Phase One: Feeling my way to freedom

I know a little something about the experience of intense emotion. Seen as a “moody” child, I grew up with deep resentments, hatred, and despair alternating with moments of great hope and grandiose ambition. My life had two phases: at school I was the brilliant golden boy voted “most likely to succeed.” At home I was a “jackass” who couldn’t do anything right. The daily alternation warped me, I suppose. I went off to college, burned bright for the first two years, but crashed after a junior year abroad that sent me over a precipice I never saw coming and never named until seven years later.

By that time, 1987, the diagnosis of bipolar disorder was almost a relief. Perhaps the mess of my life had a cause. Maybe it wasn’t my fault.

But something nagged me about the prognosis: a lifetime of “managing” the disorder with a strict medication regime, without which my chances of eventual suicide were high (said to be 1 in 4) and further degradation of my quality of life was almost certain. Psychotherapy was considered useful only for the purpose of helping me adapt to the condition and stay on the meds.

Although I had no solid logical, medical, or scientific reason to doubt the expertise of the psychiatric establishment on this issue, I didn’t believe they knew the whole story. I had studied neuro- and other sciences before dropping out of college. I had trained in an iconoclastic therapy practice called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). And I had held since my year in Scotland the deep intuition that western culture was missing something important in its understanding of human nature in general and the mind in particular. In addition, I was by nature extremely introspective, and I had tracked the progression of my mood cycle on more than one occasion, noticing a repeating pattern of inner mental events that seemed driven by a psychological cause rather than a biological one.

After taking lithium for only 10 days, not long enough to reach therapeutic blood levels, I decided to trust my intuition and pursue an independent inquiry into my own mind with the intention of finding the mechanism responsible for the mood cycles and dismantling it. The problem was, I really had no idea how to move forward on this project except through further introspection. I had no particular discipline by which to pursue my campaign for success – in fact, as much as my nature was introspective, it was also undisciplined. It could even be said I was anti-discipline.

In addition, I had the opinion that no conventional knowledge could be useful. If my premise was that the prevailing view on my condition was wrong, that wrongness could be embedded in any or all of the body of existing expertise. I rejected it all, stopped reading books of any kind except the occasional novel, and committed myself to returning to the raw data of personal experience. My assumption was that everything I needed to know existed inside my own mind, and that with diligent effort I would find the key to unlock my prison door.

Starting assumption: Complete knowledge about the human mind, knowledge that includes insight into the psychological mechanism of bipolar disorder adequate to enable its dismantling, is available through introspective examination, given sufficient intellectual rigor and effort. Today’s insight: This assumption was limiting of course, as it is certainly not true. There is much about the mind which is simply not accessible to introspection. However, the assumption did succeed in driving the introspective efforts to a high level of intensity and persistence, without which this endeavor would likely have died an early death.

And of course, there was also a certain undeniable grandiosity to this project. I actually believed that I could discover something that had eluded research efforts spanning decades, if not centuries, and enrolling hundreds or even thousands of people probing the mysteries of the mind, scientists and therapists, corporations and universities.

It was crazy, perhaps, but this grandiosity was a central ingredient of my particular condition. Ironically, in this way I was uniquely prepared to undertake this mission. No one without unreasonable hubris would ever have persisted to the point of yielding results.

Someday perhaps, if time permits and people are interested, I will write an autobiography and fill in the details of this period. For now, to give you a sense of the tumult of my life during the period from 1979 to 1994, let me give you a few estimated numbers:

Apartments lived in:	45
Jobs gained / lost / left:	30
Longest job tenure:	6 mos. (twice)
Bankruptcies:	1
Relationships, (supposedly long-term):	18
Marriages failed:	1
Friendships kept :	3
“Brilliant” business ideas or other plans:	countless
Most shameful action:	Spent $15K that wasn't mine

For this book, however, I wish to skip the drama and fast forward to 1994. I had been striving on and off again to wrestle this thing to the ground for seven years with limited success. I had employed techniques of NLP, deep introspection and journaling, self hypnosis, 12-step programs, sessions with three different psychotherapists, geographical relocation, family reconciliation, regression, expressive arts, performing arts, and other methods in search of answers. Some of these things led to personal insight and helped a little. But in the spring of 1994, I conducted a seemingly trivial experiment that was to lead in less than a year to the full and complete cessation of my bipolar disorder.

