Sometimes emotions grip our attention and it seems as though they’ll never let go. That’s OK – there is no need to change the emotion. Instead, you can simply add space inside it and all around it and let it dissolve.
The Open Focus session starts at: 29:40.04
Emotions are not emergencies. We aren’t at their mercy, no matter how strong they feel or how long they last. So if you find yourself in emergency mode without an actual emergency, it might help to know that emotions are predictions the brain makes to keep us safe, according to the research of psychologist, Lisa Feldman Barrett. And our brain is constantly updating its predictions. That knowledge dovetails well with the approach we take to emotions through through Open Focus: We add space effortlessly to shift how we pay attention, and our brain moves into alpha synchrony and out of the narrow focus of fight, flight, or freeze.
We hope you enjoy the Open Focus session in this week’s podcast
Here’s the transcript:
0:00:00.3 Kat Oak: In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” But is there an art or a science to stopping and looking around once in a while?
0:00:16.5 Liz Williams: I’m Liz.
0:00:18.8 Kat Oak: And I’m Kat, and this is Beyond Resilience. When Liz and I met during the COVID-19 pandemic, we discovered that we shared a passion for exploring accessible ways of experiencing and incorporating trance into our daily lives. In particular, we were interested in how different trance-inducing practices might promote physical, mental, and emotional healing, enhance creativity, and inspire liberation. So in the first season of Beyond Resilience, we explore Open Focus, a practice developed by Les Fehmi that helps us retrain our brains to access all the different types of attention available. Please join us as we explore Open Focus and learn about the benefits of daily practice.
0:01:05.2 Kat Oak: Hello, Liz.
0:01:07.1 Liz Williams: Hello, Kat.
0:01:08.3 Kat Oak: How are you doing today?
0:01:13.3 Liz Williams: Well, I’m very well. Super happy to be here in kind of our three-part pain series.
0:01:21.7 Kat Oak: Pain in three parts.
0:01:22.1 Liz Williams: Pain in three parts. One, two, three.
0:01:27.0 Kat Oak: So I wanted to give you my status report. So I… Now the weather wasn’t kind to this process because it all of a sudden got really warm. We had a 70-degree day two days ago. And it was…
0:01:42.3 Liz Williams: This in… Around Detroit, Michigan, right? So and…
0:01:43.2 Kat Oak: Detroit in February, yeah.
0:01:45.5 Liz Williams: In February, okay.
0:01:47.1 Kat Oak: So it didn’t really necessarily… It wasn’t the kind of environmental issues that… Or a status that gives me the sinus headaches, but there was a few days where I did. And I really got into my story of doing the Open Focus and imagining the space in my sinuses. That was actually ’cause I have this visual of sinuses that they’re like these curlicue labyrinthine, little tubes. So I was putting space in between all of those tubes. And it was pretty effective. I didn’t, like, I didn’t take any meds. I didn’t take any Advil Cold and Sinus. I did kind of have a little…in the background. But it was tolerable. And so, yeah. So there’s my report. I didn’t do it daily because I didn’t need to, but I did it probably three times.
0:02:48.3 Liz Williams: Three times during our session or…
0:02:50.9 Kat Oak: No, no, no. During the week, between.
0:02:52.4 Liz Williams: Once. Okay.
0:02:53.0 Kat Oak: Yeah. So from when we recorded last. So yeah, there you go.
0:02:58.8 Liz Williams: So did it start to come back and then you did a session, or did you just do it as a preventative?
0:03:06.8 Kat Oak: Yeah. Well, so it usually is when I’m in the… It’s in the morning is when it happens or it might hit me later on in the day. But this time it was in the mornings and I did… I did… Like, it came or I was able to kind of dissolve it and then it sort of kind of slowly came back in that kind of subtextual way in the late afternoon. But it wasn’t so much that I was like, “I need to take a pain pill,” or something, to take Advil Cold and Sinus. So I’m doing Advil Cold and Sinus advertisements, obviously [laughter]
0:03:44.1 Liz Williams: It’s a product placement.
