I enjoy doing this one exercise with my clients and myself that identifies what shifts an experience to become easy and natural to do.
It’s a quick exercise of examining memories and laying out key characteristics of your sensory experience. One part of that is getting into how you look at something.
How does this connect to making a big problem shrink?
What you can reverse engineer from knowing what’s easy and natural to do is what makes something more overwhelming and difficult to do.
And, two things that arise are this. The size and location of what you see shifts your experience.
Here’s an easy way to experience this shift for yourself.
Slow down. Take a breath and then think of some issue that’s currently disturbing you.
With the sincere aim to learn, get a clear picture in your mind’s eye.
Slowly, make the image of what you see very small and far away from you. In fact, even step out of the experience totally like you’re looking from the outside.
Jot down the exact sensations and feelings that arise when you make this shift.
Sometimes, when I have unnecessary distractions in my mind, I do this.
Like I was eating my lunch and a whole story started running about some new project. With alertness, I can recognize this is not a positive thing. Eating a story about a project.
So, I started closing out the story. Literally making it small, moving it away from me, and stepping outside of it. This gave me focus to concentrate on the eating and relieved the pressure of the distraction.
I don’t propose this as a permanent solution.
It’s a quick way to relieve pressure in a stressful situation. And, we need both.
Temporary and permanent solutions.
In case you’d enjoy another approach, you can read more here.
It’d be great to hear what your instant experience was with this shift of literally shrinking your problem, moving it away from you, and stepping out of it.
It’s an insightful experience isn’t it.
Peace.
Jennifer