A subtle shift of feeling

It was the middle of a beautifully sunny, early summer afternoon in Kalispell, Montana. I lay on my bed with my eyes closed, unable to muster the motivation to walk a few blocks to the coffee shop, to work on the freelance writing project on the table in the next room, or honestly to do anything at all except gaze at my navel, wondering why my life sucked. Depression was dogging me once again.

My attention, as was common in moments like this, was inward. In this moment, my focus drifted over the general region of my torso, perhaps with particular emphasis on the center of my chest. There I noticed a sensation that I could only describe as “downwardness.” I didn’t think much about it; it seemed familiar. But I began to wonder.

The previous year, I had gone to a high-level NLP training in San Diego with one of its founders, Richard Bandler. Much of the training focused on sophisticated work with “submodalities” – the building blocks of subjective consciousness. Bandler was responsible for the most advanced work with submodalities, so I was learning from the master.

The word submodalities refers to the fine-grain structure of thought. If I conjure a memory of what I had for breakfast, the submodalities of my mental image include aspects such as the following:

• How far is the internal image from my point of view, or from my face?
• Is the picture in color, or black and white?
• Is it in sharp focus, or more blurry?
• Is the picture a movie, more like a photograph, or a collection of photos?
• Does it seem flat like a photograph, or 3-D like the real world?

Submodalities identify the structure without regard to the content of whether I had granola or eggs for breakfast. What Bandler found is that submodalities map more reliably to feeling states than content does. He also found them to be fully malleable. You can take one content, say the face of someone who annoys you at work, and shift the submodalities of that image to match those taken from a different image about which you feel appreciation, and you will find yourself actually liking the person you previously found annoying. Bandler-style NLP applies leveraged strategies to manipulate submodalities and selectively choose how to feel about various aspects of your life.

So on that sunny, depressed afternoon, I began to wonder about submodalities of feeling states. In NLP, feeling states are always shifted by manipulating the structure of thought. Was it possible to directly manipulate the feeling state itself? I took the downwardness, and wondered how it would feel to reverse its direction. Whatever it was that felt a downward pull or movement, what if it were pulling or moving upward instead? I was surprised to find my mood lift instantly.

What did this mean? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I had invested years of time and energy, and thousands of dollars, in pursuing various ways to intervene in thoughts, beliefs, memories, and perceptions with the intention of making myself feel better. I wasn’t eager to face the possibility that all the work I had applied was for nothing. So I scoffed, quickly went back into my depression, and refused to try that trick again.

Expanding the repertoire of questions

The experience tugged on my shirttails – it wouldn’t leave me alone – and finally I returned to explore further. What other sensory qualities of a feeling state might be useful to identify? In short order I fleshed out a small repertoire of questions to ask about a feeling state, inquiring into various properties including the following.

• location: Where is the feeling located in or around the body?
• size/shape: What size and shape does it occupy?
• substance: What qualities of substance characterize the feeling: solid, liquid, gas, light, energy, or other?
• temperature: What temperature is that feeling substance?
• color/appearance: What color and other visual properties does the feeling substance display?
• movement: Is the feeling substance moving at all, and is there any kind of force or pressure?

In later development of the question repertoire, sound was added:

• sound/voice: Does the feeling substance make any kind of sound, or express itself in voice?

I soon discovered that asking questions eliciting this full set of sensory properties of feeling states yielded fascinating results. I learned that changing some properties made the felt experience of a given feeling state change, while others didn’t seem to do much. Each feeling state had a distinctly different set of properties. The properties that were most responsible for the discomfort of the feeling were often easy to identify, usually by their extreme value. For example, feeling states that were extremely heavy, or dark, or were very hot or cold were nearly always distressing.