0:03:48.5 Kat Oak: Send me the money, Advil. So, yeah. So and then that was one day and then the other two times it was gone. Yeah.
0:04:01.3 Liz Williams: Yeah. Yeah. So congratulations. That’s a…
0:04:05.0 Kat Oak: Thanks.
0:04:07.5 Liz Williams: That’s a flexible attention success story.
0:04:12.4 Kat Oak: I know. Yeah. I mean, it was… I struggle with it still. I’m getting better now about not falling asleep during Open Focus. So I guess I’m healing. But, yeah.
0:04:24.6 Liz Williams: That’s great.
0:04:25.2 Kat Oak: So it did feel like a win. It felt like, “Oh, this is a tool I have in my little toolbox for when things happen.” And yeah.
0:04:38.3 Liz Williams: That’s wonderful. Thank you. That’s… I love hearing that. And one of the things I’m aware of is we talked about dissolving pain, physical pain last week and dissolving emotional pain this week is that, and then mental pain is what we’ll talk about next week, arbitrarily separating these things. But we talk about them as different things from an attention point of view. They’re the same thing. It’s overusing narrow objective focus of staying separate and gripped, gripping attention, and physical pain is one of the most gripping things that we can do because it’s so easy to get it becomes… It feels like the whole screen. Everything we see and feel is pain. And then the future is our future prediction of more pain, which is one of the insidious things about pain. But the Open Focus practice of getting back to your body, locating it in your body, just the simple steps that are so reliable in making our attention broader and more immersed. The rest just happens automatically. So I love that you feel like you have this tool now.
0:05:53.0 Kat Oak: Yes. Yeah.
0:05:57.3 Liz Williams: Yeah. Yeah.
0:05:58.7 Kat Oak: So we’re going to pivot into the second in our triumvirate of terror: emotional pain.
0:06:11.2 Liz Williams: Emotional pain.
0:06:11.3 Kat Oak: I have the sads, so.
0:06:12.5 Liz Williams: I have the sads, yeah.
0:06:13.7 Kat Oak: So talk to me about ’cause the process is gonna be very similar. You’re gonna use different terminology as we go through our session, but you’re still, I mean, we’re still kind of just trying to get into that space. Get into space.
0:06:29.1 Liz Williams: Get into that space and space. Absolutely right. All the spaces. Yeah the… Because we’re talking about flexible attention, we’re doing one thing here and we’re using a lot of different language to practice doing that one thing so that we know that we all know how to do it, right? So that you and I get practice doing it more and other people who are listening get practice doing it. So period. So having it be familiar to do this, whatever pain is coming up. So, we are arbitrarily separating this into physical, emotional, and mental. In fact, these all happen together, which is something that Lisa Feldman Barrett talks about in her book, which I just started. So be careful, those of you who have digested every word. She talks about how the brain is… A very different research showing something quite different about the brain and how it makes emotions. So ‘How Emotions Are Made’ is the title of her book.
0:07:37.1 Kat Oak: Okay.
0:07:38.4 Liz Williams: And her research is decades-long now and it shows that a lot of what we believe about emotions just isn’t true. A lot of what we believe about the brain, the triune brain theory, for example, that there’s this reptilian part of your brain that’s emotional and then there’s this sort of a more recent addition to the brain, evolutionarily-speaking, et cetera. And that they do different things. It just turns out not to be true. That the brain is a series of networks. It’s just neuronal networks that do certain things. But they’re all over. The whole brain is used, all parts of the brain. So I’m saying that badly, but yeah, there’s a broad brush explanation. It’s not, “This one does this, this one does this.” They’re networks that fire and light up. And so any remaining vestige of separating emotion and mind and body are just gone in her theory.
