Tangible Minds™

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.

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?