The Watcher Exercise excerpted from Martha Beck’s book, “The Four Day Win.”
EXERCISE: THE WATCHER, THE DICTATOR, AND THE WILD CHILD
“In Chapter 6, I asked you to recall the set of controlling, bitter thoughts with which your mind tries to lash you to various weight-loss regimens. These words, like all verbal thinking, are produced by the computer-self. You saw how your creature-self reacts, by panicking and breaking the rules.
In this chapter, we’ll picture these rule-making and rule-breaking parts of you as humans. Tiny humans. We’ll call them the Dictator and the Wild Child.
The instructions below may feel odd, but I want you to follow them anyway because of the way they affect your brain. First, hold out your right hand, palm up. Imagine a 2-inch-tall version of yourself in a military uniform, with a whip in one hand and a gun in the other, stomping around in your palm, shrieking deeply personal insults and commanding you to lose weight. This is the Dictator.
Now hold up your left palm (you may have to put down this book for a minute) and picture your Wild Child there: 2 inches tall, dressed in skins and bark, covered with scars, waiting for an opportunity to escape or subvert the Dictator’s brutal control.
Watch until you can see them both clearly in your mind’s eye. Now, while watching these two mini-you’s, I want you to see that as dysfunctional as they may be, both of them are essentially good.
The Dictator wants you to be healthy and beautiful. It gets frantic about your weight for the same reason you might freak out if you saw a beloved pet wandering into traffic. It screams and yells, pens you in or drags you around—anything to keep you from a horrible fat fate.
On the other hand, the Wild Child is the part of you that evolved to avoid starvation and captivity. It panics when the Dictator berates, shames, and tries to control it. It knows the Dictator is planning to starve it. So it’s not surprising that the instant the Dictator is weakened by stress, hunger, or environmental chaos, the Wild Child leaps into action and eats like a junkyard dog.
Think through the well-meaning motivations of both your Dictator and your Wild Child, until you really understand that within their limited perspectives they’re doing their very best.
Then offer them both kindness.
One useful method is to silently repeat these phrases from the classic “loving-kindness” meditation: “May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from suffering.” It may help to set the book aside again and close your eyes. Continue offering these good wishes while visualizing both the Wild Child and the Dictator until you genuinely mean it, until you can feel compassion toward both sides of yourself.
When you get there, consider the following question. Who are you? The only reason you can “see” and offer kindness to both Dictator and the Wild Child is that you’re not either one of them. You’ve moved into a third realm of consciousness, which resides, literally, in a different part of your brain. Call it the Watcher.
This is a subtle transition. You may feel it as a slight sense of loosening and relief, the psychological equivalent of taking off a tight, itchy piece of clothing. Or it might feel revolutionary, an epiphany that changes you permanently the first time you feel it....
You may not feel this at first, or it may be so inconspicuous that you don’t even notice it. Just persist with the exercise, offering the Dictator and Wild Child best wishes for at least a full minute at a time (it often takes about 50 seconds for a beginner).
When you can clearly imagine both sides of your dieting self, without identifying completely with either of them, consider another question: Holding this mental position, how do you feel about food?
While both the Dictator and Wild Child make you want to overeat, your Watcher self is not nearly as compulsive. It doesn’t feel either rigidly controlled or totally out-of-control. In fact, according to some medical psychologists, it’s physiologically impossible for your mind to stay locked in a war of control when you’re engaging its ability to generate compassion and appreciation. It is a place of great inner peace.
Since it’s also the only mindset from which you can make yourself an effortlessly lean person, I call it “the place of Thinner Peace.” True, this is a roll-your-eyes pun, but it gives me a memorable label for a distinct inner sensation. I know from brain mapping that this is literally the feeling of my brain releasing anxiety.”
This is a great exercise.
Edited by: SKIRUNNER1 at: 3/18/2018 (18:55)
