Joe Shirley

One year after I first noticed the curious ability to deliberately shift a feeling state using a sensory imagery map, I was left with a major decision. I felt freed to pursue whatever I might wish to pursue. But I was also a 36-year-old with a patchwork career and no possibility I could see of cobbling together a resume that would get me meaningful work. The freelance copywriting work I had been doing was not satisfying. And nothing else beckoned.

What I did have, though, was the beginnings of something quite compelling, a kind of work that promised emotional healing results that had previously been unavailable to people, as far as I knew. And the possibility of learning something truly new about the human mind.

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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.

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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.

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I decided to apply this technique to theatre. Over the previous three years I had acted in the local community theatre in Whitefish, Montana. Before that I had danced on stage in Philadelphia with two different groups. I enjoyed the challenge of creating a palpable experience for an audience through the vessel of my own body and mind, and saw this technique as a valuable tool by which to intentionally sculpt emotional landscapes upon a stage.

For this application to theatre, I was particularly interested in how these feeling states I was mapping were connected to what I called imagery fields. The images which NLP manipulates through submodalities can be seen to inhabit “fields” occupying apparent space around the body.

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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?

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It was the middle of a beautifully sunny, early summer afternoon in Kalispell, Montana. I lay on my bed with my eyes closed, unable to muster the motivation to walk a few blocks to the coffee shop, to work on the freelance writing project on the table in the next room, or honestly to do anything at all except gaze at my navel, wondering why my life sucked. Depression was dogging me once again.

My attention, as was common in moments like this, was inward. In this moment, my focus drifted over the general region of my torso, perhaps with particular emphasis on the center of my chest. There I noticed a sensation that I could only describe as “downwardness.” I didn’t think much about it; it seemed familiar. But I began to wonder.

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I know a little something about the experience of intense emotion. Seen as a “moody” child, I grew up with deep resentments, hatred, and despair alternating with moments of great hope and grandiose ambition. My life had two phases: at school I was the brilliant golden boy voted “most likely to succeed.” At home I was a “jackass” who couldn’t do anything right. The daily alternation warped me, I suppose. I went off to college, burned bright for the first two years, but crashed after a junior year abroad that sent me over a precipice I never saw coming and never named until seven years later.

By that time, 1987, the diagnosis of bipolar disorder was almost a relief. Perhaps the mess of my life had a cause. Maybe it wasn’t my fault.

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Edinburgh

March 1980, Arthur’s Seat overlooking the city at 2 am.

I come here often, striding the massive hill at all hours of the night. These days I am sleeping only every other day because I crave the fugue state that overtakes me on my nights awake. This night, I have been reading Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man and am captivated by his idea of the noosphere, a kind of global consciousness transcendent and integrative of ordinary, unitary consciousness. I feel I am on to something big, sensing insights just across the divide waiting for me to reach out and bring them home.

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I ask big questions. And I don't trust ready-made answers. Especially when they don't seem to be producing results.

I'm also willing to pursue the answers to questions that are important to me with a persistence and tenacity that are rare. My life is a pursuit of answers to big questions. It is what I live for. It is what I love doing more than anything.

The example most relevant to my work is the question, "What is bipolar disorder?" The convenient answer is, it's a genetically influenced imbalance in brain chemistry. When I was diagnosed with this condition in 1987, this became my prime question, with an urgency unmatched in my life to that date. The result offered by the standard answer was appalling: a life sentence of high-side-effect medication cocktails and therapeutic "managing" of the disorder.

Sorry. Not good enough.

Fortunately for me,

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