Personifying Thoughts

 

I was actually a bit skeptical of part C of Exercise 9 when I first started working with it this week, particularly the suggestion that I would find an “aura” around each thought, and that “expanding awareness” into these domains would release emotional tension.  And I struggled with the practice in other ways, as well, resisting the “reduction” of certain thoughts simply to “stories,” fearing that such a move would isolate me in some way, maybe by putting me in a schizoid space of dissociation, or that it would otherwise deny or invalidate aspects of my life that I value.  For instance, early on I bumped up against these fears when I realized that I wasn’t willing to have the thought, “I love my wife,” rendered transparent by this exercise.  Calling it a story, transforming it into the pronouncement of a “stage-play character,” felt threatening, demeaning, reductive.  It certainly could have that effect.  But rather than letting these concerns stop me from practicing this time, I decided to just make them part of the inquiry — to acknowledge them and yet remain open to whatever unfolded.

The practice surprised me in several ways.  The first surprise was how easy it was for me to personify my thoughts, to visualize them and transform them into distinctive characters, almost immediately as they arose.  My normal inner stream of verbalization transformed into a form of picture-thinking, in vivid dreamlike detail.  As thoughts arose, they carried with them emotional tones and intentional attitudes that helped me translate them, quickly, into distinctive characters.  This felt similar to the Big Mind or voice dialogue process: touching the many voices and presences that inhabit my psychic space – the critic, the narrator, the hurt child, the dreamer, the lover and poet, the analyst, the director, the angry boy, the appeaser, the aesthete or sensualist.

In the midst of this play of voices, I sometimes felt a twinge of fear, recognizing the plurality of my consciousness and the potential for fragmentation or disintegration.  I responded to this by letting the fear emerge as another character, creating space around it while also allowing it to continue with its pronouncements.

The second surprise for me was just how quickly this practice seemed to bring stillness to my thought processes: as each thought became a character with a voice, and as each affective tone or pressure underlying thought was similarly transformed – “rounded out” and embodied — I found that my stream of thought seemed to lose its compulsive steam, slowing down and sometimes opening onto moments of relaxed appreciation. 

I had not expected that “characterizing” thoughts, making them “players” in a story, would also help them emerge so fully and dynamically.  They became simultaneously more fictional and more present.  At times, this sense seemed to emerge spontaneously as I was going about my daily routine, looking out at the trees on campus, walking past a small lake – a sense of luminosity, where thought and vision were equally vibrant and constructed, like flowers rooted in space.

Earlier this afternoon, while feeling frustrated by the heavy, frantic holiday weekend traffic and a tight schedule, I found myself awash in negative feelings.  They were present but unfocused, only partially acknowledged.  As I became aware of them, I felt into the knot of tension, which was largely in my forehead but which also spread out into my face and chest, and let this feeling emerge fully embodied as a character.  I saw him vividly, fuming in a contracted position, and I let him express himself – playing out his role, giving dramatic voice to his feelings.  As I (he) did so, the feeling of frustration quickly began to transform and dissolve.  A rich palette of feelings “bubbled through” and I expanded my attention to encompass and “enact” them.  Joy and wonder took the stage as the fuming man retreated, and the spacetime of my drive across town opened, becoming something playfully creative and new.