Previous chapter in this series on fieldwork moving:
As we prepare to apply these methods to a rigorous investigation in pursuit of a true science of inner experience, let’s take a step back for a moment.
Some Key Perspectives on Belief
What is a belief, anyway? A feeling state is an anchor which organizes the activity of consciousness. Multiple feeling anchors work together in every moment to organize your experience of being a self-in-the-world, including thought images and perceptual filters. Each feeling has unique thought imagery attached to it.
A belief is a link between imagery of one feeling state to the imagery of another related state. This link can be expressed (more or less) in language. Belief links tend to fall into five rough categories: links of equivalence (A=B), links of sequence (First A, then B), links of causation (If A, then B), links of inclusion (A is in the category of B), and links of relation (A is related to B, e.g. “has,” “is in,” or “belongs to”).
When we move a feeling from its reactive state to its ideal state, the old imagery no longer fits. The new feeling state generates a new thought space within which new imagery arises. So a belief that began as a link to an image attached to the reactive state loses its attachment point. The belief crumbles.
In its place are possible new beliefs which can attach to the new imagery of the ideal state. Your task in moving the state is to explicitly invite these new connections. By asking about new beliefs, you are actually assisting them to form in the moment, drawing on the possibilities arising with the new imagery.
Sometimes the newness is so profound you may have difficulty immediately generating new thought patterns. Many times I will turn attention directly to drawing. This provides time to sit with the new feeling and allow it to begin making new connections in that quiet space without words. Then, after the drawing, come back to explore the thoughts that arise in the new space.
The last line in the belief questions sequence, “What does this part of you most want you to know?” may be the most important. It invites the part to choose for itself what is most important about the new state, in the context of its service to you as a whole person.
When you are accessing these new beliefs and perceptions, be open to transcendent, transpersonal, way out there kinds of statements as well as very simple, seemingly mundane observations. In these ideal states, we connect at times to aspects of life that are outside of our ordinary waking consciousness. At times, we tap into the realm of dreams and beyond dreams. At the same time, we tend to find ourselves stripped of pretense and connected to the simple truths of life.
I find these moments to be great gifts. There are times when an explorer is sharing the thoughts of the ideal state, when I feel as though I am sitting at the feet of a great teacher. Through many of these experiences with my students and friends, and through my own explorations, I am convinced that every one of us has access to the deepest mysteries of life. That’s exciting to me, and humbling. You may find it so as well.
The Connection to Other States
A different aspect which might show up here is a connection to other states which have not yet been shifted. At this moment of the work, you are asking about beliefs that connect to one specific feeling state. But a belief will almost always connect to another part somewhere. And many times, especially in the early stages, the other parts it connects to may still be stuck in reactivity.
You’ll know this when you hear things stated in the negative, for example. “I’m not in danger anymore,” or “I don’t have to put up with anyone’s BS now.” In these examples, it’s clear there are still active feeling states holding images of danger and other people’s “BS.”
That’s OK. In these examples, zoom in a little closer on what’s possible with the new state by asking them what you get to experience instead of danger, or other people’s BS. Focus on the experience you generate for yourself, from the inside. If necessary, remind yourself of the “perfect world” frame, and invite this part of you to explore how it would feel in a world in which danger, etc., simply was not an issue, never was, never will be. Sometimes this reconnecting to the larger frame invites a further shift of the state itself, and you may need to take another tour through the questions to check for adjustments to the various qualities.
The farther you go in the mapping and moving process with any given issue, the more the different parts will spontaneously settle into beliefs of possibility and resourcefulness. When you’ve moved all the feeling states associated with a given issue, there are no parts left generating the negative imagery. So the beliefs that naturally form are overwhelmingly positive and at the same time sensitive to real conditions of the world.
Finally, don’t fret if you find yourself at a loss for words. You will have plenty of opportunity in the hours and days to come for this part to work its way into your natural thought process and belief system.
