I am thrilled to share an advanced truth-seeking talk-therapy technique that I’ve used in my practice for over 35 years. Please be gentle and don’t expect yourself or your Dyad partner to be proficient immediately in this technique. You will receive loads of feedback from your dyad session, so be gentle with yourself.
This technique requires focus, mindfulness, present awareness of your recipient, and it takes loads of practice.
Your goal is not to solve anyone’s problems but to detect when you or your Dyad partner have moved away from the Feeling Mind to the Thinking Mind. Gently invite each other back into the Feeling Mind.
Various schools of thought categorise dantian, or “energy centres,” differently. Three main dantian are typically emphasised in the following way:
Notice how you feel when migrating from one state (Middle Dantian/Feeling mind) to another (Upper Dantian/Thinking mind).
Please pay close attention to these subtle shifts and differences in your dyad partner when they migrate from one Dantian to another.
It’s OK if you are wrong. Don’t let ego stop you from being right or wrong!
In the Sacred Witness role, we are at the threshold of higher information. Your ego may want to make everything about ‘you’ and your greatness or your smallness. Get out of the way, and serve well.
This mental and somato emotional cognitive technique’s gift is that it creates a process to identify, unpack, repair and heal mental and emotional patterns that cause devastation and suffering. It opens a pathway to recognize how painful events are not the cause of our suffering. Our struggles are born of reactive assumptions about these events. We create a new skewed narrative based on these assumptions.
One of this technique’s most critical actions is your compassionate timing when interrupting your Recipient. These are at pivotal moments that you discern at the time. Your job is to gently nudge them deeper into their inquiry with as few words as possible.
Consider this timing as a metaphor for entering into the children’s game of double-dutch skipping.
Synchronise with your Recipient to know exactly when to jump in and nudge their inquiry process along to the next phase.
Over time, you will get better and better at observing and listening to your Recipient.
Your single most potent skill is discernment. Notice when your Recipient is in her thinking mind. Guide her back to her feeling-mind with the simple suggestion of asking her how she feels about what she just shared. Continue to ask her what she is feeling. Invite your Recipient to resist the habit of looking up and into her brain for feelings. She will never find them there. Guide her to connect to her heart. The goal is to break through the trap-door at the bottom of their somato-emotional process. When they open that trap door, they liberate their awareness of their genuine fear. Subsequently, they are ripe to transition to the final phase, stage 3, and discover their truth.
You can’t get to the truth until you know the fear. The truth shall set you free.
In Stage 1, the goal is to keep a line of inquiry going with your Recipient gently. Hold a safe space for them to feel their way to the bottom of their emotions with clear intention. Become riveted to their process and never interrupt them or make suggestions.
You can shut down the process instantly by moving into a nurturing counselling role. Even if you are not comfortable with someone expressing emotions, do not start to offer comfort with words or gestures. You will shut down their process.
Your goal is to help your Recipient reach the summit of their truth. Stick to the technique and remain grounded and firm with them while moving through their maze of suffering until they are ready to move to Stage 2 and confront their fear.
You will know you have reached the bottom of the barrel when your Recipient begins to experience a subtle shift. If you are not in your ‘feeling mind’, this shift is easily missed, so pay close attention and keep your heart open. It is helpful to know mindsets. In this role as the Sacred Witness, compassion is the keystone. The tricky part is knowing when to act.
This shift from feelings to the edge of fear could look like a sudden increase of emotions, a breathing pattern change, fidgeting, escaping the process, or futility. It is always their choice if they want the process to stop. It can get intense at times. Gently encourage them to keep going. I say something like this: “I know this is hard… Let’s keep moving; you are so close.”
Keep going until they reach this transitional point where they are at the threshold of their fear. It is palpable. Then and only then is it time to move to Stage 2, where you ask your Recipient, “What are you afraid of?”
If you move to Stage 2 too hastily, your Recipient will not reach their truth. They will end up having to cycle back to Stage 1.
That is ok! Remember, this process is a journey. I can’t stress this enough, so please keep going until their truth is liberated.
Once your Recipient is well and truly in Stage 2, you can invite them to look square in the face of their fear. There is a trap door at the bottom of this process where fear is waiting to be revealed.
You can’t get to the truth until you know the fear. The truth shall set you free.
Stage 3 arrives quickly on the heels of asking your Recipient what they want! The moment when they connect to their truth.