Overall, though, it was clear that this technique was powerful. Any feeling state could be “mapped” by this technique and “moved” to a more pleasant, resourceful feeling state.

Early discovery 1: Feeling states could be “mapped” by asking questions about the tangible, sensory properties of the actual felt experience. Early discovery 2: Feeling states could be “moved” by deliberately shifting sensory properties in a direction leading to a more pleasant feeling state experience. This shift could happen instantly, with no need to engage cognitive processes of analysis, reframing, etc. Commentary: These two early discoveries by themselves constitute a significant departure from the leading theories and practices of today. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) considers it virtually impossible to directly shift an emotional state or reaction (their terminology) without extensive reworking of the thoughts which supposedly cause it.

During the first month of exploring this phenomenon, I believed I had found the holy grail. If turning bad feelings into good ones was this easy, humanity should have no more reason to suffer, ever again. More to the point, I should have no more reason to suffer. I could put my own troubles behind me and move forward. The world was open to me, and all I had to do was choose in what direction I wanted to move.

Emotional landscapes on stage

I decided to apply this technique to theatre. Over the previous three years I had acted in the local community theatre in Whitefish, Montana. Before that I had danced on stage in Philadelphia with two different groups. I enjoyed the challenge of creating a palpable experience for an audience through the vessel of my own body and mind, and saw this technique as a valuable tool by which to intentionally sculpt emotional landscapes upon a stage.

For this application to theatre, I was particularly interested in how these feeling states I was mapping were connected to what I called imagery fields. The images which NLP manipulates through submodalities can be seen to inhabit “fields” occupying apparent space around the body. Anyone can become aware of these fields by paying attention to a mental image, and shifting attention gradually to the space which contains it. These fields can be identified to have its own submodalities – size, shape, density, visual qualities, etc.

An imagery field constrains the type of imagery that can arise within it. For example, if I conjure a feeling of fear by remembering a threatening encounter with a thug, and then notice the space around the mental image of the thug, I can do an experiment. What happens if I place an image of a kitten in that space? It immediately grows large and menacing, and hisses at me. Strange! If I transform the feeling of fear into something calm and secure, and then put that same mental image of a kitten into the imagery field, it does what most kittens do: purrs and looks cute.

It was my experience on stage that deliberately constructing large, potent imagery fields in the space onstage drew an audience compellingly into the experience. One of my most satisfying moments on stage was in The Boys Next Door. I played a mentally ill man living in a halfway house, and in one scene I was in a catatonic state, brought on by a violent encounter with my abusive father. I was unable to move a muscle, yet I constructed a presence on stage that communicated pure, hopeless pain and despair. Several people afterwards told me they found that scene particularly disturbing. I created this by filling the space around me with images of horror.

How this works I cannot say. Some would argue that the imagery fields carry some non-physical kind of energy that all of us are able to perceive. Think of your first impression of some people, how you can immediately get a sense of open delight or creepy control, for example. Or think of the stage presence of true theatrical masters: how does a Zoe Caldwell fill the entire performance space with her presence? I might argue instead that a perfectly adequate explanation could be that we are finely attuned to subtle cues in body language. When I inwardly see a powerful image, off to my right, larger than life, it is likely that you will pick that up, and that without even knowing it you will read the fine cues of my posture, breathing, eye focus, and micro movements of my musculature.

Either way, this is what drew my attention in the first months after discovering this technique. I wanted to explore the possibilities in a place with access to lots of theatre, and so moved from Montana to Seattle, where there was a thriving fringe scene I hoped to become part of.

It took me several months to establish myself in Seattle, to find a suitable apartment and line up enough work to feed myself. (By this time in my life I had a considerable portfolio of work in copywriting and other marketing work, and found it easy to pick up several key clients soon after arriving.) All the while, I began taking classes and digging into the Seattle arts scene, soon finding myself drawn more to the alternative dance community than to theatre.