0:08:37.2 Liz Williams: So her theory is this. So we’re taking it apart the way you do to learn something, right? We’re splitting it into these parts that aren’t really parts. We’re just gonna focus on different aspects of this one process, which she describes as a brain, a very networked whole brain scanning the environment for stimuli and then going through past experience and knowledge for information with which to make a prediction. And emotions are a prediction because the brain’s sole function is to keep us alive. It’s doing everything to keep us alive. That’s all it’s doing. So it’s predicting all the time. “What do I need to do here? What do I need to do here? What do I… “
0:09:21.0 Liz Williams: So the emotions are a part of that process and they are made. So our brain is making our emotions all the time. I think of the Swedish Chef, like, just slinging the ingredients together and, “Have some water.” Exactly. That’s what’s happening in my brain right now. So [laughter] truly terrifying thought. So one of the things that is so true… So just focusing, we’re gonna pretend that we can talk just about emotional pain because we wanna be able to use Open Focus and flexible attention when that’s the predominant thing, when we are feeling an emotion and that emotion maybe is taking us over.
0:10:18.3 Liz Williams: And I was talking to someone this morning and she said, “You know what? There’s a difference between ruminating and spiraling.” And I’m like, “Wow, that’s sophisticated.” One of the things that Feldman Barrett says is that the more information you give your brain about emotion, so learning lots and lots of words to describe emotion. I’m not just always angry or anxious. I’m frustrated. I’m irritated. I’m not always just happy or sad. I’m delighted. I’m joyful. I’m… Learning all of that becomes new information that the brain can use to then give us different experiences of emotion. We start to feel those emotions the more we use those words. We start to see them in other people. So the brain then has a lot more options for what we might feel.
0:11:05.1 Kat Oak: Oh, Liz, this is just getting into the mix here.
0:11:09.8 Liz Williams: Is it getting into the mix, Kat?
0:11:10.6 Kat Oak: Yeah, it is.
0:11:11.9 Liz Williams: Okay [chuckle]
0:11:13.5 Kat Oak: Have you gotten into or is she talking about kind of how… If the brain is making emotions in order to make decisions, is there the interplay between the brain kind of making associations at some point that maybe aren’t accurate? That are then like these are drivers for making emotions? Is that maybe part of maybe PTSD struggles and things like that? This thing happened and that’s what this means. And so when this happens all the time, when I have this experience again, these are the emotions that have to come up with this. Have you gotten into that yet? Or is she talking about that, or?
0:11:56.6 Liz Williams: I haven’t read that far in the book. She has a TED talk that might… It’s not gonna answer your question specifically, but I think you’re… To see what you mean by getting into the mix, that’s the basic premise. So I can’t… I have no idea how it relates to PTSD and what that does to the brain. But the basic process, and I don’t know that she’s done research on that, so I really, I can’t speak to it.
0:12:19.2 Kat Oak: Okay.
0:12:20.5 Liz Williams: So you’re doing that thing you do that I love, which is like, “Oh, so I get that instantly. Can I apply it here? Can I apply it here? Can I… ” I did the same thing. I was like, “Well, what about this and this and this and this?”
0:12:30.6 Kat Oak: ’cause I was like…
0:12:32.0 Liz Williams: I don’t know.
0:12:32.9 Kat Oak: There’s that. And then when you’re talking about, “Once you use these words, then you start to see them.” And I’m like, that’s terministic screens.
0:12:38.0 Liz Williams: Right, exactly, I know. Exactly, right? So it does…
0:12:44.1 Kat Oak: Okay, sorry, I’ll stop jumping all around. But yeah, but I love that.
0:12:47.7 Liz Williams: No, no.
0:12:48.0 Kat Oak: I love that idea. Like, I love that, the terministic screens is this theory that, you, the words you use shape your perception of reality.
0:13:03.5 Liz Williams: Yes. And that would be right.
0:13:03.6 Kat Oak: Yeah.
0:13:06.4 Liz Williams: That is exactly something that she talks about, that you’re listening. So yeah. And the words you know to use. So the brain needs lots of information. It loves knowledge and it will use that to make future predictions.
0:13:23.6 Kat Oak: Yeah.
