Identifying and Mapping Multiple, Coexisting States
Fieldwork Mapping Series, #9
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Next post (coming January 22): Cultivating a Witness Awareness
One thing you will learn very quickly as you enter into mapping various feeling states is that no state lives alone. Our normal approaches to feeling obscure this, but when we bring fieldwork’s more precise approach to observing the actual experience of feeling, the muddiness of generic “anxious” and “sad” differentiates into discrete feeling objects, each with a distinct character and role to play in the whole experience of our selves.
In this post, I will present an outline of what this might look like for you, how to recognize it when it shows up, and how to bring greater discernment to your mapping practice. As we enter this territory, I’d like to introduce the term “excavation” to refer to the practice of bringing multiple related feeling states into awareness.
Choosing a Focus for Excavation
Your inner life is rich and complex, and as you reach beyond mapping only one state at a time, you’ll want to select a particular zone of interest. You might think of it as choosing what issue to work on. You might instead see it as a pattern of thought, mood, or behavior. You might draw a circle around a particular relationship in which you experience difficulty. Or you might be drawn to a particular mode of being in which you struggle, for example “working on a project,” “getting to sleep at night,” or “doing chores around the house.”
Don’t worry about being too specific. It’s better to go small at first. Trust that you will be able to follow the trail of feeling to identify related states. If you start with too large a focus, you may wind up casting too large a net and have difficulty wrangling things into manageable order.
What is most important in choosing your focus is that there is a congruent felt sense you are able to inhabit which fills the space of your issue or pattern. Think of it as a particular “way of being,” persona, mode or context which shapes a distinct experiential vibe. When you’re in it, you’re in it. When you are inhabiting a different way of being, your inner experience is also clearly different. It can be helpful to give this a name that will be your headline for the work on this group of states.
Telling the Story
Once you have chosen your focus, it can be helpful to tell the story of your experience in this context, inhabiting this way of being or persona. What is it like to be you, having this experience? What are your predominant streams of thought, salient emotions, and recurring behaviors? What stands out to you in your world? Who are the other characters in your story, both human and non-human? What are the other significant forces which exert their influence upon you?
Share this story with your facilitation partner if you’re working with someone. If you’re working solo, write your story as if you were telling it to another person. Capture the nuance of your inner experience as much as possible. What is it like to be you, having this experience? The more complete your notes are, the easier it will be to identify the patterns and name your states. Once you get the hang of this excavation process and where it leads, you will be able to simply survey your experience and go directly to harvesting the feeling states that mark the features of the pattern you’re exploring.
If you are facilitating someone else in their journey, do them the favor of capturing as best you can their exact words for key phrases and passages. It’s OK if you have to slow them down or even interrupt them at times to repeat a portion of the story so you can capture it in detail. When they stop talking, it gives them an opportunity to feel more deeply into the flow of things, and when you capture their words accurately, you will be able to share those back to them when you review to go deeper into identifying the states. They will appreciate it, and it will make it easier for them to do the work.
In capturing the story, you want to go deep into any given moment, and you also want to go broad across the timeline of a typical cycle through the story. Most issues people want to map involve recurring themes and episodes where the same sort of thing happens, again and again. Zoom into one cycle of the story. Use the climax or conflict as your easy entry point, but expand out from there. What happens before the blow-up? When do you know this is coming, and what is your experience then? What happens after the big event? How do you feel afterwards, what do you do, what are you thinking?
Different people will have different levels of access to the rich under-territory of any pattern. With some people, the story will gush forth with copious detail and color. Other people will benefit from patient, probing questions.
Identifying States in the Story
The purpose of reviewing your story is identify key feeling states. At any point in its telling, you can choose to pause to identify and name states. I tend to do this as I go, pushing pause after a passage or burst in the story to lean in and notice what underlying feeling states hold the story experience together. In this activity I am zooming in first on the low-hanging fruit of common words of emotion, mood, interpretation, perception, and attitude. I am also listening into the characters, forces, and entities in the story world. Finally, I am paying close attention to nonverbal cues of physical gestures, reports of somatic and non-somatic sensations, posture, and vocal inflections.
A key concept here: All experience is anchored in feeling, and all language is tied to those underlying anchors. Absolutely any language telling the story of experience can be unpacked to identify the feeling states holding the scaffolding for the experience surveyed by the story. Give yourself permission to probe, to experiment, to inquire, to invite attention inward to identify those specific places inside which hold the unique states driving your story.
Inviting Coexisting States to Emerge
Our normal, habituated approach to feeling constrains our awareness. We most often expect feeling to be monolithic, a single state that is the complete feeling experience in any given moment. Even “mixed states” tend to be thought of more as a blended hybrid than the presence of two or more distinct, coexisting states.
Introducing an enhanced awareness of virtual material properties of feeling states changes this habit. Rather than framing the experience of feeling as a somatic sensation or a cognitive assessment, we open up to the nuance and complexity of its actual presence in our conscious awareness.
Welcoming Everything that Shows Up
The best way to support our expanding awareness of the complexity of the feeling experience is to welcome whatever shows up as we engage our practice of fieldwork. As we work our way through the development of our science, we shall discover two key principles that shape our experience.
First, all conscious experience is grounded in feeling. Let me say that again: all conscious experience is grounded in feeling. No matter what we may be experiencing, no matter how disembodied, abstract, or vacant, our experience can be attended to in such a way as to reveal a dimension of feeling that is inseparable from and essential to the lived experience.
Second, our experience is modular, multifaceted, and integrated as a whole. No matter what portion of our experience is being brought into our awareness, other components of that experience exist, and together the collection of these components constitutes the integrated, lived experience of a self. As other components of our experience rise into awareness, we can assume that these seemingly different components are connected.
