Working as a Solo Explorer
Fieldwork Mapping Series, #2
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When I stumbled into my first crude experience of moving a feeling state using the properties of virtual materiality, I had no idea what I was getting into. But an uncommon skill helped me make the most of what was given to me.
In earlier years along my journey toward managing and overcoming bipolar disorder, I had done some training in hypnosis. In the course of that training, we students would practice upon one another. My reluctance to trust another novice to guide my inner experience led me to somehow develop the ability to “split” myself.
One part of me fully surrendered to the trance and the unconscious responses that come from it, while another part of me remained separate and vigilant. This observer part was able to watch the process from the outside and provide commentary about what worked and what didn’t, helping my fellow students and keeping me safe.
Later, I took advantage of this new skill by developing a practice of self-hypnosis. I was able to guide myself into deep trance, with that observer part of me facilitating verbally from the outside while the bulk of my inner experience went fully under. In this way, I was able to do regressions, for example, tracing strong, reactive emotions back to the original experiences that planted them in my psyche in my efforts to heal those original wounds.
This skill served me very well as I began to develop fieldwork. On one side, I was able to serve as my own facilitator, while on the other, I was able to go fully into the mapping experience. This enabled me to use my own inner laboratory as my prime zone for designing and testing the process as it emerged.
Supporting Your Choice
In the 30 years since then, I have remained my own primary facilitator. This grants me certain advantages, but at the same time carries some liabilities. Over this post and the next, I want to offer you some guidance to help you decide whether to pursue a solo exploration yourself or to team up with a partner. Today, I’ll review what you can expect in diving into fieldwork by yourself, and how to get the most out of your solo expeditions.
In next week’s post, I will offer support for your teaming up with a fellow explorer and mutual facilitator to enter this new frontier together. Mutual facilitation can work very well, overcoming some of the liabilities of solo work. At the same time, as you might imagine, mutual facilitation comes with its own set of needs. I’ll do my best to help you identify and meet those.
A Few Things to Keep in Mind As You Explore, Whether Solo or with a Partner
For many people, this really is a new territory we’re entering. For some, it’s not so much a new territory as a new way of experiencing it, one with far greater vividness than the norm. In both cases, you will find it helpful to carry the following suggestions with you in your explorations.
Let yourself fully absorb the language of the prompts. In a couple weeks, I’ll be publishing a piece about the prompt structure to show you what’s behind the design. In whatever way makes sense to you, really open yourself to the language and let it work its magic on your observations.
Give yourself the freedom to improvise. You will be developing a new skill, and it will help if you allow yourself to make “mistakes.” As you answer the prompts, “make up” your answer if you need to, as a way of trying it out, testing this possibility versus that one.
Notice what you notice at the periphery of your focus. Sometimes, as you focus on one property, you might notice something related to a different property. That’s great. Capture what you notice and decide whether to turn attention to it now or come back to it later.
Maintain curiosity. If something doesn’t fit your expectations, put those expectations aside and open up to what is actually there.
Expect to be surprised by what shows up. Seriously. You will encounter features of your inner landscape that render senses ranging from awe to WTF! Welcome what emerges on your excursions.
As you answer the questions, don’t force an answer if one isn’t forthcoming. You might be able to return to it later, or it might simply not be that relevant in your actual experience.
These tips also apply when you are working with a partner facilitator. As the explorer, your experience will be similar as that of working solo, but potentially even deeper. These ways of engaging will serve you there as well.
Meeting the Challenges of Working Solo
There’s a certain advantage you give up when you go it alone with fieldwork. Having a facilitator gives you the luxury of focusing exclusively on your deepest inner experience, but going solo requires you to also maintain solid grip of the structured process. Without carrying the framework you are at risk of getting in over your head and potentially mired in an inner swamp. And those swamp creatures can be relentless, rearing their beautiful heads from beneath what appeared to be a placid surface.
As you get started, I recommend that you focus first on relatively low-intensity, more neutral feeling states like a mild state of worry or a simple eagerness. But you will find out soon enough that bringing even seemingly neutral states into greater awareness opens your awareness to other states that accompany them. As we start, we don’t want to carry expectations, but this is too important not to give you a heads up.