In early 1995 I began working with a recently retired professional dancer from New York City. She had hung up her slippers and moved back to Seattle with the intention of finding a husband and having a child before it was too late. Ann had danced for Merce Cunningham and other famous choreographers, and had enjoyed a vibrant career. And she was an incredibly sweet, genuine woman. Working with her was a privilege.

Ann’s intention was to keep her hand in dance, just a little, while holding down a 9-to-5 job and looking for Mr. Right. In working with me, she wanted to choreograph and perform a short piece of her own. I was to help her identify and craft an internal source for her dance, one that came more from her soul than her head.

We began by identifying a particular arc of feeling states. She wanted to express a feeling state of power and grace she called “stand-tall.” This was the state she typically brought to the stage in New York. In helping her transition from an external orientation to choreography as scripted movement, to an internal orientation to dance as authentic expression of inner states, I was fascinated to experience the difference between the two. In her normal state, her body control was beautiful but did not move me. Dancing from the inside out was another thing entirely, drawing me exquisitely inward to the space of her expressive body, my own muscles moving in micro harmony with hers as I watched.

In order to create a compelling story for the dance, we sought a counterpoint to the stand-tall state. She identified a feeling of fear which seemed to be its opposite. I believed our task was straightforward: to map both the fear and the stand-tall, create a continuous transition between one and the other, and for Ann to dance the authentic expression of the transformation from one to the other.

Ann experienced “stand tall” as a thin metal bar rotating like a propeller in her belly, as if casting a swath of fog into the back of the performance space behind the audience. Within the fog stood all the people who were important to Ann, and the bar was a motive force, connecting her to those people through her dance. She experienced the fear as a crusty shell around her body, containing and confining her, cracking in one or two places to allow her a glimpse at the world beyond. According to our theory, it should have been a simple matter to transform the crust into the bar and connect the two feeling states in one smooth transitional arc.

But something unexpected intervened in this spare plan. No matter how much she tried, Ann was unable to connect the two states. There was no shared middle ground. When we invited the fear to transform to its ideal state, it became an oceanic body of water filling her torso, an experience of “calm presence.” When the “stand tall” was manipulated to become something unpleasant, it became crumbling ground beneath her feet, a feeling she called “unstable.”

It was impossible to fuse the two. So to create the dance, we assumed we were working with two distinct “parts,” each with its own distressed state, each with its own ideal state. She worked from the beginning, holding both the crusty shell and the crumbling ground images as simultaneous feeling states, and slowly opened both feeling states into the ideal states of “stand tall” and “calm presence.” The result was powerful and compelling.

Early discovery 3: Feeling states appear to have limited ranges of motion. Two different feeling states may not be able to transform into one another. This non-overlapping state space seems to indicate the existence of “parts,” each with its own feeling state space within which feeling may range but outside of which it is prevented from going. Commentary: The discovery of “parts” was a complete surprise. It immediately raised several questions which were to take over a decade to fully answer. “How does one tell one part from another – what defines a part?” “Are parts interchangeable?” “Does there exist a fundamental set of parts? If so, how many are there?” “Do parts persist, or do they arise and fade away as needed?” “Does a part always have an active feeling state?”

An inner diversity of feeling

Integrating the impact of this discovery of parts, I found myself growing less interested in applying this work to the performing arts. Instead I grew fascinated about what it seemed to reveal about the nature of the mind. I was not so interested in becoming a therapist by any means, but I resolved to dig deeper in my own experience, and worked as well with several acquaintances.

Over the next couple months I entered a veritable wonderland of feeling state exploration. As I asked these questions of others, I grew more sophisticated in my technique. As I heard the amazing answers people gave me, my amazement and curiosity grew.

For example, I could never predict how someone would describe a particular feeling state. One person’s anger might be a hard steel ball in their abdomen; another’s a spewing red lava in their throat; still another might experience anger as heavy green boots that stomped and kicked. I quickly learned that when it came to describing feeling states, the common language of emotions was pathetically incompetent compared to this descriptive imagery. In addition, I discovered that people had strong opinions about the specific imagery that represented particular feeling states. Surprisingly, people would quibble about the exact degree of temperature or the exact shade of color.