0:13:24.2 Liz Williams: So yeah, I think… It’s funny to be someone like you who reads broadly and has broad interests and then a researcher has to go deep and narrow into what they’re doing, right? She’s looking at MRI scans. She’s doing literature. She’s done all of the lit review for the last 20 years on this topic. And she’s a neuroscientist. So she is like very systematically building this new understanding. It’s constructive theory of emotion. I think it’s what she calls her version of it. That emotions are made, that they are not built in. They are built.
0:14:04.6 Kat Oak: And they’re not… Everybody has them, not just women.
[laughter]
0:14:13.7 Liz Williams: Well, actually, no Kat, that’s not. Yeah, exactly. Everybody has them.
0:14:20.6 Kat Oak: Everybody has them.
0:14:21.3 Liz Williams: Yeah. And so it really helps to learn the vocabulary so you can talk about them and have different ones.
0:14:31.7 Kat Oak: And expand your vernacular, right?
0:14:35.8 Liz Williams: Yeah.
0:14:36.9 Kat Oak: So that is actually one of… In one of my previous lives, you know I was a massage therapist.
0:14:39.5 Liz Williams: Yes.
0:14:40.4 Kat Oak: And learning about…
0:14:40.5 Liz Williams: I’ve heard the rumors, Kat.
0:14:43.8 Kat Oak: [laughter] Learning about, I think it was like muscle contraction. Every single thing that has to happen for when you think in your brain, I wanna move my right arm to moving your right arm, is just incredibly complex, happening so fast, imperceptibly, right? All this stuff. So at the one hand, the brain is just like, just a marvel of functionality, right? Then on the other hand, it’s really stupid, right? Like in terms of referred pain, right? You hurt your back and you had back pain for two years that you dealt with and it was finally resolved. And the next time you stub your toe and you feel pain, your brain is like, “Oh, I feel pain. That must be my back again. No, it’s my toe.”
0:15:42.3 Liz Williams: Oh wow. Yeah.
0:15:46.4 Kat Oak: Yeah. So that’s one of the common issues that people can have where even if they have dealt with it, the brain has this worn pathway that’s like, “That’s what pain is. Pain is my knee that I shattered. So when I accidentally cut my finger, I will feel pain there, but I will also feel pain in my knee.” Just bizarro.
0:16:10.0 Liz Williams: Wow.
0:16:11.8 Kat Oak: Yeah.
0:16:11.9 Liz Williams: That is dumb.
0:16:13.9 Kat Oak: Yeah, it is [laughter] So that’s what I’m saying. So when you’re talking about making the emotions and then the Swedish Chef in the mix, I’m thinking of that situation where the brain’s like, “Last time somebody said that to me, I felt like this, so that’s how… ” so that’s how you can have these like real young emotions that are still guiding you. Because when you were six, this thing happened and your brain was like, “That’s what it is. I made this emotion once.”
0:16:43.8 Liz Williams: “That’s what it always is. That’s what this means. In order to keep you safe, I predict.”
0:16:49.4 Kat Oak: So there’s just tons of us stumbling around this world, like hammering each other with our six-year-old emotions. I guess that’s really kind of the story of society.
0:16:58.5 Liz Williams: I think mine might be slightly younger. Yeah, I think it’s a good, I think it’s a good summary. I’m gonna think, say, four, four-year-old emotions, ’cause it’s just. I think if we can get them…
0:17:05.9 Kat Oak: Yeah, before you even can make a decision about them.
0:17:08.8 Liz Williams: Right [laughter]
0:17:10.4 Kat Oak: Yeah, they feel innate. It feels natural because it’s been that way for so long where it’s like, “No. You learned that when you were two and a half.” And it’s not fact. It just happened once. And your brain was like, “This is how it is now.”
0:17:23.7 Liz Williams: “This is the way it is now.”
0:17:24.2 Kat Oak: Yeah.
0:17:24.9 Liz Williams: Yeah.
0:17:25.1 Kat Oak: Okay, so with this making of emotions, then obviously you can… If you’re making your emotions, then you can put space around those emotions.
