When babies start learning to talk, they don’t learn to consciously control every single tongue movement. Young children don’t learn to ride a bicycle by calculating the biomechanical force distribution in our muscle structures. Parents use simplified images and cues to teach.
In the movie The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi taught Daniel-san how to deflect a punch using the “wax on, wax off” analogy.
“Every concept we have is essentially nothing but a tightly packaged bundle of analogies… all we do when we think is to move fluidly from concept to concept — in other words, to leap from one analogy-bundle to another.”
- Douglas Hofstadter
Our mind works like a drum, we can absorb frequencies. These frequencies can be empathic, conceptual or in form of Tetris. When we play too much Tetris, our mind is likely to absorb these flashy images and start seeing everywhere falling blocks that need to be arranged. Even when we close our eyes and try to sleep. (And trust me, you don’t want even start playing Tetris while having a fever!) As the so-called Tetris effect shows, our mind absorbs patterns and aesthetics. In this way, when you communicate in the form of a metaphor, you preprocess it for the other person.
This phenomenon is well-known in Sport Psychology. In his book, “The Language of Coaching“, Nick Winkelman describes how learning by analogy is one of the most powerful ways how to coach professional sports athletes. Learning with analogies and metaphors helps athletes to stay in flow even in high-pressure situations. Coaches use cues like “Land soft like a cat!”, “Rise through the sprint like a jet taking off” to foster intuitive learning and execution.
A very similar method is used in improv theater to jump-start your intuition. A famous warm-up game is “As if“, where you let one of your limbs walk, talk & act. For example, you start to let your whole Being be possessed by your left elbow. How would your it talk & walk? How would your right eye walk and talk? How would your nose talk? You channel each of your body parts. What would your Self feel & look like as a:
machine
culture
political system
landscape?
We can also channel more abstract metaphors like silence: Listen to the silence around you, listen carefully & then write it down what the silence around your body, around your whole being speaks of. Or choose any object (e.g. your coffee cup) in your surrounding & listen with compassion to it. What does this object try to tell you? Listen to it and write it down. Listen to your emotional body, listen with compassion & patience. Then ask what your emotion would say if it was a pirate (or samurai?). Listen to it and write it down.
Our brains attune and couple during a conversation, synchronizing beyond and regardless of the content of the communication. Based on such interpersonal synchronization we create simulations of others in our minds. This so-called Embodied Simulation presents an implicit process that enables us to feel the actions, intentions, and emotions of others.
Based on this principle, absorbing the vibes of our idols (real or fictional) is a very powerful method for embodying desired qualities. You can use fictional characters that are wild mixed cocktails of reality or TV-based characters.
We can absorb the vibe of our idols that embody qualities that we would like to learn. First, we can dive into feeling them empathically, then we can start to move, speak & write under their spell. This can be done in front of the mirror with some music that carries the power of your inspiration. You can also watch videos that carry that certain flavor you want to manifest in you.
A beautiful way in order to embrace loving-kindness is to let a loving role model possess you. For example, how would the Dalai Lama talk? Feel it, allow the Dalai Lama to speak with your tongue. Feel his emotions and inner smile. Feel the warming piece in your belly. This is kind of technique can have similar effects to Metta Meditation (loving-kindness meditation).
In order to foster our empathy, you can also embody the feeling of a family member or friend. Feel them completely. How do they walk and talk? What feelings arise when you emulate your friend? What images arise in you? This exercise strengthens the perceived connection and understanding of their wavelength.
In psychology, this method is called “Learning by Analogies” and is not only shown highly effective for professional Sports athletes but also highly used for music pedagogy, theater training (in Improv as described above) but also in speech therapy.
A lot of stutterers suffer from being too self-conscious. This creates the conflict that they try to control their speech consciously which actually is much better performed by our subconscious and implicit knowledge. This effect fosters their stuttering even more because their whole awareness is filled with thoughts directed at effortful trying.
This makes their speaking much more robust against stressful situations. In the movie, "The King's Speech," the speech therapist puts headphones on the king and plays loud music to drown out the sound of his voice.
By letting the king’s own voice vanish in the background, he wasn't worried about each word and how it sounded and so enabled him to just talk.
By training this kind of speech we unlearn the habit of speaking with explicit effort and learn to trust our subconscious again. We learn step by step to trust ourselves again. In order to create more holistic attention, some speech therapists use cues like “Express the waves of the ocean with your speaking!“. The patient focuses on the metaphor allowing his or her intuition to take over.
Such metaphors are best embraced with all senses. For the most powerful impact, we can focus on a single easy-to-hold metaphor or internal image in your mind. The simpler the better. Personal relevance and simplicity are the secrets. This simplicity enables you to have a free awareness to stay flexible and open to creative insights. Further, this simplicity frees your awareness to expand toward the external environment. For the most transforming results, we can compress the message for our subconscious. Short and intuitive.
The most powerful cues and vibes are rich containers filled with sensory-motor and emotional information. In this way, a rich metaphor doesn't just capture one image, behavior, or emotion but contains multiple in the best case a whole role to jump in.
Feeling your sense of self overlapping and merging with the frequencies and tastes of other people, music or any other aesthetic can burst your old agencies and create new perspectives in you.
A very powerful way to crystalize and clarify styles and vibes is to contrast them. We can talk like an old-school Western hero first and then talk like Margareth Thatcher. Switch between them to feel their different tastes. In this repetition, you can sense the contrast of styles and express them more clearly.
The art is in finding the right analogy. For this, we need to open ourselves up to recognize what inspires us, what starts our internal fire of passion? What personal heroes inspire and catch your soul? What music touches your heart? We can collect a library of internal images, metaphors and inspiring visions. We can create the ingredients for cooking our own shamanic ceremonies that uplift our spirits.
By building those ceremonies, we can enter new forms of agencies. We are giving away responsibility from the ego to our intuition. In this sense, spontaneity means devotion.
Improv teacher Keith Johnstone used rules to remove the fear of failure by redirecting responsibility.
"I tell my improvisors to follow the rules and see what happens and to not feel in anyway responsible for the material that emerges."
~ Keith Johnstone, Impro, p. 111
By focusing on a rule like “Speak in a whispering voice!“ we distract ourselves from trying to control what we say. Our explicit effort is directed toward focusing on the simple rule, while the rest of our mental capacity is free to listen to our partner on stage and let our intuition compose answers. As soon as our awareness is absorbed by the scene & the gates are open into our subconscious we can let go of the rule & just let ourselves be possessed by the whole scene which is happening. By the vibes, we get from our friends on the stage, from the music in the background, from the feeling in our bodies.