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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INTERESTING
So if I get what you are saying, you are noticing when something brushes past or impacts against your established locus?
Any faint whiffs of "huh" or "wow" or "uh"?
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When the student is with me in the present moment, shall we say, it feels like this. (QT)
As soon as they go off somewhere else there is a tangible "thing that this feels like", which feels like some kind of modification of my own experience.
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1/ I've become fascinated by the experience of what I call "shared attention spaces".
This is where people all have their attention on the same thing and it feels like they're having a shared experience.
We can explore what they feel like when their spell gets broken.
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