Divide and Conquer – Relating to our Mind/Body experience and Difficult Emotions

My teacher Shinzen Young often uses this phrase to identify our basic strategy when building internal awareness of sensory phenomena (anything we think, feel, notice in the body-mind.) Having this intention to ‘divide and conquer’, can be a great aid in bringing mindfulness to difficult emotional or physical experiences. Breaking down our experiences into their sensory parts or pieces essentially creates some detachment and takes a lot of power out of what could otherwise feel like a very overwhelming experience.

There are essentially four realms or domains of sensory experience that we can tune into at any time. These are (using the terminology of Shinzen Young) Touch, Feel, Image, and Talk.

Touch space is spatially located in the physical body. This space is defined as encompassing purely physical phenomena. For instance, an itchiness on you right toe, or pain in our knee.

Feel space is also spatially located in the physical body, but could be said to also include the subtle or energetic body. Feel type experiences are those that are physical sensations, but also have emotional content. Say for instance that you have a tightness in your chest and there is awareness that this is anxiety, that is Feel. If it were simply a pain in the chest with no undertone or flavor of emotion it would simply be touch. So to discriminate between a Touch and a Feel type sensation it is necessary to discern if there is emotional content or not. Often we will each have our own unique feel centers. For me, much of my Feel occurs at or around the center of my chest.

Image space resides spatially just in front of or behind the eyes. For me it is slightly above and in front. For each person the location of these sensory phenomena may differ slightly. Image space is where we ’see’ the visual component of thought occurs. Say you are thinking about your partner or a friend. Chances are if you check in with Image space you would notice a visual representation of that friend or partner projected upon your image space. Image space is almost like a blank screen upon which we project our visual thoughts.

Talk space is spatially located between the ears. I locate mind towards the back of my head and between the ears. Again, this may vary from person to person. Talk space is where the verbal component of our thoughts occur. If we are scared and we become aware of the activity of in talk space we may find that we are repeating to ourselves something like ‘I am scared, I am scared’ or creating some narrative about the frightening situation. If you were to say to yourself silently, ‘One, Two, three, four….’ and count to ten. The area in your head where you ‘hear’ the these numbers being spoken is Talk space.
So why is this important?

To be truly mindful, in a sort of global way, we would need to be simultaneously aware of all four of these spaces as we experience them. For most of us this is impossible. Particularly if what we are experiencing is a difficult, disturbing, or overwhelming thought or emotional pattern. Instead we will use these sensory spaces to divide up our experience piecemeal.

Let’s take a look at what might be going on in these areas if you are experiencing sadness.

Touch: sensations of watery eyes, tears rolling down your cheeks

Feel: A throbbing knot in your chest, pulsating in and out

Image: the picture of your friend who you just had an argument with

Talk: ‘He or she is never going to forgive me, I’m a bad person, I should have hurt him/her, I’m no good….etc. etc.’

The best way to begin using the Divide and Conquer approach to your experience is to set aside a time to do some sitting mindfulness practice.

1. Choose a sensory space to pay attention to: Touch, Feel, Image, Talk

2. find your comfortable upright seated position and devote a certain amount of time to the practice, 10, 15, 20 minutes or more.

3. Spend a few minutes, maybe 5 or so attending to your breath to settle the body/mind. Anapanasati practice, as explained in a previous post.
4. Begin to ‘tune in’ to your chosen space by finding its location in the body. Experiment until you find the place where your selected sensory space occurs. This may take a while to locate. Try to just remain present and patiently and mindfully aware to whatever part of your body the sensory space occurs in. (For instance, Talk space would be in the head, between the ears.)

5. If you find you have wandered from the space you have committed to exploring gently bring your self back.

6. Notice what is going on in your chosen sensory space. Say you chose Image space, notice at first nothing there a sense of blankness, then after a few moments you may notice an image begin to arise and fade away, or perhaps a stream of images much like a movie. Just be present with whatever arises, or does not arise. We are not attempting to make anything happen here.

7. Very often there will be sensory phenomena occurring in 3 or 4 of the sensory spaces at once. You may be distracted by ‘Talk’ when you have committed to sensing Image space or you may feel a ‘Touch’ (a pain or sensation in the body) when you have committed to exploring Talk space. If you find you have left your chosen domain, gently bring yourself back again and again.

8. Allow yourself to return to the breath as the object of mindfulness for the last 2 minutes or so of your practice, and end after that.

This is a simple way to bring mindfulness to the component parts of your experience. It is highly therapeutic in that you will over time find that a certain amount of spaciousness occurs in each of these sensory spaces making a difficult experience less painful, and we are able to observe with detachment.

Often my clients report that painful phenomena, when focused on with mindfulness will quickly break up or fade away. Sometimes the phenomena grow stronger or stay the same, but over time these difficult and painful experiences lose their power as we relate to them and become familiar.

We also grow much more accustomed, and develop insight into what we may define as ‘anger’,’sadness,’ loneliness,’ isolation, or any other negative emotional experience, making it less painful. We realize that our emotions are not as big, real, painful, and scary as we think they are. Instead we see that they, like all of our experiences, are just a collection of visual and verbal thoughts, feelings and sensations.

Painful and difficult emotions are like a tightly bound knot in the body/mind. Mindfulness creates space and loosens tension. The knot over time unwinds, and healing occurs.