Tangible Minds™

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.

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.