0:17:42.4 Liz Williams: Yeah, I think that I’ve been thinking a lot about the connections between her research and Open Focus. And I have absolutely nothing to say about that at this time. I’ve been desperately seeking that connection. But what I think is true is that not going right to that narrow objective focus is another one of those pathways in the brain that you’re talking about, that I have to… If it’s an emotion, if it’s a strong emotion, boom, it’s an emergency. I have to do that. That becomes a… That’s that habitual way of responding that isn’t really reality-based and is not helpful. And then becomes more information for the brain ’cause the brain is interpreting physical sensations, right? Like, “What is that? What is that gripping in the stomach? Is that anxiety? Is it fear? Is it anger? Or am I hungry, or thirsty?”
0:18:41.2 Kat Oak: Yeah.
0:18:42.9 Liz Williams: There’s a thought. I don’t know. So the brain is trying to figure it out. And then it… The Swedish Chef gets in the kitchen and like, “Let’s… This experience and that experience. And oh, I stubbed my toe once. So therefore… “
0:18:56.0 Liz Williams: So adding… We can add space all along that process. And when the brain has that, it works better. It can access the information it does have, value it differently, and be open to new combinations of meaning, new ways of being with the feeling you’re having, the tightness in your chest, the way your eyes narrow when you’re in emergency mode. If you can shift the physiology like you did with your sinus, if you can shift your attention so that your physiology is not predominant in quite the same way, then the brain can function in alpha where it is more likely to function well and to have enough time to reach a different conclusion or consider some other options for making meaning of something, and making an emotion. So we’re like pre that, right? It’s like, “Let’s do what we can ’cause we can direct our attention.” And then what comes into our awareness when we redirect our attention is part of what the brain is going to use to make its predictions.
0:20:16.5 Kat Oak: And I guess one sort of an issue that I have with the terminology is, and this is somebody who is newly learning how to not compartmentalize, is the idea of dissolving emotional pain or emotions like, I don’t want them to go away.
0:20:40.6 Liz Williams: Right. Yeah. This is where this dissolving pain is a really good descriptor of the way we shift our attention from the particles in the atom to the space in the atom. And the space of an atom that electron orbit, that entire space that the atom takes up is 200,000 times more space than particle. That’s the ratio between the nucleus and the diameter… The entire size of the atom. So when we talk about dissolving pain, it’s, the language is slightly problematic. It might be better to say we’re creating flexible attention in two ways. We’re broadening our attention to take in this space in that atom, which everything is made of. And we are immersing ourselves in it rather than separating ourselves from it. And that’s what creates the changes in the brain.
0:21:41.0 Liz Williams: So it’s a little bit of a misnomer to say we’re dissolving physical pain or emotional pain, and it’s going away. We are shifting our attention along these two axes of broad to narrow, and separate to immersed. And that will make changes in the brain and that will help the body to settle and the mind to settle so that there’s not this automaticity of, “This means this and this is bad and this is horrible.” It’s not that you become an automaton that doesn’t feel anything in your body. For me, what’s happened and happening over time as I do this is, I have a different experience of the sensations in my body. I’m much less… There’s nothing automatic. It used to just kinda be on autopilot. Boom. Now it’s like, “Well, what? Okay, do I need to drink something? Am I not hydrated? Let me try that. See about that.”
0:22:39.9 Liz Williams: I have just so many more options for how I approach something. Do I need to feel what I’m feeling and decide what it means? Do I need to interpret it in that way? Do I need to experience it as something that is separate from me that I have to defend against? Or can I let it be right in here with all the space? Can I dissolve it into the space in my body? Can I dissolve the particles, broadcast them through the space in the room? Can I feel myself, imagine myself diving in to them? What’s that? So can I attend to them differently? Can I put my attention on the space around, the space between, the space that permeates? When I do that, my brain automatically is like, “Oh, okay. I don’t need to narrowly focus on this phenomenon. I can just be with it.” So it’s not like you’re gonna stop feeling, there’ll be more room. For me, there’s more room. It’s not just I’m grabbing onto this, grabbing onto that, and I have to… It’s like, well, it’s very easy to… Easier and getting easier to let go of an interpretation, to just be with whatever this sensation is and try out different ideas.
