here were the ingredients in my toolkit:
Blank paper or body-outline templates, or a preferred notebook.
A reasonably hard surface to write on, whether a table, clipboard, book or magazine.
Multiple writing instruments. It’s a bummer to run out of ink or mechanical pencil lead when you’re in the middle of mapping an intense feeling state.
A set of colored pencils or pens. Pencils are the most versatile tool, and it’s best to have a box of 24 or more. Colors can be combined for maximum accuracy, and can be used to simulate many textures. My own kit was anchored by my prize 120-color Prismacolor set, and I had many markers to supplement that.
To organize my loose sheets I used file folders and/or three-ring binders. Find whatever solution works best for you.
Digital Approach
Nowadays I rely on an excellent digital toolbox. Here are my essential devices and apps, with alternatives that might suit you better.
Hardware
For taking notes: Any computer or notebook with a comfortable keyboard and good enough display will do.
For drawing: The Microsoft Surface Pro. What is essential is that you get to replicate the experience of drawing your feeling state. On a Surface Pro, you have way more freedom to illustrate your states, depending on which program you use. The pen is pressure-sensitive, which is key. For alternatives, consider the Samsung Galaxy Note, iPad Pro, or other options, preferably using a stylus for drawing. You will want to draw directly on the screen rather than use a drawing tablet.
Two-in-one: The Microsoft Surface Pro. This is a full-fledged notebook computer with a pressure-sensitive stylus for drawing directly on the screen. It’s the best of both worlds, and I’ve used this device for all my personal mapping since 2013, using the first model. If price is an issue for you, consider purchasing an older model. The most recent model as of this writing is the Surface Pro 9, but I’m currently (2024) still using a Surface Pro 3.
Software
For taking notes: It is imperative that you use a note-taking app which supports your tracking the various states and their relationships, as well as collecting all your process notes along the way. I’ve been using mind-mapping software since the early 2000s, currently using MindManager. Cheaper alternatives include XMind at under $100, and Freemind for free.
For drawing states: You want an app that supports natural-media simulation and layers. I’ve been using ArtRage since the first version, but there are other options available today. ArtRage has not been updated for a very long time now, but it still works great and is very affordable. But I anticipate needing to shift to another app at some point. I am considering include Autodesk Sketchbook and Adobe Fresco.
The topic of digital tools is best handled through demonstrations, so I will put some effort into making more guidance available over time.
The Question Sequence
Over the coming posts, we will go into depth for each of the questions. Overall, the questions follow a particular flow. We will first conduct a simple scan in order to identify the location we’re interested in exploring. Once we identify the location, we will add greater resolution to our scan by adding precise filters to our field of awareness, highlighting specific qualities one by one.
The fieldwork questions are designed to fine-tune your field of awareness to gather information in a new way from this mysterious territory of feelingmind. The process goes beyond simple observations of the type we might use in ordinary vision. We are employing a more sophisticated functionality of our field of awareness, as you will see.
The fieldwork mapping questions almost always follow a standard sequence that best serves the collection of virtual material property observations.
We start by gently easing into the experience of the feeling state, simply describing our normal experience of the state as if talking with a close friend. This helps us center the experience of that feeling in the current moment.
We begin our more focused observation practice by identifying location, size and shape of our experience of the feeling state. This helps us co-locate our field of awareness with the affect field of the state we are mapping.
We continue with substance and temperature. This helps bring our observation into tangible relief, supporting the collection of further information to come.
Our next step covers the following two properties. The order usually proceeds to color and appearance first, followed by movement, force and pressure. But in most cases, we could just as effectively do these two in the reverse order.
We usually first engage color and appearance. Observing this property invites our point of witness to step back outside the affect field for a moment and take in the experience of it as an object. This gives us more detachment and objectivity with our observation.
We usually then engage movement, force and pressure. Observing this property often invites us to step back into more of an immersion of our felt experience, placing our point of witness back into the midst of the affect field. Going back and forth between detachment and immersion serves our agency in conducting our observation.
In our next step, we engage the question about sound. For this one, we may find it useful to be either detached or immersed in the affect field.
From the position of having observed each of the primary virtual material properties and having moved our point of witness into and back away from the affect field, we take this opportunity to review our observation to discern whether there are further distinctions to note.
Finally, we step back from our virtual material property observations to take in the unique presence of this feeling state in the whole space of our being. We do this through the questions about related cognition — belief, thought and perception. After having collected our property observations, we have gained a greater intimacy and familiarity with this specific part of ourselves, and the contents of the cognitive dimension come more easily to mind.
As we move through this sequence of questions, focusing our attention on the actual, inner felt experience of our chosen feeling state, we will experience the emergence into our awareness of a tangible, palpable presence. This is the feeling state as it lives in feelingmind.
With our attention fully upon the feeling state, we will explore the kinds of thoughts, perceptions, beliefs and attitudes which arise from the place of this state or are connected to it. This will help illuminate the nature of the state and the role it may play in life. After completing our exploration, we will draw the results of our inquiry on an outline of the physical body to capture a visual portrait of what we have discovered.
In your first time through this, I suggest you take as much time as you need to read the full text and understand the variations and possibilities of each step. Then perhaps go through once again, moving more fluidly from each question to the next as you go through the mapping process without the encumbrance of the detailed explanations. This first time through, it may take you as long as an hour to map your first feeling state. But once you get the hang of it, you can often map a new state in as little as 10 or 15 minutes.
Reflections
In the course of this series on fieldwork mapping, I would like to ask for your feedback about how well you are able to put these instructions to work. Where do you struggle, what comes easily, and what suggestions do you have for improving how this series supports you and others in doing the mapping? Thank you!
And of course, if you have not yet subscribed and would like make sure to keep up with this series and beyond, please do subscribe. And consider signing up for a paid subscription to participate in the live Engage meetings, where you’ll be able to get your questions answered and more.