Tangible Minds™

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.

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.