As I sit here on the morning of June 8th, 2025, I feel a hesitation, a doubt, an impasse. I carry in this moment a profound sorrow for all that we have lost, for all that we are continuing to lose. At least, that’s the best way I have at the moment for putting words to what I am feeling. But it feels important, so I’m going to take my own medicine and do a little bit of mapping as a way of sharing more with you.
I will start by feeling into what I’m sensing and trying to name what’s there.
Sorrow: This is here for sure. It feels both very personal and broadly universal. On the personal side of things, last night, Spring and I talked about our respective difficulties showing up for one another with emotional caring when one of us is having a hard time. I am very good at being present, and listening, but offering emotional holding in a way that Spring experiences as caring is something absent from my repertoire. On the flip side, I have been completely self-sufficient with my emotions, using fieldwork obsessively over the past thirty years to take care of myself and to avoid relying on anyone else for that kind of caring. From this part of me, I wouldn’t even know how to receive that kind of caring if it were offered to me. In fact, it would feel fake, and I wouldn’t trust it.
This is a growth edge for me. I have worked the core structures in myself to dissolve the original reactivity that kept me distant, but have not proactively worked to rebuild new ways of meeting my needs and showing up for others. This is what Spring and I are doing now with one another, to the extent we are able, both of us coming from a place of not having much experience with this, me especially.
I share this very personal window into my reality because it touches yours in some way, or at least, it touches my sense of you as one who is reading this book. We all have those places in our lives where something falls short within ourselves. We are not able to meet someone close to us, or to step out of our productivity obsession, or to take care of our bodies, or to simply trust life and lay down our persistent vigilance. We all have those places where something in us shut down a long time ago, and where the sequestering of that part of ourselves impacts our lives today.
Plus, we all have those parts of ourselves that have stepped into the empty space left by these exiles, that have been doing double duty filling in for them while simultaneously trying to take care of their own domain as well. These compensation parts have grown out of balance. They take up too much space and require too many resources, sending our lives careening out of control at times.
For me, this compensation was through a supreme sovereign self, one who needed nobody, who took care of everything on his own, who lived his life in dedicated commitment to his work in service to humanity. And the primary exile was the vulnerable one, the one who cared deeply about others and longed to be cared for.
So, I want to share with you that fieldwork mapping can serve us in our recovery and rebalancing of these compensatory structures in ourselves. And I want to take the risk of showing you how that might work in real time, here today.
I’ve named Sorrow as a central state in my experience right now. I sense other states around it, and you might be able to see hints of those in the writing above. I’m going to make a judgment call, though, and to move forward with mapping the Sorrow before looking for other states. I could easily go the other direction, but I want to keep things simple, for one thing. For another, I do sense this Sorrow holds something profoundly important for me.
As I settle in to prepare to map Sorrow, I am drawn to renaming it. In my mind, I was saying to myself, “I’m going to map my Sorrow,” and the “my Sorrow” felt more accurate as a name for what I am feeling. So: My Sorrow. Just saying that to myself deepens the feeling of it, brings me a nudge closer to feeling the latent (or pending) tears.
I’m in my recliner seat right now, and I’m going to close my eyes, lean back, and start leading myself through the mapping questions. First, though, let me try a bit to describe in more general terms what it feels like to be me, experiencing My Sorrow, as if I’m sharing with a friend.
It feels big. Like it encompasses a large space around me, and that we are all in this space. It is as if I see us all shrouded from one another in this heaviness, this longing, this separation. I can’t get close to you. You can’t get close to me. None of us can get close to any of us. All of us blindly stumbling around but never actually stumbling into one another, always separated by some distance. That’s my image of it. And I’m in the middle of it, experiencing my separation and seeing there is no way out because everyone else is embedded in the same stuff.
So, My Sorrow. Settling in to map it.
As I lean back to feel into it, I sense there are in fact two parts to it. There is a more concentrated, more painful part inside my chest. That is My Sorrow. And there is the much larger space that surrounds me, that contains everyone else. What do I want to call that? Something like perpetual separation, although that’s not quite it. It feels epic, ancestral, built in, like we don’t have a choice about it. It’s like a curse on humanity.
