my best friend is 47 with a newborn, a toddler, two dogs and a husband. i just spent a week at their house. it should have been chaos but it was total serenity. the delightful beast of a toddler tried my patience but over and over her mom had the winning response. i am just /1

Over time, I understood the real meaning of what she was saying: she wasn’t my friend. This wasn’t her purpose. Her purpose was to help me understand myself better. My desire to make sure she liked me or was charmed or amused by me would only serve to get in the way of that.

* insane person acts insane toward you * Normal person: “wow this person is insane and i’ll avoid them and be happy” Inner-work person: “wow what an opportunity to explore my shadow. it’s definitely a good idea to prolong my exposure to them”

tell me about your relationship with the voice in your head. what's the vibe?

An implication of this is that to jump into a certain stance, you need to know how to clench yourself into that shape, but you also need freedom (relaxation, absence of tension, nothing stabilized-by-default) in certain other parts of your vascular system. I.e. if you have a lot of latches (tension / constraints / prestabilized patterns) in some domain that the stance requires freedom in, you won’t be able to use the stance Figuring out how to clench in a certain way is a learning process; unlatching is more of an unlearning process

but “healthy relationship” should never be the domain of “professionals only.” we need a culture where the average person is able to be collaborative, perceptive, stable, warm, resourced, and attuned enough to meet the average emotional needs of the people around them

When I post about head/heart/gut, I am neither being strictly metaphorical, nor am I making a claim about where processing happens. The difference is in whether I'm talking about phenomenology or epistemology/science. • Phenomenology is the branch of philosophy that deals with first-person experience, which is useful for solving personal life problems. It overlaps with psychology. • Epistemology is branch of philosophy that deals with how information/knowledge flows and grows. It's a fundamental field that touches on everything, but it's closer to logic. So, to explain what I mean when I talk about head/heart/gut: Most processing indeed happens in the brain. While there are surprisingly as many neurones in our gut (200-600 million) than there are in a dog's brain (400-630 million, depending on breed¹), that doesn't necessarily mean there's any human-level thought going on in the gut. But whether there is or not is irrelevant to phenomenology. For example, there are only ~40,000 neurones in the human heart, which is about a third of the neurones in the brain of a fruit fly. Nevertheless, if you direct your attention to where you think your heart is, and ask yourself questions while attending to your sensations there², you will get different answers compared to if you are 'in your head' ignoring the body. In my posts, when I'm talking about personal psychology, what I'm usually doing is giving instructions for exploring phenomenology – which is the main way to access one's inexplicit knowledge. It is somewhat metaphorical in that: despite my knowing some anatomy, I don't think I could accurately say where my heart is. And sometimes phenomenologically it feels like my heart is in my belly; and I've totally done introspection on this belly-heart, and it helped me solve a personal problem. This kind of thing sounds bizarre, but is very normal in introspection practices. It is not metaphorical in that: when I talk about the heart or gut, I am referring to precise locations in the body where people tend to get introspective information. It does vary (including within a session), but for whatever reason³, inexplicit thinking is frequently tied with specific locations on the body – such that, the more you attend to body sensations, the easier it is to get insight about problems like why you feel reluctant to call your parents. In philosopher Eugene Gendlin's Focusing technique, you get insight by finding a descriptor word for a body sensation (say, in the belly) that fits it just right (like "tense"), and when you hit on something that feels right ("tense?... contracted?... more like constrained"), there's a physical give or relaxing or relief ("ahh yes that's it"), and/or a mental "oh!" ("I'm reluctant to call my parents because I feel like they're going to subtly judge my choices, and I feel constrained around them"). In this example, such a person isn't physically constrained – his parents aren't strapping him to a desk – but his felt sense⁴ is 'constrained'. Similarly, your heart might be perfectly intact while its 'felt sense' is one of breaking. But if you dissociate from your heart and ignore the sensations of your chest area, even though there's nothing wrong with it physically, it'll be harder to metabolise feelings and move on from a breakup. The fact that subjective introspection or phenomenology does have some relevance to physical locations and bodily processes is... uh, annoying. It would be nice if we worked more clearly like computers, where substrate doesn't matter because it's all computation anyway. (And maybe we do in the limit.) Finally, I want to note that this kind of introspection is a skill. Some people don't feel emotions as sensations in their body. Skill issue. I didn't have this skill before I trained it via the Focusing audiobook. I thought it was all metaphorical. I didn't know the body 'did processing' (however metaphorical or not that is – I didn't know there was a thing of 'listening with your body' that returned a ton of insights). Anyone can learn it. For some people, it takes a while. Some people need adjacent practices. Some people need someone experienced to walk them through it, or reflect back when they're doing it. It's like any skill. It's not mysterious, it's not a talent some people are gifted with, you don't need to be a certain kind of person to learn it. And just like all other skills, in order to learn it efficiently, your exact path will be unique to you. Footnotes 1. I got these numbers from a quick scan of papers. I only used the first google result for heart neurones, so I'm less confident in that number. 2. And especially if you can feel as if it's 'you', i.e. you feel your identity shift to your heart. (Not doing this can create a layer of meta discussion/observation that gets in the way of subtle introspection.) 3. There are a few different popular theories on this. Most of them are about nerve clusters: nerve plexuses; vagus nerve branches; enteric nervous system stuff; proprioceptive innervation. I expect this won't be fully understood until we understand consciousness. 4. Gendlin coined the term 'felt sense' to describe the physical sensation associated with (typically inexplicit or subconscious) mental content.