0:24:09.7 Kat Oak: Yeah.
0:24:10.0 Liz Williams: The brain does all this stuff to take action, right? You wanna take an action. Anytime I can pause before I do that and consider the possible emotion that I’m building, the action that I’m about to take. That’s beneficial for me. In my life that’s been very beneficial to do that. Slow it down, open it up.
0:24:34.6 Kat Oak: And then take a beat.
0:24:36.2 Liz Williams: Yeah. Exactly.
0:24:42.3 Kat Oak: And I think that, like you were saying the, “Do I need to make a decision about this emotion? Or is there meaning in this emotion?” I think that can be really valuable too. I mean, I’m kind of trial by fire with that right now going through my perimenopausal chaos where I’ve been forced to get into that space of going, “Wait, this is not… This is just biochemistry out of whack. There’s nothing meaningful here. You don’t need to make decisions based on this. It’s not some kind of result of your life. Your body is just it going through this transition. And so you just got to be with it.” And that’s really hard sometimes to just be in the emotions and not make decisions based on them.
0:25:31.3 Liz Williams: Yeah. They just kind of need to wash through you sometimes. And it’s quite a storm. I’m through that transition as we’ve discussed and before, but I remember so clearly times when I just thought something terrible was happening to me and I got frightened. Or I had flashes of rage that were so red hot or so white hot that I… Luckily, I was so surprised by them, I didn’t do anything ’cause it was just… But I was amazed at how powerful that physical sensation could be. And the emotion just, I’m like, “What’s happening to me? It feels so out of control.” It’s really frightening. Can be really frightening.
0:26:23.6 Kat Oak: Yeah. And I think until you realize it, like, I was just reading this article about this woman who thought she was having early onset dementia, and then she went in to see her doctors. They did all this tests and they were like, “No, you have early onset menopause.” But she thought she was going crazy, right? I mean, she thought legitimately. And so I think that’s another side of it. When you don’t know then it feels like, “Okay, this is something I need to attend to.” So it seems like with the process of using Open Focus, it can be a tool that regardless of your at, in your biochemical fluctuations in life, male, female, in between, all across the spectrum, you could use this tool to kind of interject that moment of going like, “Okay, what’s going on here?”
0:27:20.1 Liz Williams: Yeah, exactly, let me just…
0:27:20.2 Kat Oak: “Do I need to react to this?” Yeah.
0:27:22.2 Liz Williams: And do I… Is it an emergency? And rather than ask that, just start putting space around it and flex your attention. If it’s really an emergency, you will take action. That’s how you know it’s an emergency. You do know it’s the habitual attention style that we’re talking about. So that is our tendency to over-interpret everything as an emergency, to react to everything as though it was an emergency. You don’t need to be in emergency mode. Even if you have strong emotions, you don’t. You can, as you said, take a beat. I love that. And then can I imagine… Can you imagine… I do exactly the phrases we use when I’m doing this myself. Can you imagine, can I? As though or a voice outside me say, “Can you imagine the space in your index fingers and thumbs?”
0:28:25.4 Liz Williams: And after doing this for now a few years, the minute I ask that question…
0:28:32.2 Kat Oak: It brings it down.
0:28:33.7 Liz Williams: I calm down. It brings it down. And I can imagine more and more fully that is what happens with repeated practice. Your imagination. It’s almost like it’s a dog wanting to chase a ball. It’s like, “Okay, yes, you can. Watch this. You really can.” The imagination gets more sensitive and it really does become a refuge to be able to flex your attention. It’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna… That’s right. I’m gonna add space. I can live my entire life from this refuge.” It’s just this simple process of adding space to an embodied experience we’re having without any effort. So we’re really not trying to dissolve emotion. We’re not trying to dissolve pain. We’re using that as a way to talk about particles in space. Particles in space.
0:29:33.3 Kat Oak: All right, so should we get into our spaciousness?