Early discovery 4: People experience feeling states with a diversity that cannot be contained in the common language of emotions. However, the vividness with which people describe feeling states using sensory imagery clearly illustrates the value of poetic language in communicating the richness of the feeling world. Early discovery 5: The mapping of feeling states to sensory imagery is highly specific. This indicates our felt sense is far more sensitive than we have come to believe.

In these early days of mapping other people’s feeling states, I experienced a growing humility in doing the work. I learned to put aside any illusion that I might understand someone else’s inner experience. This seemed to make me better suited to support someone’s unique experience, no matter what that was. People said they felt validated and appreciated simply through having the experience of being able to share such intimate details of their inner experience in ways they had never been able to do before.

At this time in early 1995, I was still struggling with my mood swings, so I was also doing a lot of this work with myself. More and more, I was discovering that feeling states were rarely isolated. They came in groups of two or three or four at a time. Often times other feeling states would show up anecdotally. Someone might say, in telling the story of a particular issue, “and then after I blow up, I feel guilty and want to be by myself.” Right there you have three distinct feeling states: “blow up,” “guilty,” and “want to be by myself.” Further questioning invites the person to place their own meaningful labels on the feeling states, but this kind of clustering is common.

At other times, the explicit structural introspection questions made it easy to identify disparate, coexisting feeling states. For example, a feeling state that maps as solid slab of granite pushing hard against my chest is very likely to be met by an equal force pushing in the opposite direction. Asking about whether the granite is pushing on something, or whether something is pushing back on the granite, will usually elicit awareness of the complementary feeling state. Very often this kind of structural connection will have been indicated earlier in conversational language as well.

As soon as I realized that feeling states always came in multiples, I began to look for them. How many could I find in any given situation? Was the number limited, or would I keep finding feeling states if I kept questioning? The number of simultaneously experienced feeling states seemed to plateau near seven, plus or minus two. I resolved to dig into my dark moods and find as many feeling states as I could, with the hope of disrupting that driving cycle.

Into the darkness, returning to light

One day in late March of ‘95 I was having some emotional difficulty with a girlfriend. She was away in Mexico and hadn’t been in touch for over a week, and I was upset. At the same time, I was indulging in grandiose fantasies about the power of this work to change the world.

It was a grey Seattle day, and I sat in my apartment overlooking Elliott Bay, looking out the window and calling up the god-like state of being I have relied on since Edinburgh to bail me out of pain and carry me to glory. During a visit to the bathroom, by chance I happened to look up into the mirror and focus on my own eyes. The wildness I saw frightened me, startled me back to sobriety. I vowed to bring an end to this insanity as soon as possible.

A few days later, on April the 4th, I awoke at 4 am from a disturbing dream. This was my opportunity. Laid bare by the dream were a slew of raw emotions that felt powerfully familiar, but which tended to remain outside of my awareness. By this time I had learned that it was easier for me to do this process with myself if I had a way of externalizing the questions. One method that worked well for me was to set up a dialogue on the computer between the “mind” asking the questions and “emotion” answering them. A fortunate by-product of this technique is that I preserved a detailed record of the process.

Following is an edited excerpt of this self-facilitation, focusing on one particular feeling state which I am choosing as an illustrative example.

FEELINGS: I've been feeling this low-level panic, like something big is going to run me down and it's in my face and I can't get out of the way. …

The dream just tonight (It's about 4am on Tuesday morning) was about me being in a large mansion that belonged to someone else. I had been given a room or suite of rooms on the top floor. The light switches didn't seem to work exactly according to logic, with each switch operating lights in illogical places, but they did work. I was working in this house. Late in the evening I decided to go to my room. On my way up the stairs I passed this guy who was doing something strange with a wall socket. I didn't understand. He was like a David Copperfield, dark, good looking, mysterious. I have a sense of another version of myself. I continued upstairs and discovered that none of the light switches now worked. That and it was dark, and I had a sense that the switches had been disabled by someone who was perhaps the true owner of the house (whom I hadn't met) and who had some secret plan to harm me. I wondered if the man on the stairs had something to do with this. I was frightened, and woke up feeling the fear as something very big, unknown.

