Summary Of Instructions
1. Become vigilant toward yourself. Open an input channel to feelings and body sensations. Keep it open as you live your life. Recognize when some discomfort, physical or emotional, is creeping up on you.
2. Find a quiet, comfortable place, as quiet and as soundproof as possible. Cars, for instance, make great emergency primal rooms. Nowhere else in civilization can you find a place which will allow you to scream with very little chance of being heard. Park. Don't drive through a red light.
3. Lie down (sit or stand if you have no choice). Place yourself on your back comfortably with a pillow under your head, arms and hands at your sides. If you put your hands on your abdomen, you are blocking your ability to receive impulses which will come in that area, rather like sticking a metal object in front of a radar antenna. Uncross your legs, create a sense of being open with this vulnerable and exposed body position.
4. Turn your awareness to your feelings and inner body state. Look for any kind of discomfort. Check your six major symptom categories, specific body sensations, diffuse body states, and so on. Do you deviate from complete comfort in any way at all along these six channels?
5. Do not think. You are now a receiving system for sensory input. If you have trouble switching off your mind, go to the use of inarticulate sound. Reread the sections dealing with this. When our minds are racing with ideas and words, it is helpful to use the skills which are wordless.
6. When something comes to you in the area of physical or emotional disturbance, dip down beneath the waves of logical everyday life. Go to meet it like a diver beneath the sea. Scan for location, intensity and texture. Move toward the discomfort and let it move toward you.
7. Merge with it. Open your mind and your body. Open the pores of your skin, the front of your guts, your body orifices, eyes, ears, mouth, vagina, penis, rectum everything. Become one with this discomfort. Soak within these sensations for a minimum of thirty seconds, to allow the reorientation of awareness from the verbal level of the mind to the sensing and feeling level of the mind which, in turn, calls forth the holistic functions of the brain.
8. Assume any position that increases the feeling and your experiencing of it. If it helps, let your body move.
9. Activate your vocal chords with unscreened and often non-logical sounds, words and phrases which exactly come from and match the intensity and texture of the physical and/or emotional discomfort which you are tracking. Strive for absolute congruence. Match each verbal production back to the original feeling as you would throw a dart into a bull's-eye. Your inner body sense will tell you when your vocal productions, words or sounds are precisely accurate. Listen to what is coming forth. Do not move from one thing to another until the tension peaks and leads automatically to the next thing. More than anything else you can do on a depth therapy journey, this exercise of sound and word congruence is the most important.
10. When you achieve absolute congruence, maintain the congruence with your repetitions as the pain intensifies (enrichment), peaks and then recedes. You should be left exhausted and free of the discomfort you began with, so that the tension leaves your mind and body. You may or may not receive a Holistic Insight.
11. While you work do not go actively into your intellect and search for, or try to force, understanding. This kind of intellectual closure prevents Holistic Insight and straightjackets the mind into linear function. When the insight is ready to arrive, during or after the therapy sequence, it will come to you.
12. Gentle pondering on issues between sessions is not a bad thing, if it is done in a relaxed manner. Your awarenesses, however, will almost always come to you during a moment of letting-go. When pondering or considering an issue between sessions, forced concentration tends to keep insight away. It is therefore important to leave vegetative non-striving time in your daily journey.
13. Mental hygiene work, as outlined above, will probably have to be done several times a week across a number of years. Do not be obssessive about it for there may be times when your mind needs to drop its struggle with therapeutic pursuits for weeks, months or even years at a time, in order to integrate some of the profound shifts that may occur.
14. Remember that the mind and body need relaxation. Do not use these sequences so often that you drive yourself into a state of exhaustion. Find the rhythm that is right for you. Find the intensity that is right for you. In your heart you will always know whether you are healing or harming yourself.
15. On the other hand, as I often say to my own patients, there is no need for you to carry pain. When pain comes, lie down as soon as you can reasonably do so and use your mental hygiene skills as outlined. Do not be afraid occasionally to do lighter or more gentle work on yourself when you are in a therapeutically quiet phase of your journey. Pain can be gently blown off, using almost any of our techniques at a lesser intensity.