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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Sure. Spending all your time inside someone else's body is very destabilizing. It's like trying to read on a screen when someone else is constantly changing what's on the monitor.
I found that being outside both my own body and the other person's body made me sensitive to both.
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I'll typically bounce between awareness of someone else's body language or my own.
Either excessively self-aware or excessively other-aware.
Outside, it's both.
(Side-note: I am not very neurotypical, so can't attest to what a common experience of this is like.)
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Yeah there's a place you can get to with this where it's both:
- you and them and the world
- inside and outside are the same
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