Let’s take an example to illustrate. We are mapping a feeling state we have called Sadness. We keep finding ourselves getting lost in rumination, reliving an argument with a friend from earlier in the day. Rather than ignoring it and trying to keep pulling our attention back to mapping Sadness, we acknowledge this distraction by feeling into the memory and giving a name to the felt experience. We call it Angry, and we notice a feeling of Hurt under that. We add those to our list of states to map, and either return to mapping Sadness or turn our attention to one of the new states. These three states are very likely to be companions, co-creating a complex way of being that also includes other states as well.
A little bit later here, we will look at ways to confirm the connection between these two. For now, let me offer this list of possible experiences that might seem at first to be unrelated, but which, in the long run, as you become more comfortable with the fieldwork practice, can be included in the work you are doing.
In solo work, pay attention to states and patterns that show up in the course of your exploration.
In partner work, include states and patterns that show up in the dynamic of your interaction.
Notice meta-states about the process itself. “This is hard.”
Include meta-states about the self. “I suck at this kind of thing.”
Consider exploring the actual experience of self. “Who is the ‘I’ who holds that judgment?” (We will go further into this “witness” experience in the next post.)
The Golden Question
As I’ve described, every feeling state inhabits a context including other state objects. These states anchor functions that coordinate their activity to generate the complete experience of self, and each one is intimately intertwined with one or more other states.
Because of this, one simple question carries a beautiful power for excavation:
What else are you feeling?
You can use variations on this question to link it to other specific, already identified states or certain contexts or memories. In general, though, we are inviting the field of attention to wander into the space surrounding any of the states already under the spotlight. You might be surprised at what shows up.
Excavating From Structural Clues
While mapping, you might find it very useful to treat feeling substances revealed in mapping as if they were real. Although in the mapping process we specify clearly that these feeling substances do not need to obey laws of physics, nevertheless they do tend to mirror many behaviors from the material and energetic world. Use your own somatosensory intuitions to notice possible locations and structures for feeling states that have not yet been mapped. Here are a few you might look for.
Pressure and Force Clues
If a state exhibits a force in a particular direction, it will often encounter resistance. Just like in the material world, if you push and there is no resistance, your push will become simply a movement or flow. If a feeling object is not moving, yet is experienced as having a force in a particular direction, inquire to see what might be meeting that force from the opposite direction.
In the case of pressure for something like a gas or liquid, inquire whether the pressure is inward or outward. If outward, it’s possible it is met by a containing substance. If inward, it might be the container for a different substance at its center. Probe a bit to find out by shining the field of attention into the space in which you suspect there may be another state object.
The Inside of Potential Containers
On occasion you will map a feeling object which seems inert, rigid, contracting, or otherwise somewhat resistant to change. These objects can sometimes hide other feeling states within them. In these cases, sometimes that external feeling state is all we are aware of because it is doing such a great job of blocking our attention to what is at its center.
We can check for these hidden inner states simply by using the field of awareness as a scanner.
Bring your awareness all the way into and through the center of this [feeling state]. What do you notice there? Does it seem to be the same [feeling substance] all the way through, or is there something different in the center?
If it does seem there is something different, check to see if there is a clear differentiation between one substance and the next. Different substances and colors give the clearest indication of differentiation between the two. If the outer segues gradually into the inner with no clear demarcation, it may actually be experienced as the same feeling substance under different conditions, for example higher pressure, at the center. In that case it is most likely to be the same part.
If they are clearly of different substances, identify and name the new feeling state at the center and take it through the full mapping process.
If you have some question about it, just ask. “Does this seem to be a different feeling, or does it seem more like it is the same part of you?” Most often this will clarify things. If you have one feeling object hiding and containing another, most likely they will be clearly experienced as having opposing intentions. Roll with that and map the second state.
Containers are more common than you might imagine. Very often when we go into the source of a tension or anxiety we will identify a container. And for very high-energy, high-stress configurations we can even find complex containers running several layers deep.
Sources and Destinations for Flows
Often times you will map a state experienced as a flowing substance. In these cases make sure to trace the source and destination of the flow. If you identify a closed-loop circulation, then no worries. It’s a single state. But occasionally you will notice the flow seems to be coming from or going to a separate, different feeling object. In these cases, make sure to identify and map that extra state.
Confirming Coexisting States
Once you have a list of identified states, it’s good practice to review the list looking for duplicates or potential links to new states. A name like “Guarding Against Evil” will most likely turn out to have the two components “Guarding” and “Evil” as opposing states expressing two distinct parts. Names that seem to point in the same direction, for example “Distress” and “Upset,” may turn out to reference the same feeling state. Confirm whether this is true by simply asking whether the actual, felt experience of Distress is the same as that for Upset. If so, choose one of the two names or find another that captures the feeling state even better.
If they do not seem to be the same state, you might want to confirm whether they are the same part or not. Do this by attempting to hold the two distinct states in awareness at the same time. If that is possible, maintain them as two distinct states on your list and treat them as distinct but related parts.
If you are not able to hold both in your awareness at the same time, they may or may not be distinct parts. Sometimes a single part will have more than one common feeling expression, each arising in a different context. To confirm whether this is the case will have to wait until we get into the fieldwork moving practice.
In other cases, two states that are unable to be held in awareness simultaneously may belong to different sets. We haven’t built our science far enough to even ask that question at this point. For now, simply treat them as separate and distinct as you map them, but maintain an open curiosity about what their relationship might be.
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!
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