The word Ancestral comes through as being important. It’s about something much larger than any of us or even all of us here today. Ancestral what? It could be sorrow, or separation. Ancestral Separation gets close to it. But it’s more than separation. There’s a shutting down, an imposition, a closing-in-on, a binding that is carried in it that affects everyone. I’m drawn back to the word “curse,” and I want to call it Ancestral Curse. This is what made my parents so emotionally unavailable to me. This is what turns people everywhere into zombies who hate each other.
OK. So I’ve got My Sorrow and Ancestral Curse. They go together. Whew. I’m going to take a brief break and then come back to continue mapping.
I’m back, with a fresh little thermos of puerh tea.
On my break, and as I sit down again now, I am aware of a vulnerability in sharing this with you. And the vulnerability feels very connected to the My Sorrow. It feels like a third state to include here. I’m going to call it My Vulnerability, and I think I want to start my mapping with that. Something about it seems to shine some illumination on the My Sorrow and the Ancestral Curse.
Starting with a general description of what it feels like, it’s just a pervasive tentativeness. Like, “Oops. I’m not sure. Is this a good idea?” Like, I don’t really know where this is leading me, and it could lead somewhere that’s not good, and am I really going to share that?
At the same time, it feels central to the sorrow in that the vulnerability is a big part of what makes it so difficult for me to be that kind of close to others, where mutual expression of caring is easily present. That feels vulnerable, like I could be hurt if I allow myself to open to that and it turns out not to be available, or to show up in some way that attacks or shames me, for example. So yes, related. I am moving into the space between you and me in a way that is inviting that mutual expression of caring, and I might receive something very different back.
I feel a quiver, a shake of recognition in having spoken that. OK, so mapping it:
My Vulnerability: This feels subtle, more difficult to access than the My Sorrow. Actually, it feels as if it is located inside the My Sorrow, and that it will be easier to map if I map My Sorrow first. OK.
As I seek to place my field of awareness over the experience of My Sorrow, I struggle a bit. It doesn’t seem as distinct as it did earlier. I move my field of awareness out, away from myself, into the space of Ancestral Curse, and right away the My Sorrow differentiates and shows up more distinctly again in my chest. I am struck by how that general sense of people blindly stumbling around, unable to bridge their separation from one another, is key to both My Sorrow and My Vulnerability. It is because of people being under the Curse that they are unavailable to meet in a space of mutual expression of caring, and it is because I am unable to be met there, and because I see all others also being generally unable to be met there, that I feel the Sorrow.
OK, back to mapping My Sorrow. Just a comment, though, before I proceed. So far, this is a demonstration that there is a strong benefit from simply bringing awareness to the distinctly different feeling states inhabiting our inner world, and giving them an opportunity to become aware of one another. Even before explicitly mapping these three states, I have gained a lot from simply engaging with them in an open inquiry.
My Sorrow: I kept looking for it where I had originally sensed it, in my chest, in the space of my heart. But it didn’t seem to be there. Placing my awareness back out into the space of Ancestral Curse activated it again, and I could sense that what is there at my heart is more of a somatic activation, not an affect field. Letting go of that original impression, I can sense My Sorrow occupying a larger space in my upper body, more toward my back. As I bring my awareness there, I can again sense the somatic activation in my heart. The My Sorrow, though, occupies the space of the back half of my entire upper body, from even below my waist into my hips. It extends outside my body somewhat as well, into the inch or two behind my back and up above my shoulders on either side of my head.
The substance is a murky, slowly swirling, thick liquid. Dark, not exactly black, maybe more of a deep purple, but muddy as well. There’s a sense that much of the movement is downward, somehow, as if it doesn’t need to move back up. Some swirling-ish movement, but mostly drifting downward. There’s a weight to it as well.
The constant downwardness makes it seem never-ending, like it’s forever. Temperature is neutral, body temperature, maybe slightly warmer. Sound is like a coarse brown noise, as if under water.
It doesn’t matter. It’s just there as the background of life. “This is just the way things are. There’s nothing to be done about it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
In reflection, yeah, this is it. It’s familiar. This is a lot of what I carry, overall, in bringing this work into the world. As if the task is too big, and people are too entrenched in their countless ways of staying separate from themselves and one another. And I am too inadequately skilled and too unclear about what actually needs to happen to make enough of a difference. (Sigh.)
OK. I’ll move on now to bring my awareness to the Ancestral Curse state.
This one feels easy, familiar, like it’s something I inhabit most of the time at this point, as I’m wrapping up this book. The mental imagery is as I’ve described, with each person trapped in a dark gray bubble, all the bubbles bumbling around, nobody able to touch anyone else through the bubble spaces and hardly even being able to see one another. Lots of projections going on, though. The bubbles work well as projection screens from both inside and outside.
