This is a simple but powerful exercise, originally created by one of our coaches, Qiaochu Yuan, and then further adapted for this workshop.
Context: someone wrote on Twitter:
Feels like I’m going to spend the next decade untangling the difference between “what I want” and “what others have told me I should be wanting”
You can try two sentence stem completions:
- Say out loud “I should want…”
and let the sentence complete itself as many times as you can.
Notice how your body reacts to each completion - Repeat for “I actually want…”
If you find something that your body reacts strongly to then repeat it slowly and feel into it and notice what thoughts or feelings or images come up. the prompt may be too general so you can try narrowing by focusing your attention on one area of your life at a time
Question:
Oo this is interesting. If there’s no reaction from the body, does that mean that the “should” doesn’t really exist for you? (which is…good?) Is it possible that it exists, just that you just don’t have strong feelings, or don’t care much for it?
Response:
So, it’s tricky to tell the difference between “I didn’t react to this” and “I reacted to this and then suppressed the reaction”. I think that requires building some genuine skill at introspecting on short perceptual events, through e.g. meditation or similar.
Also, there are two different kinds of reaction you can try noticing:
- “yes that feels true”
- emotions like sadness, fear, anger
You’ll want to learn how to detect both of those.
To test how it feels to say things that feel true vs not, try out very neutral true vs false statements, e.g. noticing the difference between how you react to “the sky is blue” vs. “the sky is brown,” or looking at a chair and saying “that’s a chair” vs. “that’s a penguin”. Perhaps you have a sort of giggle at the false statement, or an awkward feeling in your hands.
For emotions, you could try pointing your attention at something you know tends to evoke a particular feeling for you, whether that’s recalling a memory (or a movie/book scene) or listening to a song. See how that feeling resonates in your body. It may be relatively undifferentiated, like maybe everything sort of feels like a hot sensation in your chest.