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.

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

A direction you are currently living or choosing. Changing tracks means changing direction. A new possibility is not automatically a reason to change tracks; the change can be made consciously when new information arrives.

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.