Tangible Minds™

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.