So, holding that imagery, where/what is the actual, felt experience? I get a sense of a thick mist surrounding me, going out at least 20 or 30 feet in all directions. It’s hard to move within it. It’s more than a mist, more like a misty energy, thick, viscous. It saps my motivation, adds to the My Sorrow. Color is strangely light, a cream color. Like it’s innocuous. Again, a sense of, “this is just the way things are,” nothing special or “dark” about it. Temperature is air temp, like a warm spring day, but it can get colder and thicker. Sound is more of a white noise in contrast to the deeper pitch of My Sorrow.
Interesting to see how the “saps my motivation” is linked to the downwardness of My Sorrow. And this sense of “this is just the way things are” is also so demotivating. Ugh. It’s like, “Why are you bothering with this? There’s nothing wrong, this is normal.”
As I turn my attention toward the My Vulnerability, I notice another part of me wanting to just scream in response to all of this. Like, “No! This is NOT OK! This is NOT normal, not the way things are supposed to be, not the way things could be.” It’s very angry at the oblivious attitude of everyone inhabiting their bubble, pretending they’re content with things as they are while they’re absolutely suffering inside, but doing a good job distracting themselves with their projections.
What to call this? “Rage Against the Machine” comes to mind. Something even more apt in this age of the rise of AI. (I never actually listened to that band, but somehow their name came to mind as the most appropriate name for this state. Looking them up on the internet, it seems to fit well enough.)
I step back for a moment, go downstairs to get a fan from the garage. It’s getting hot in my office facing the sun on this hot June day.
The irony here, of course, is that in carrying these states, and the stories they hold, I am myself inhabiting one of those bubbles. I am keeping others at a distance, believing my projections, maintaining my isolation. The My Vulnerability part sees others as unsafe, believes it is important that I keep my distance. This is the part, I believe, that does not trust that if someone — even Spring — does express caring, that it is genuine. It sees a performance instead, disconnected from authentic presence.
The irony is an essential ingredient of the My Sorrow. I know I am also trapped in my own bubble, also contributing to and participating in this endless fugue of separation among us. I want to find a way out and through, but I have not found it yet.
It strikes me, though, that this realization is exactly what I entered this space in search of. I started writing this transparent recording of my own process to model what I want to invite you to do yourself. And here it is, actually working. In writing this, in sharing my process with you, I am demonstrating what is possible in using fieldwork to unpack your own inner complexity. Fortunately, I am also demonstrating how doing so feeds a desire for growth at the heart of whatever it is you choose to excavate.
Here, my biggest concern in getting ready to release this book is that nobody will “get it,” that I will remain isolated in having developed this new science and made these new discoveries. And in deciding to turn directly into that inner obstruction, I am moving very steadily through and beyond it.
OK, time to wrap up for now. It has taken me almost two hours to go down this path, and I’ve got to get the rest of my day underway.
Update 1: During my workout later, I found myself wanting to rename Ancestral Curse to Ancestral Trance, as a way to remove that kind of judgmental charge. No person or no thing created a “curse” to lead us into this trance. It’s just a trance. This speaks to the relative neutrality I found in the actual feeling of it, surprising as it was. I think the Rage Against the Machine still feels betrayed in some way, though, despite the absence of malicious intent.
Update 2, early morning of June 9th: Last night, Spring and I had dinner with some prospective land mates, people with whom we may be involved in helping to co-create a community living situation with a larger intention of establishing a retreat center supporting all manner of wellness offerings. These conversations about communal living have been underway for us in various forms with various people over this past year, but this one seems most potent in its potential to actually bloom.
I felt truly excited by the possibility, but afterwards found myself retracting somewhat, wondering what I am getting myself in for. These parts of me that I touched on yesterday are stirring. Not just stirring, but more like turning over, like freshly plowed ground.
It feels like dipping into this territory yesterday set me up for a more earnest participation in last night’s conversation. And it feels like last night’s conversation set me up for a more earnest engagement with this territory inside myself.