After getting up, the fear continued, or rather, I allowed the fear to continue. The darkness was menacing, the running water seemed sinister, and every turn I made sent chills up the back of my neck. Very disconcerting.

QUESTIONS: So what are you feeling now?

FEELINGS: The fear.

QUESTIONS: Where is that fear located in your body?

FEELINGS: I think there's a part of it that runs up my spine, from about the bottom of my shoulder blades up my neck to the base of my skull.

…

QUESTIONS: If there were a sound associated with this, what might it be?

FEELINGS: It seems very low and deep, like this electrical or machine-like hum, but very low pitch, like a throb more than a hum, very loud.

QUESTIONS: Does the sound seem to have a point of origin?

FEELINGS: Yes, it's coming from behind me, farther back than the fear space, height about mid-back, about four feet behind me.

…

QUESTIONS: So do you have a sense that there is another space to find out about at the source of the sound?

FEELINGS: Yes. It seems to be ovoid in shape, about half the size of a human, half my size in volume, more than half in height. Its center is where I mentioned, about mid-back and four feet behind – maybe more like three feet. It's height is about half way up my head and down to my knees or so. It seems gray and smooth, but more like a gas than a solid, and more like a dull, soft smooth than shiny. The fear really comes from having that thing behind me. It's scary as hell.

QUESTIONS: So what is the connection or communication between the – what do you want to call it?

FEELINGS: The fear thing.

…

FEELINGS: I wondered what would happen if I gave in to it, allowed it to grow and pull me into it, envelop me. The answer was that I would die.

QUESTIONS: Wow. So the fear thing is death.

FEELINGS: Yes.

…

QUESTIONS: How are you feeling now?

FEELINGS: Freaked. Anxious. Paralyzed.

QUESTIONS: … [Various facilitation questions, focusing on shifting “the fear thing.”]

FEELINGS: State change. At first, words were a feeling of oneness. I tried to get a sense of oneness with what, and whether there was a source of energy I was tied in to. This is a different kind of oneness, though, where I am the source. I am the universal source. This is the core state.

…

QUESTIONS: How does this change the gray thing behind you?

FEELINGS: It has shrunk to a golf-ball size and come inside me to a place beneath my heart. It is the source. It is emanating light in all directions from my center. The ball itself is blindingly bright white and its center is I think as hot as a star.

… After shifting other feeling states…

FEELINGS: It seems to have dropped to a point about at my navel, maybe slightly lower, actually a few inches lower. It seems to want to come to rest at about the base of my spine but forward into the core of my pelvis. It is still white-hot, still small. I have a sense of being able to expand it if I want to tap into a greater source of energy. This is raw energy, raw source, raw power, the source of creation.

…

QUESTIONS: Now let's check back to the source. I wonder if there might be a sound with this source?

FEELINGS: At first I heard a powerful roaring flow like a rocket engine. That seemed a little much, though. It's less than that now, but the same quality.

QUESTIONS: If you increase the size of the source, does the sound increase as well?

FEELINGS: Yes.

I began at 4 in the morning, and including breaks for a nap, eating, and a walk, continued into the early evening. There were several other feeling states which I transformed on this day.

Old feeling states	became	New feeling states
the fear thing	>	source
body fear	>	anchor point
hunger	>	radiating fullness
sadness	>	buoyant heart
aloneness	>	purposeful flow
unstable	>	strong flexibility
blocked	>	illuminating goodness

This was the most intensely focused emotional work I had ever done, requiring supreme effort. At times I had to drag myself to the keyboard while immersed in some of the most painful feelings I had ever experienced. And to make the work effective, I wasn’t holding back. Whenever I could, I amplified each feeling state I accessed.

