Glossary
Instrument
The embodied system through which you receive information: sensations, tension, warmth, breath, energy, emotion, openness, heaviness and other changes in the body. The instrument gives information before the mind explains it.
Signal
A change you notice in the instrument that carries information. A signal may be clear without being fully understood. It is information, not automatically an instruction to act. A signal is information. It does not have to flip the switch.
Current
The movement or direction that is already underway before another possibility appears. You may already be resting, writing, building, recovering, cooking or finishing something. Reading the current means noticing what is already moving before deciding what comes next.
Passenger / Conductor
Two positions of awareness, not fixed identities. The passenger follows the scenery, thoughts, interpretations and meanings that appear. The conductor stays present enough to receive reality and the instrument’s information, then chooses from there.
Track / Changing tracks / Switch / Sidetrack
Track: the direction or life track currently being lived. Changing tracks: a shift in position or awareness; another track becomes the lived reality. Switch: the choice point where the direction of travel can change. Sidetrack: a direction entered when an activated layer takes the switch rather than awareness consciously choosing it.
Direct experience / direct reality
What is actually sensed or observable before naming, interpretation and meaning are added: sound, colour, movement, temperature, pressure, smell, taste, touch, tension, warmth, weight and other immediate experience.
Making something out of something
The mind’s movement of turning received experience into labels, associations, interpretations, stories, meanings or predictions — and then sometimes forgetting that this translation was added after the experience itself.
Recognition
The moment you notice what is actually happening: a signal, an old setting, a story, a change of track, or the fact that attention has wandered. Recognition is the first shift because once something is seen, a different response becomes possible.
Original Decision
A decision made inside an experience that later becomes an unconscious basis for choices, identity and available directions.
Aspect
A capacity or part of yourself that belongs to you and can be available or excluded from your range of choice.
Unfinished Experience
An experience of which some mental, emotional or physical part was never fully received or lived through.
Emotional Structure
The recurring inner pattern beneath different outer situations: similar emotion, conclusion, impulse and response even when the scenery changes.
Corner of Right and Wrong
A fixed judgment that places a possibility so firmly in right or wrong that it becomes unavailable before it can actually be considered. Moving something out of the corner does not mean approving it; it means making choice possible again.
The Three Positions
Victim, perpetrator and bystander: three viewpoints used to understand an event more completely instead of remaining inside only one perception.
Acknowledgment
Not merely understanding what happened, but allowing yourself to experience what is actually present — mentally, emotionally and physically.
Acceptance
Allowing reality to be what it already is, without confusing acceptance with approval, agreement or choosing the same thing again.
Completion
When the unfinished mental, emotional and physical parts of an experience have become available enough that the old decision no longer has to keep doing its old job.
Integration
The stage where an excluded aspect becomes genuinely available in real life again, enlarging your range of choice.
Freedom
Having enough of yourself available to genuinely choose. Freedom is not doing whatever you want; it is having more than one response available and being able to choose from what is actually true for you rather than from an old prohibition or automatic protection.
Wallpaper
A belief, decision or setting that has been present for so long that it no longer looks like something you learned or decided. It simply feels like reality, personality, or “this is who I am.” Recognizing the wallpaper makes the setting visible again — and therefore changeable.
Staying with yourself
Remaining in contact with yourself and your own experience while life is happening, rather than leaving that connection to fix, fight, please, escape, control or disappear into what is happening around you. You can receive help, love and support and still stay with yourself.
Mental / Emotional / Physical Layers
Three ways an experience or change can become available. The mental layer recognizes and understands; the emotional layer carries what was felt and organized around the old position; the physical layer includes the body’s learned tension, posture, impulses, habits and responses. Understanding something mentally does not automatically mean the other layers have moved with it.
Tectonic Plates
A metaphor for a deep inner shift in which an underlying position changes and everything that had been organized around it has to find a new place. The realization may happen quickly while the emotional and physical consequences continue moving afterward.
Bed of Roses
The quality of attention with which you meet yourself: listening, allowing yourself to matter, and not abandoning yourself when life becomes uncomfortable. It is not a perfect circumstance or a particular place. The bed of roses can travel with you.
Emotional wave
A temporary movement of emotion and bodily experience that can rise, intensify, change and settle. A wave can change your state without automatically determining what you do.
Contact points
The places where the body is physically meeting present reality — feet on the floor, back against a wall, weight on a chair or mattress, hands touching something. Contact points give attention something directly observable to remain with while an emotional wave moves.
Making attention available
Giving an experience your attention without using attention to force, analyze, suppress or change it. Attention is available to notice and receive what happens next.
Steering
Consciously choosing direction after receiving the signal and reading what is actually here, rather than letting an automatic reaction, story or emotional peak determine the next move.
Projected Self
The identity formed from learned rules, expectations, adaptations and repeated choices that gradually come to feel like “this is simply who I am.” The Projected Self is not a false personality you consciously invented. It is the version of you that became familiar through what you learned about belonging, safety, approval, success and what someone like you is supposed to be.
Awareness
The part of you that can notice what is happening without automatically becoming what is happening. Awareness can receive the body’s signals, notice thoughts, recognize old settings and observe the reflection. Awareness can be in multiple places at the same time — with the body, the reflection, a thought, a sound or another part of present experience simultaneously.
Reflection
Everything outside yourself that you can experience through your outer senses in this moment. Everything you can see, hear, touch or physically feel, smell and taste belongs to the reflection. It is the directly perceivable world around you before interpretation, meaning or story is added to what you are experiencing.