0:29:37.2 Liz Williams: Let’s do it.
0:29:39.7 Kat Oak: All right.
0:29:40.4 Liz Williams: So sitting… We’re gonna sit or stand erect, not stiffly, very comfortably. If your feet haven’t been flat on the floor as mine have not, that would be a great time… Now would be a great time to get them flat on the floor. If that’s how you’re sitting or standing. Obviously, they will be on the floor. Closing your eyes if you are relatively new to this practice is really helpful. As you practice, you can start to open them here and there during a practice, maybe just letting a little light in through your eyelashes. Our visual sense is super, super grabby. It wants to narrow and focus on things tightly, so not so helpful in the beginning. And it’s also helpful to have your hands resting comfortably somewhere, not holding onto anything. ’cause we use them very often as a way to get into Open Focus quickly. And that’s what we’ll do now. So eyes closed, sitting comfortably. Can you imagine the space in your thumbs and index fingers on both hands? That is the volume of your index fingers and thumbs full of space, the feeling of them being full of space effortlessly imagined.
0:31:01.4 Liz Williams: And can you imagine the space all around your thumbs and index fingers? At the same time, you’re imagining the space inside. And sometimes it’s helpful to move your thumbs and index figures just a little toward each other and away from each other, kind of moving them in space. The feeling of the space inside feels a little different from the space outside. Can you imagine the same feeling of space that you have in your thumbs and index fingers is also present now in the rest of your fingers? So space filling your middle finger, ring finger, and pinky finger.
0:32:38.2 Liz Williams: And is it possible to imagine that same space expanding to fill your entire hand and wrist? Can you imagine space in your forearms and elbows, upper arms and shoulders full of space and surrounded by space just like your thumb and index finger are? Can you imagine the feeling of space in your neck, including your throat, windpipe, esophagus, the muscles in your neck, the nerves full of space? And can you imagine the feeling of space in your jaw, jaw muscles, your teeth and gums, your tongue, the roof of your mouth and throat full of space and surrounded by space? Can you imagine that feeling of space filling your entire head all the way top to bottom, back to front, side to side, and filling all the structures in your head, cranium and brain eyes, eye muscles, eyelids, eyebrows, muscles of your face, your sinuses, your ears, outside, middle, and inner? At the same time, as you imagine the space around your head and around each of these structures, can you imagine that all of those structures in your head, and your head itself, are a cloud of particles in space that surrounds and pervades and fills them?
0:36:55.6 Liz Williams: And can you imagine space in your entire torso all the way down to your sitz bones, where they’re contacting the chair, if you’re sitting full of space, three dimensionally, chest to back, side to side, top to bottom, full of space, and at the same time surrounded by space? Can you imagine the feeling of space filling your thighs, knees, lower legs, ankles, feet and toes, so that your entire body is full of space and surrounded by space and permeated by space? Can you imagine the space between you and all four walls that surround you, the ceiling and the floor, three dimensional and multi sensorial space? And is it possible to imagine yourself as a cloud of particles in that space? And now, is it possible to identify an emotion that you’re feeling or maybe feeling strongly and locate where you feel it in your body?
0:40:05.2 Liz Williams: Might be tight throat, might be kind of a furrowed tight brow, could be tightness in the pit of your stomach, tension in your back or neck, a twitching foot, a tightness in your hands. Can you imagine the shape of that emotion as it is in your body? What does it feel like? Is it large or small, soft, hard, pointy, rounded? What is its texture? Is it a spot or an entire region in your body? Is it three dimensional or only two? And as you’ve gotten to know this shape of the emotion and its place in your body, can you imagine that shape full of space?