At this point in the development of the work, I was flying by the seat of my pants. I quickly shifted focus from one part to the next, inward to the feeling state and outward to examine the imagery field, back and forth. Reading the transcript today feels like a wild ride through 20 pages of my former psyche.

At the end of the day I was exhausted. At the end of the day I was also not the person I knew myself to be at the start of the day. There is no way to capture this in words except to say that the inner experience of being me had transformed. Dramatically. Honestly, it was the strangest experience of my life. It still is, to this day.

I was disoriented, a bit dazed. And more importantly, I noticed myself having experiences of subtle feeling. I found myself walking down the street wide-eyed, noticing small cues coming from my feeling body. Passing a homeless person, I felt something like an empathic sadness. Small. Not dramatic. Looking out on the bay, I felt a stirring appreciation. Again, no high drama.

It dawned on me that this must be what other people experience, having feelings. My life to that point had been funneled into high and low channels, with very little in between. I think I tended to occupy my intellect in between my passionate swings. This new land of nuance was amazing to me.

It took me about two weeks to adjust to the experience of being the new me. I grieved a bit for the 15 years I had lived without this. And I wondered what I would do next, how I would make my choices, what I would find important. It didn’t take long to find out just how different things were. Within a few months I had started back to school, beginning a journey that would finish my bachelors degree and continue through my masters. Never before had I been able to sustain effort on a single pursuit, certainly not for the seven years it took me to complete both degrees, (including a year in San Francisco doing work toward a Ph.D.).

I also never experienced the kind of out-of-touch emotional highs or lows again. Oh, I certainly had more personal work to do. I was a big bundle of “issues” by any measure. But never again was my rationality twisted in knots and held hostage by emotion.

This deep change in me was the evidence I needed to leave behind ideas of using this work in the performing arts, and to devote myself to its therapeutic applications. The evidence was clear: the work was a big deal. I was unaware of anything else in the world which had the power to unwind the twisted cycle of bipolar disorder. I had confirmed that it worked. Now I just had to figure out how. What the hell had I done, really, and could I replicate that with other people?

Early discovery 6: Feeling states can be located outside the body. Commentary: This “fear thing” may have been the first time I mapped a feeling state that was clearly situated outside the body. The imagery and inner sensation of this state brought to mind various horror storylines, the “shadow” archetype, the idea of aliens or the experience of paranoia, like somebody was following me. The fact of a feeling state outside the body raised a big question: If these feeling states I was mapping were not physiologically based, what were they? It wasn’t until reading the later work of Antonio Damasio that I came to a physiological hypothesis of how we might experience these extracorporeal feeling states. More on that later.

Summary of the first phase

One year after I first noticed the curious ability to deliberately shift a feeling state using a sensory imagery map, I was left with a major decision. I felt freed to pursue whatever I might wish to pursue. But I was also a 36-year-old with a patchwork career and no possibility I could see of cobbling together a resume that would get me meaningful work. The freelance copywriting work I had been doing was not satisfying. And nothing else beckoned.

What I did have, though, was the beginnings of something quite compelling, a kind of work that promised emotional healing results that had previously been unavailable to people, as far as I knew. And the possibility of learning something truly new about the human mind.

Here’s what I knew about the work so far:

• It had liberated me from bipolar disorder, something no other method had succeeded in doing. And something that the psychiatric establishment held was impossible to do.
• It suggested that consciousness was modular, that we were made of parts which could be clearly identified and studied. It seemed to me that these sensory mapping questions had the power to illuminate and possibly cure a great variety of mental and emotional afflictions.
• It showed very clearly that standard, semantic approaches to studying and working with emotion and feeling were grossly inadequate. At the very least, here was a tool with which to bring precision to the study of the subtle, non-linguistic dimensions of mind.
• It also suggested that our understanding of feeling was far too constrained by the definitions of the strong emotions. I had mapped some feeling states that would not have been qualified to fit the category by any other methodology.

This seemed to be a very promising start. However, I knew that even if it turned out that this work was groundbreaking, it would be very difficult for me to get anyone to pay attention to me in my current status as a college dropout. I began to consider going back to school.