11: However, you ever notice how viewing a thing from different angles completely transforms your understanding of said thing?
So it is with moving your consciousness around your field of awareness, too.
Viewing things from outside the body is so different from the inside view.
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12: What I discovered when my anchor point jaunted to outside my head, was that my behavior became very detached, disembodied, and incredibly calm.
Inside the body there was turmoil, many powerful feelings vying for attention, but outside, relatively little was going on.
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13: Instead of feeling trapped in a feedback loop of the kind you sometimes experience when deep in suffering, "I" could think, talk, act as if very little was going on.
It was interesting to note that from this perspective, my self-interest was a lot clearer, but less personal.
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14: While not greatly moved on an emotional level by anything going on, I was very much receiving signals as to what was necessary for me.
This unnerved the person I was with at the time so much that I slipped back into my body just to prove I could... and exploded with rage.
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15: It wasn't that the feelings that had prompted this little act of dissociative rebellion were gone, but rather they were just body-local.
When viewed from inside the body, they were still very much the dominant force in awareness. From outside, not so much.
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16: However, more than being just a simple tool for dissociation, out-of-body awareness had a lot of other strange side-effects.
I became deeply attuned to sensations in my environment. I could pick up those kinds of sounds that people hear without really hearing, for example.
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17: I noticed that, while my own emotional sensations were very low-resolution, other people's visible body language was much more salient.
This caused some unnervingly odd side-effects like feeling like I was reading minds. I could *see* the emotional processing on other faces.
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When I'm teaching Alexander Technique I often unnerve people by pointing out exactly what is going through their mind at the time.
Whether it's some kind of processing, that their awareness is closed off in a certain direction or that they are off somewhere else.
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That's very interesting.
Where would you say your own anchor, to use my own terminology, is located when you are doing this?
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In my example my awareness stays firmly 'here', so to speak.
Part of the work as a teacher is to notice the effect the student has on your own subjective experience, the pushes and pulls, and to leave yourself alone while noticing changes in the student.
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Getting caught up or in some way dragged along by the experience of the student means I'm no longer able to be useful - I'm on the same rollercoaster they are.
My role is to provide an external anchor – an awareness true north in the here and now – that they can hook onto.
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