This stage is about inviting the voice in your Recipient’s head to speak out loud uninhibitedly and therefore hear themselves in this limited state. The Recipient will either shut down their emotions logically or move into stress. A lack of information and or a quality self-connection will lead to being triggered and stuck until the Recipient is willing to delve into their emotions to find relief and understand oneself.
The Recipient may not be listening very well, stuck behind blind-spots, old patterns, old limiting beliefs and trauma. They are editing thoughts and words quickly with their thinking-mind processor. Their thinking style is over-analytical. They resist an inner curiosity to connect to new information, look at their fears, or battle their anger (the flip side of fear). They are “emotional reasoning,” where they believe what they are feeling is proof of reality. Their monkey-mind self-critic kills self-curiosity or keeps the Recipient in an apparent disconnected stupefied or numb state, and self-judgemental talk narrates events with assumptions.
The transitional phase between stages 1 and 2 is the hardest part of this journey because your Recipient’s protective resistance activates from feeling unsafe at that moment. Feeling unsafe starts the GateKeeper’s defensive strategy of circulating between the feeling-mind and the thinking-mind. The Recipient resists the heart of the matter, and the GateKeeper supports this reaction. The Recipient will often need to oscillate from Stage 1 to Stage 2 and bounce back into Stage 1 before deeper learning unfolds.
Surrendering to the feeling mind helps to fast-track this process of resistance. It also opens the door to realizing this is a healthy process that could lead to liberation from suffering. It deals with the issue at a safe distance, made safe by the technique’s gentle inquiry. When the Recipient is problem-solving focused, the technique’s inquiry process gently persuades the Recipient to transition from the thinking-mind to the feeling-mind often repeatedly until they well and truly arrive at Stage 2 feeling their fear.
This stage tends to arrive on a wave of emotions. The Recipient may slam into anger and or fear, but this is all a good sign. It means they are about to listen and become curious about their inner and outer world. They start to recognize their emotional justifications and the overarching beliefs they were clinging to and don’t have enough integrity or conviction or truth to validate their assumptions. The magic moment arises when they move through fear into reality. It’s glorious to witness.
The Recipient’s emotions have been exhausted; stress and anxiety have collapsed into surrender to their truth. Your Recipient arrives at deep listening, gentle, loving self-talk, a deep curiosity about self, becoming open to feedback from your innate wisdom, coming into the awareness of their best values, becoming quieter mentally and tuning into the body-mind experience. The quest for self-knowledge explodes at the fundamental level of their being.
Sacred Witness: Name the pain or problem
Sacred Witness Script:
“How does it make you feel (insert the pain or problem your Recipient shared).”
Repeat and finish this statement – “I feel….”
Recipient:
“I feel…”
Sacred Witness:
“And how does that make you feel?”
Repeat and finish this statement – “I feel….”
Recipient:
“I feel…”
Pro Tips:
Transition point – Edge of Fear State – When your Recipient first encounters their fear, often they retreat quickly to the circular pattern of the thinking-mind, making it necessary to invite them back to their feeling-mind.
Sometimes going in circles indicates a Higher Self Guardian on duty.
Sacred Witness:
“What are you afraid of?”
Repeat and finish this statement – “I feel….”
Recipient:
“I am afraid that….”
Sacred Witness:
“And how does that make you feel? Repeat and finish this statement – I feel….“
Recipient:
“I feel…”
Sacred Witness:
“And how does that make you feel? Repeat and finish this statement – I feel….”
Recipient:
“I feel…”
Pro Tips:
Transition point – Their process begins to shift on the edge of the fear state.
The Recipient may not yet have revealed their fear, but it is suddenly palpable and begging for release.
Sacred Witness:
“What are you afraid of?”
Repeat and finish this statement – “I am afraid that….”
Recipient:
“I am afraid that….”
Sacred Witness:
“What do you really want?”
(Hold an unconditional intention for your Recipient to connect with their truth)
Recipient:
“All I really want is….”
Pro Tips:
You were moving from knowing your Truth to living your Truth by recognizing its relationship to your authenticity.
Sacred Witness:
“How does your life change when you show up as the AUTHENTIC YOU?”
“Repeat and finish this statement: My Life changes -“
Make an affirming declaration of truth.
Recipient:
“When I show up as my authentic self, my life changes in that I….”