0:42:17.7 Liz Williams: And at the same time, can you imagine that that shape is surrounded by space, full of space, enveloped in space? And can you imagine that shape, the boundary of that shape dissolving into the space around it, dissolving into the space inside it, just really one space. And is it possible to imagine yourself being immersed in those particles as they dissolve and disperse into space, either diving into them or letting them wash over you? And is it possible to, at the same time, be aware of the feeling of space all around you, extending out to the walls of the room you’re in and now in your imagination, just checking in with that place in your body and whatever that sensation was, is it the same? Is it still in that location? Is it gone? Is there anything left? Or are you aware of a new sensation in your body that is associated with this emotion? Some other place you’re feeling it in your body, and if you’re feeling it as repetitive thoughts that’s happening in your brain and your imagination can show you that shape too. So once again, going through the steps of filling that shape with space. And next, can you imagine at the same time as that shape is full of space, it’s also surrounded by space. Can you imagine that shape dissolving into space, dispersing, immersing yourself in those particles in space?
0:47:06.7 Liz Williams: Can you imagine also feeling the space all around you, letting it all be there, all in your imagination, the space in the room and in your body, the space inside the shape that is dissolving, flexing your attention broadly, just by imagining, letting yourself be a part of it and letting it be a part of you. And can you imagine that this multi-sensorial space that fills the room and your body, can you imagine what it sounds like? Maybe there are sounds in that space right now or you can make them up. Can you imagine what it tastes like, what it feels like? Does it have a texture? Is it light or heavy? Does it have colors? Is it transparent? And can you imagine repeating this process with emotions, even strong emotions as they come up in your body throughout your day?
0:50:27.9 Liz Williams: Can you imagine locating that emotional pain, linking it with a physical feeling in your body, an area of tension, imagining a shape and its characteristics, filling that shape with space and surrounding it with space, then letting it dissolve and disperse throughout the space, immersing yourself in it. And then can you imagine looking again, feeling again for where that emotion is in your body and repeating the steps again and again until that emotion is just a part of the space that you’re in, the space that’s in you, and you can attend to it broadly and immersed in it, rather than in emergency mode where you’re separate and narrow and you grip it. And can you imagine doing this with ease and effortlessness, imagining space in and around your body? And is it possible to imagine this becoming your habitual response?
0:53:44.0 Kat Oak: Wow, Lee, I can’t even speak. Thanks Liz.
0:53:50.3 Liz Williams: <laughs awkwardly>
0:53:51.4 Kat Oak: No, that was really good. I felt… I didn’t feel dissolved like I was scared of, but I felt integrated and kind of present with it. So that was nice.
0:54:06.9 Liz Williams: Yeah. Nice. Good word. Good word. Yeah. I’m aware of… After that I’m aware of my tendency to think that I need to separate myself from my emotions in order to control them or in order for them not to control me. And that is habitual for me. And this practice really, it gives me another option, another way of being.
0:54:38.2 Kat Oak: Yeah, yeah. ’cause you know, like I said, I’m a recovering compartmentalizer, so I’m like, “I don’t want something else that just teaches me how to do that really, really well.”
0:54:47.7 Liz Williams: You’re right. Exactly. Right, it’s the opposite of that, right? It is integrating it and letting it be… And integrating yourself into the space. Which is always here. It’s amazing how present space is and how frequently we do not pay any attention to it [chuckle]
0:55:06.3 Kat Oak: Exactly [laughter] all right, well thank you Liz, and I’ll see you back here next Week.
0:55:12.9 Liz Williams: All right. Thanks so much, Kat. See you later.
0:55:15.2 Kat Oak: Are you interested in learning how you can incorporate Open Focus into your daily life? Consider joining us for our weekly Open Focus Friday group session at 12:00 PM Pacific on Zoom. Registration details and more information on Open Focus are available on our website, www.beyondresilience.io.
0:55:38.5 Kat Oak: Thanks for listening to Beyond Resilience, which is hosted by Liz Williams and Kat Oak and produced by Liminal Nation. Neither Liz nor Kat are trained medical or mental health professionals. And all of the ideas, techniques, resources, and tools we explore in the podcast reflect our own personal perspectives. Special thank you to Stephen Carey for our musical ambiance and to John Hughes and Paramount Pictures for the excerpted audio of the preeminent philosopher of late stage Capitalism, Ferris Bueller. All rights where appropriate are reserved. Until next time, stay open.