You will soon discover that every feeling state is intimately connected to other distinct states, and the chains of connection often lead to places far more intense than what is on the surface. Everything within you is connected to everything else. No matter how irrelevant your choice of focus seems to your most challenging inner experiences, you are likely to find them far closer than you might anticipate.
This will eventually lead to your bumping into un-resourceful states such as hopelessness, lethargy, confusion or mental fog. The most significant challenge in working alone is that in order to explore states like these, you must first access this feeling — you must feel it in order to engage the virtual material imagery.
Accessing this type of feeling can make continuing the work difficult if you’re on your own. When you are feeling confusion, for example, anything you do can seem confusing to you. When you access sadness or lethargy, it can be hard to keep up your motivation and stick to a plan. When you are in touch with mental fog, it can be challenging to be clear about your experience. When you are mapping hopeless, it can seem pointless to continue at all.
Later in this series I will offer suggestions for developing the capacity for the kind of strong witness function I described in the intro here. For now, as you’re just getting started, it’s probably best to minimize your engagement with really intense states, especially if you’re working on your own.
Facing Real Risks
Given my history, I can tell you with confidence that you can take this work anywhere you want to go on your own. At the same time I will say that at times it’s just damned hard.
It isn’t always easy to go deep into hell and keep a foot on the other side of the gates. But once you’re there, the only way out is through. So you just buckle down, lean into the structure of the process, and keep putting the next foot forward. So far I have not gotten permanently stuck, but I tell you that is a definite risk for those with less experience than my own, or different inner structural challenges. So please tread with caution.
I recommend you let the people around you know what you’re doing, and that you check in with those people from time to time to stay connected. Cultivate your support network and let them know you’ll be calling on them as you immerse yourself in the deep ocean of feelingmind.
You know, it really is a judgment call here. On one hand I would say refrain from taking on work that’s too ambitious if you do not have a good support structure around you. But if you do have such a support structure, I would much more strongly recommend you reach out to someone in your network to explore a fieldwork partnership instead. Allow someone else to help you carry the structure that will get you through. And do the same for them.
Preparing for the Investment of Time
Fieldwork takes time. Different people will have different levels of ease in dropping into feelingmind and coming out again, but overall, entering the world of fieldwork mapping takes you into a mode of being that’s different from your everyday norm. Things move more slowly when you bring your awareness to this realm. And in some ways, because this mode lies so outside the ordinary, it can feel a bit trance-like. So it will be important to devote an appropriate amount of time to the entrance and the exit stages of the work.
This is true even at the outset, as you begin dipping in to this new way of using your awareness. Make sure to allow enough time both to drop in and to make a slow resurfacing. You’ll want to give yourself time to integrate and come back to your everyday way of being before taking on responsibilities or normal tasks. Everyone will find their own best way to do this, and at some point I’ll write more about how to optimize the before-and-after frame for the work.
Looking forward, we will eventually get into mapping and moving full collections of parts/modules, each marked by a habitual, reactive feeling state shifting to its ideal. When we get to that point, making space for this adjustment time becomes even more important, and the time required for reintegration grows significantly. We’ll address that when we get there.
Time Investment in Partner vs. Solo Work
You might be concerned that teaming up with a fieldwork partner might mean twice as much time is necessary to get the same amount of progress on your own journey. I doubt if that is true. My own inner work in comparison to what I see others accomplishing with my assistance suggests that the time invested will be about the same because you will go twice as fast on your own journey with the help of a strong facilitator. Give it a try.
Leaning Into the Container
If after my attempts to get you to consider otherwise you decide to plunge in under your own steam, let me share a few tips that might help you stay safe and make optimal progress.
In your solo journey, your best friend is the structure of the fieldwork process. It is straightforward, systematic, and no matter where you are there is a next step forward. Get to know it backwards and forwards, and learn to rely on it. Here are a few suggestions for how to do so.
A Written Dialog
I got started by creating a strong container for myself through the written word. I would explicitly write a facilitation question for myself on my computer and pause. Then I would read the question as if it was spoken by another person, for me the explorer, and explicitly write my answer to it. And pause. Then I would put my facilitator hat back on, read the answer to the question, formulate my next facilitation engagement, and explicitly write that. Back and forth. 'Round and 'round.