We’ll get into this more in Volume 3, but for now, I’ll share that this zone of “belief” includes thought, imagination, memory, perception, habit, behavior, and more. In short, this is the zone we tend to think of as who we are. This is where we live most of every hour of every day. When we drop into the realm of feeling, mapping and moving the virtual material properties of the affect fields, we are working with the underlying infrastructure of this surface manifestation of ourselves.
The changes we make here can be tectonic, and they can take a while to settle in, with aftershocks and further integration as you go through the experiences of your life. In general, you’ll be making small changes in how you choose to interpret, to act, to articulate, to respond to the situations in which you are embedded. Through the accumulation of those small changes, the “who you are” will evolve, naturally and spontaneously. Over time, you become someone much more aligned with the deeper truth of your authentic nature.
The Most Important Attitude
Imagine the explorer finding herself confronted by an inner terror or rage that hasn’t seen the light of day for decades. And imagine the facilitator, with an eager lightness, saying, “Yes!” and welcoming that new feeling into the process. That’s a very different experience than the explorer has likely ever encountered in the face of that feeling, and that welcoming attitude changes everything.
This is an amazing gift to offer someone, and many of my clients have shared that this was one of the most powerful aspects of our work together. As a facilitator, this attitude will develop naturally as you accumulate experiences of working with a wide variety of feeling states and discover that without question, even the most distressing negative state has within it some far greater, positive power to share. Your eager curiosity will be natural and compelling.
And don’t stop with welcoming the obvious black shadow states. Whenever an explorer is working with a particular issue, and is in the work, mapping and moving, experiencing the states, then whatever comes up is part of the pattern. Whatever comes up.
This includes things that in other contexts would be labeled as “transference,” “resistance,” and other terms. These labels say more about the limitations of the methodology and skill of a practitioner than about the client or explorer. In truth, no matter what comes up, it will be directly relevant to whatever issue the explorer is working with. Some of the states or experiences that fall into this category might include:
Resistance / Reluctance
Frustration
Self-Doubt
Evasiveness
Defiance
Annoyance
Attraction
Not Ready
Rebellion
Lack of Trust
This also includes impulses, mental processes, and behaviors that would normally fall outside the domain we refer to as emotion or feeling. These might include:
Confusion
Numbness
Fogging Out
Fatigue / Sleepiness
Judgment
Analyzing
Obsessive Thoughts
Racing Thoughts
The key message here is: Welcome everything. No matter what shows up in a session, treat it like a welcome guest. Make space for it in your notes, and invite it to participate in the process. Trust the explorer to discern with the help of the mapping questions whether a newly identified state is relevant or not.
This same attitude similarly supports solo work. Notice how you are holding the work itself. Are you procrastinating, feeling frustrated or distracted, for example? Pull those states into focus as well, and take a look at their relationship to the states that seem more overtly to be involved with the pattern you’re working with. You might be surprised to see how far that pattern reaches into the zone of actually working the pattern.
I mean, think about this for a moment. Who is the person choosing to do fieldwork with a particular pattern in your life? Is this “person” separate from the pattern, or are they more likely to be intimately involved? Very likely, the witness position from which you are choosing to approach this work is intimately related to the pattern itself. It may turn out to be its own set of states, or it may be embedded in the pattern’s states. We’ll have to wait until we get clear about the underlying topology of the self in order for me to get more specific about this. Trust me, though, it’s quite empowering.
Looking Ahead
In the next and final chapter in this section on moving, we’ll step back even farther to look more closely at exactly what we’ve got here, what questions this opens up, and how we’re going to address those questions.
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.
Bringing Three Parts Together in a Functional Triad
The following are Ruby’s notes on integrating the last three states I shared with you in the previous three posts.
