Joe Shirley

Get On With It

Somatosensory Image:

• 1st Impression: Go through the routine, ignore sickening, doubt, etc.
• Location: Top of head, surface.
• Substance: An energy – somewhere in my brain are the good feelings I had yesterday – I want to get to that.
• Temp: Comfortable; a little cooler than body temp; like a nice cool breeze on a summer day.
• Color: Orange.
• Movement: Not moving – always there when I look for it. I can just put my consciousness to that area to access it.

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Sickening

Somatosensory Image:

• 1st Impression: Triggered by frustration. Accompanied by doubting myself.
• Location: Stomach – whole belly.
• Substance: Liquid, thicker than water, but not as thick as oil.
• Temp: Kind of warm – pleasant-warm.
• Color: Green, murky.
• Movement: Churn/slosh. You don't want to move because that might make it worse.
• Sound: The sound of a thick liquid just sloshing around, sometimes a little vacuum/sucking sounds.
• Misc: Action: Push this out of my head, do the song, deal with it afterwards, (get on with it).

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Tense/Nervous

Somatosensory Image:

• 1st Impression: With sickening, creates motivation to lock up into get on with it.
• Location: Front surface of whole chest, paper thin – if I stretch out my chest, I can break it.
• Substance: Like that laminating contact paper.
• Temp: Kinda cold/tingly.
• Color: Red, translucent.
• Movement: Contracting.
• Sound: Like the sound of Silly Putty when you stretch it, but not so crinkly.
• Misc: Tastes like strawberries.

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Hate

Somatosensory Image:

• 1st Impression: I hate feeling the disappointment. I want to glare at somebody.
• Location: Head; in my brow. Emanating forward about 10 feet.
• Substance: An energy.
• Temp: Warm/hot – really warm – "my burning hatred."
• Color: Clear/transparent.
• Movement: Emanating pulse.
• Sound: My voice, low growl.
• Misc: Like stepping in front of a bass amp.

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Disbelief

Somatosensory Image:

• 1st Impression: Disbelief that people are stupid. People have the capacity for disrespect, being "retarded," not getting it, needing logic.
• Location: My head and out in front.
• Substance: Like a photon – particle, energy, waves, gas.
• Temp: Room temp.
• Color: White.
• Movement: Action – up and out/forward, "spread my knowledge."
• Sound: My voice, "Duh! Aahhh!"
• Misc: Waves of logic and knowledge emanate. This is a disbelief that people don't "get it."

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Frustration

Somatosensory Image:

• 1st Impression: I have to deal with the fact that you're stupid. Sickening. Throbbing pain.
• Location: My brain.
• Substance: Solid, soft.
• Temp: Warm.
• Color: Gray or dark, dark brown.
• Movement: Inward force plus brain swelling in pain. Pulsing, throbbing.
• Sound: Groan, "Oahhh!"
• Misc: If everyone was smart, I wouldn't have to deal with stupidity so much.

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Heebie Jeebies

Somatosensory Image:

• 1st Impression: Shrugging, "I want to get it off."
• Location: On surface of my whole body, mostly upper body; thin, but you can't get away from it.
• Substance: A layer of gas.
• Temp: Room temp.
• Color: White – like white light – like stage lights.
• Movement: Constant – always there – clinging.
• Sound: Hissing.
• Misc: Feels unwelcome. I stand there, people looking at me, and I have to move out of the way.

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Doubting Myself

Somatosensory Image:

• 1st Impression: Not sure I'm any good. Similar to when I get nervous and I take a breath.
• Location: In face and throat and chest; sometimes larger than others; internal.
• Substance: Gas.
• Temp: Cold.
• Color: Blue.
• Movement: Random eddies.
• Sound: Silent.

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Disappointment

Somatosensory Image:

• 1st Impression: A black hole of hate.
• Location: Heart and gut; chest area; dinner-plate size.
• Substance: Dense solid.
• Temp: Room temp.
• Color: Black.

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Kyle (not his real name) is a young technical professional who also plays bass guitar in a Seattle band. Before the band's first show in March 2006, Kyle came to me with a serious case of stage fright. It was so bad, he had to play with his back to the audience, facing the drummer. I worked with him over three sessions in just a few days, a total of six hours to map and liberate the full set of nine feeling-nodes.

When the band played their opening show later that week, they felt, looked, and sounded like superstars. One MySpace blogger who had seen them struggle in practice two weeks previously wrote that the group "floored" him with their progress. He said that if you didn't know better, you'd swear they'd been on stage "a thousand times" before, playing with relaxed, confident poise and looking like polished professionals.

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Here is a diagram Daniel made, showing the general relationships among the various feeling states he mapped in the set he called his "Victim" mentality. States are grouped by affinity, by which ones "go together" or tend to occur at the same time. Arrows show causal relationships, "this feeling drives, triggers, or causes that one."

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A really specific sort of heat eruption from my solar plexus. I feel this heat and it fills that really tight box. There’s a feeling of collapsing in, but out of that comes that “fuck you.” My first recognition is the camera zooms in, and it fills with this heat. I’m in fight or flight mode.

Like a lava, a circular shape, a ball, but it’s liquid. Very hot, lava. And it sucks things into it, that’s what the world collapsing is all about this thing just pulling shit into it. That’s the movement of it. I feel it in my face, my shoulders, thighs, belly, the contraction. The contraction happens first - that’s the shame.

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In a yoga class, (classes becoming very prayerful, in one of those meditative states), suddenly a very specific, tangible being/child outside of my body about six inches, to the lower right, the area from my hip to my knee. I saw this young child trapped in between these two worlds, in this little tear in the field so I could see it. Immediate thought: this little me is drowning. Deep fear, terror, screaming for help and being sucked under.

Outside my body, in location described above where the child was; an energy - I could put my hand through it. 102 degrees, a kind of fever to it. (A bright yellowness to it, a light behind the vivid image of the child in all its colors.) Energy is yellow-white, sharp. Energy is swirling, clockwise looking down, frenetic, like a torrent, unstable, and a downwardness to it, totally sucking the image down, energy going down.

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It’s also very tight, bound. It’s dark. The energy wants out, but it’s restrained. It’s a full-body experience, though I feel it most acutely in the region between my solar plexus and my face. I feel specific holdings in my face and solar plexus. The feeling is wanting to scream.

In my body as a kind of core, in the very core, it’s a tube, four inches in diameter. Tube is chunky, not smooth, very dense, hot - 102-103 degrees hot. It runs from right behind my eyes all the way down to first chakra place, it runs the length of my torso, right down the core/center. The motion is a kind of twist, bottom clockwise looking down, top is counter clockwise looking down, and the central place of discord is right in that solar plexus area. It’s like a red-brown, very opaque, very dense. It’s a long cylinder, no hollow in center. Like a hard rubber, like tire rubber. It’s a repressed/suppressed scream, growl, rumble, my voice.

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Conflict. Conflict means the world is coming apart. It means safety is going away.

All around me, but there's a first place that I located was above and behind, maybe three feet above my head and slightly behind. But it's like a field that's all around me. Extends maybe ten feet. It's like there's a more dense place in that location behind and above.

Room temperature. The dense part is like a brown-yellow, and I'm not sensing so much a color as it moves out, as a sort of motion in the field is how I experience it. The motion radiates from that center, it sort of has a vibration that rains down and cycles back. It's definitely a top to bottom motion.

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