I am recognizing that, as Spring described in her foreword, I truly have been living like a hermit. The mists of the Ancestral Trance have served like the mists deep in the mountains, keeping me separated, minimizing my engagement with the world. In maintaining that existence, although I have taken an epic journey into the core of my being and have dissolved the great majority of my own inherited “curses,” I have not given myself the opportunity to learn new ways of engaging, collaborating, creating together. I have lived a mindfully steady, very intentionally crafted existence designed to give me the maximum space to find my own way through the deepest caverns of my soul.
Last year, as I began the project of writing this book, intending to finally complete this work and bring it more fully into the world, I made small efforts to shift that position, for example, by setting up my Substack. But I did virtually nothing to promote it, did not even announce it to the many people who have worked with me over the years but with whom I have fallen out of active contact. It was never “ready.”
Now, as I contemplate sharing community with others, contributing to caring for the land and hosting events open to others, I recognize it is time to step out of my hermit’s shell. And I recognize there will be much for me to learn. For example, I will have to be more proactive in making sure that I preserve time to work on the next two books, learning how to set and keep boundaries for myself while honoring my responsibilities to others. This will apply across the board, from making sure I have a space to which I can retreat when I want to do a deep dive into writing, for example, to ironing out clear agreements with Spring about how we share our much smaller living space.
I am grateful for these pending changes, and curious to see how they actually unfold. In the meantime, it is time for me to wrap up this chapter and prepare to release the book.
I suspect at some level you may be able to relate to what I have shared. Perhaps you have your own version of this Ancestral Curse/Trance in how you see the world and other people, at least those who are “different” from you. And I suspect you hold, somehow, within yourself, some way that this inner structure actually mirrors and helps to create what you most fear.
This is what I most want you to come away with as you finish this book. I want you to recognize that yes, we all do have our personal ways to keep ourselves separate from others. And in doing so, we simultaneously keep ourselves separate from large portions of our own selves. And this inner separation contributes to and participates equality in the outer separation. It’s not all “them” that creates the barriers to connection, and we hold massive agency in moving toward dissolving those barriers for our own and everyone’s benefit.
This is what I want to invite you to do, what I want to invite us all to do. I invite you to stop. And to feel. And to notice, in the feeling, what parts of yourself have been compromised. And to invite those parts back into the conversation, back into an ongoing, emerging birth of possibility among others.
I don’t know exactly the results of this little excursion I’ve taken here. I do know that a movement has begun within myself, and I am quite sure that movement will influence my connection with Spring, and with others in my world. I suspect it may lead one or more of you to consider reaching out to me, to get more involved in learning and applying psychotopology in your own life.
In that happening, I will be demonstrating for myself that I do have agency. That I do have freedom to create the kinds of close relationships I long for. That I do inhabit a space of possibility for a world I really want to belong to.
This is exciting. I’m not sure exactly where I will go from here, but it feels like things are already moving toward a more connected life for me. I may not need to do the full excavating, mapping and moving. But I may do it anyway, to offer you a fly-on-the-wall view as I go through the process. It might make sense for me to do that as part of Volume 2, or to share on the Frontiers Substack at least. I’ll keep you posted if you subscribe.
Back to You
Anyway, I do hope you have seen how helpful it can be to simply identify and map a few states as part of any kind of personal exploration. Here are some possible places to apply fieldwork mapping:
Mindfulness (or other forms of) meditation: Bring a more enhanced awareness directly to those states which seem to get in the way of your intentions.
Relationship enhancement: Take a deeper look at those places in you that get in the way of intimacy and trust.
Therapy: Do some of your own work between sessions, and bring a more complete awareness to what you’re exploring in therapy.
Career development: Get in touch with your longing and your fears as a way to open up more ways to grow into your life’s work.
Creative efforts: Bring awareness to those places that get in the way of your flow, to find out what they need and how you might enroll them in your process.
Big life decisions: These are the places where it might be most important to slow down and feel into what’s most alive for you.
Others: There are as many possibilities for where to use fieldwork mapping as there are significant moments in your life. Go for it.
The bottom line is, you want to use fieldwork mapping to center your experience in feeling as your prime orientation to your life. At first, this might be challenging as you surface all kinds of intensely charged states that have been suppressed for too long. But over time, you will develop a stronger witness awareness, those charges will dissipate, and you will find yourself more and more able to trust what you feel to navigate with far greater ease and agency. In comparison, using your mind to navigate your life will seem in comparison either convoluted or controlling. Definitely no fun.
I’ll have a lot more to unpack about all of this over the next two volumes.
This is beautiful, Joe. Thank you for sharing, I can relate to much of this!