The three original reactive states were accessed by bringing Ruby’s awareness to a sense of self that lay heavily over the work with the other nine states. She brought her awareness to that sense of stuckness and identified and mapped the states Little Self, Little Self’s Heart, and Unfriendly World. This is what these three reactive states look like in a composite image:
Then, systematically working through moving these three states, they became Radiant Self, Radiant Self’s Heart, and Infinite Encompassing Uplifting Support. Together in combination, the three ideal states look like this:
Here are the notes from the first session bringing these three together, shortly after moving them:
The Radiant Self feels more like “me,” and the Radiant Self’s Heart is where the guidance is coming from, like the higher self. They’re both so very connected. Like they couldn’t live without each other. Just like my heart and my body, that’s how I’m relating them.
Heart and Infinite Encompassing Uplifting Support are definitely working together. Seems like the Heart is getting its energy from the Support. Somehow, some of it is getting absorbed into the Heart, like it’s empowering it. There is a circuit but you can’t really see it. It’s like you breathe in air and it goes out. It would make sense with this energy. The Support is all around. It would make sense that it’s coming in and coming out.
It helps me relate it to a bodily function. So breathing in is like the energy coming in, and breathing out is the Heart’s energy going out. It wouldn’t work like breathing exactly, but it would have that expanding and compressing going on.
When I’m aware of the Infinite Support, if there were this Radiant Self energy inside my skin, it would actually touch the energy around me. It would almost merge with it. Almost same as with the Heart. They’re interacting with each other as well. Being aware of one of them, brings me into focus with the other ones.
My whole life I’ve wanted to be connected with my higher self, but it seemed so abstract and outside of me. I like this idea of my heart being where my higher self is.
I asked the question, “What’s different?” and Ruby responded:
I’m no longer constricted by my past, for one thing, nor my limitations from the past. The realm of what’s possible seems even bigger. It just doesn’t feel like there’s any fear there.
I’d like to teach yoga classes at the university. I’ve been nervous about it, but I’d like to see if I could start a gentle yoga class at the Y, which before it seemed really challenging because I’d probably be dealing with a lot of older people and I don’t have much training in that. But coming from this perspective with all this good stuff in place, it’s like I’m really trusting that whatever I need to be effective in those positions would come to me, or I would find a way to make it work.
Teaching at that studio, where I’m cleaning now, I think that’s going to be further in the future, that could be a somewhat nerve-wracking thing to do, but it’s totally possible from this new place. And I really think that these three would help me teach a class that really weaves spirituality into the physical aspects of the class, very intuitively.
Three months later, Ruby was reviewing her work, integrating the nine states shared in the earlier posts in this section plus these three. Here is what she shared about this “witness triad”:
Infinite Encompassing Uplifting Support reminds me that I can’t do any wrong when it comes down to it. This is the space for my essence to shine, where all the triads can shine. It’s really container, the space, where all that stuff we’re talking about today happens, for my destiny to be fulfilled; the nurturing, the soil, however you want to look at it. Without this, I wouldn’t be able to really shine. If I’m still in the Unfriendly World, I can’t really be my true self. This one is so important. And all it really is is my own perception, which is kind of funny. It’s me that sees the Unfriendly World or the IEUS. It’s not like it’s really there; I get to choose what I see.
These three go together: they are that space, also my higher self or who I am that is positively affected by the other triads.
Name for this triad: Infinite, Radiant Me.
This is one of those moments I mentioned where it feels like I’m sitting at the feet of a master sharing wisdom of the ages. Ruby was connecting to a deep, wise dimension of herself here and growing her capacity to bring that wisdom into her everyday life.
I really want to emphasize something here. Ruby’s words came entirely from within herself. There was absolutely nothing here that came from any “teaching” I was offering. This was Ruby, directly accessing the wisdom available to her, through her own self. This was facilitated purely through supporting her in bringing her awareness to those pure spaces that were hers and hers alone to access.
This is an example of what makes this work so powerful. Ruby went on to develop a strong teaching practice very much in alignment with the authentic essence of what is within her, contributing her gifts to many, many people over the years since our work together.
Next post/chapter in this series on fieldwork moving: (coming)
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