This is a powerful tool that, in combination with the structured fieldwork questions, can carry you through the process from beginning to end. Give it a try as you get started to see if this form can work for you.
Externalizing the Questions
One benefit of having a facilitator is that you have the embodied representative of your own witness function. There they are, looking at you! It’s relatively easy for you to put yourself in the facilitator’s shoes, so to speak, to get outside yourself and access what you’re experiencing from a more neutral perspective.
To gain some of this benefit, I suggest you find a way to externalize the questions, so that your experience is more like that of being facilitated. You want to be able to lean into the questions, to allow them to support you in witnessing your own experience. Here are a few ways for you to do that.
First, I have made audio files available in a few posts here, with me delivering the standard questions. The Give Fieldwork a Try series is good to lead you through your first time, and the Fieldwork Quick Start post breaks out the questions one by one.
You might also consider making your own. Record yourself reading them and load them up on your phone or other preferred device. As you conduct your mapping, skim through to the section relevant to your current process, and listen to the prompts as if someone (you) is there with you.
Alternatively, you can simply read the questions out loud to yourself (here’s a link to a PDF with the mapping questions), really letting yourself hear the vocal delivery and letting it land with the part going through the process. Then respond to the prompt, capturing your notes, and return to the next prompt in the sequence.
At the very least, (and I still do this quite often today), articulate the questions “out loud” to yourself inside your head, in self talk. This explicit verbalization, even though it is completely internal, can do the trick.
The essential need throughout solo work is to “externalize” the facilitation so you can free yourself to immerse in the feeling experience and report back what you find there. Maybe you will have other ideas to help you do that. If so, give them a try.
Keeping Detailed Notes
Throughout your process it is very important that you keep comprehensive notes. To manage your full process, you will need to refer back to what you experienced at various points at each step, and these notes will be essential. When wearing your facilitator hat, use your notes to refresh the memory of your explorer self and strategize next steps. When in your explorer role, use your notes to support your exploration in all the ways. Good luck!
Trusting What Shows Up
In managing your own fieldwork process, you are never fully separate from the explorer role. And that’s great. If you manage the process well, the experience is not all that different from being an explorer benefiting from facilitation.
As both explorer and facilitator, in an essential way, you are functioning as a first-person scientist of subjective experience. If you haven’t yet, you might want to review last week’s post, Principles to Guide Our Early Observations. It speaks to the general attitude of openness, curiosity and trust that must guide our investigations.
Beyond that, it will also help to carry these attitudes into our everyday lives. Each moment offers rich opportunities.
Pay attention to what shows up in your life. That includes your fieldwork sessions but extends out into everything else as well. Notice thought patterns, idle daydreams, nighttime dreams, reactions, little automatic habits. Everything is an expression of the deeper structures within feelingmind, and everything is ripe for clues to that structure and pathways to explore it.
Keep a notebook or other means of tracking your observations. And trust what shows up. Even if it seems to come from left field and have nothing to do with your current track, hold open the possibility that it is in fact very relevant, and give it the opportunity to confirm or deny that relevance.
As you go, you are almost guaranteed to enter some inner territory that lies outside your initial expectations. You will be surprised by what you discover inside yourself, and how it connects to what shows up outside. By letting go of your expectations you make yourself maximally available to the discoveries that await you. Enjoy!
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.
This is so interesting what you write about your experience with self-hypnosis.
Before developing Synchronosophy I also became my own primary facilitator. I always assumed this was mainly because the whole field of 'therapy' was not as well developed 30 years ago as it is now, and partly because (like you) I couldn't trust most of those who offered their services as 'therapists'.
Now I'm thinking more and more that new disciplines for inner work (such as Psychotypology and Synchronosophy) are emerging, precisely because these are not 'therapies' in the conventional sense. I also believe that it's a good idea to grow beyond the hierarchical concept of 'therapy' in principle (although of course there will still be many situations where therapy is appropriate and needed).
Practitioners of these new disciplines will either develop the skill of self-facilitation (being experiencer and witness simultaneously), or practice working with a partner and swapping roles, as you suggest, or both. I completely resonate with both options. (We're ultimately all on this journey together, right?)