Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life

by Steven C. Hayes

  In instructing you to do this, we aren’t trying to make the point that anything is possible, or that life is without limits. And we certainly aren’t trying to ridicule the story of your life, as you normally think about it. Rather, our point is that (a) the facts in our stories don’t determine the stories in which they appear, despite what our minds tell us. Many stories are possible. And (b) the facts are significant because of the stories they are part of. This means that what really can make a difference is something that might be capable of being changed. We know the facts. They will not change. But the story about the facts, and the self-conceptualization resulting from that story, are aspects of our lives we’ve been prevented from changing because of our attachment to and fusion with them. Perhaps that (our story and our attachment to it) can change.

  The exciting part about seeing your own conceptualized self as something you hold on to arbitrarily is that truly new narratives may be possible that are, right now, outside of the story currently being told. But it can be frightening to open up to possibilities that go beyond your conceptualized self. If you are not your thoughts, then who are you?

  When you let go of an attachment to your conceptualized self, you are like a child, open to whatever is possible and willing to find out what is. But first, you must let go of your attachment to your conceptualized self. Only the bravest among us would do this without first figuring out a place to land psychologically. For that reason, we will return to the problem of the conceptualized self later in this chapter, after we’ve identified a critical ally within ourselves.

  The Self as a Process of Ongoing Self-Awareness

  Ongoing self-awareness is your fluid, continuous knowledge of your own experiences in the present moment. It is like the conceptualized self, in that you are applying verbal categories to the self. It is unlike it because instead of being summary, evaluative categories, the categories are descriptive, nonevaluative, present, and flexible: “Now I am feeling this.” “Now I am thinking that.” “Now I am remembering this.” “Now I am seeing that.”

  There is a lot of evidence that this sense of self is important for healthy psychological functioning. For example, people who can’t identify what they experience emotionally are said to have “alexithymia.” This clinical deficit correlates with a wide range of psychological problems. And, you will not be surprised to learn, it correlates highly with experiential avoidance (Hayes, Strosahl, et al. 2004) A person unable to observe and describe her own present experience is someone who is deaf and blind to what is going on in the moment.

  We’ve been taught to speak of our personal histories and current predispositions by locating and identifying what we are feeling. For example, a child will be asked, “Are you hungry?” by way of asking, “Will you eat food if I give you some?” Very young children sometimes have a hard time answering this question accurately because their sense of self is still developing, and they haven’t yet learned what their emotions and feelings mean. As a result, they may say they are not hungry, and then ask for food minutes later; or they may say they are hungry and then pick at the food they are given because, in fact, they are not. (Every parent knows about this type of “disconnect” with young children.)

  Making contact with the present moment and the experiences it produces is more likely when fusion and avoidance are undermined. Chronic emotional avoiders do not know what they are feeling because not knowing is itself a powerful form of avoidance.

  This more fluid sense of self as an ongoing process of awareness is also diminished when attachment to the conceptualized self dominates; noticing reactions that do not accord with the dominant story becomes threatening to the conceptualized self. For example, a person who is supposedly “always helpful and sweet” will have a hard time admitting to feelings or thoughts that are angry, jealous, or resentful as they emerge in the present moment. Defusion and acceptance naturally support the development of the self as an ongoing process of awareness.

  The Observing Self

  It’s likely that the observing self is the sense of self you are the least familiar with verbally, despite it being the most important aspect of selfhood, and one that’s been with you for a very long time. There are many names for it: self as context, the transcendent self, the spiritual sense, the no-thing self, and the observing self are just a few. We use the latter term in this book.

  Unlike the conceptualized self or the self as an ongoing process of self-awareness, the observing self is not an object of verbal relations. That is why we “know” less about it. The observing self is not a content-based sense of self that can be described directly. Nevertheless, the theory that underlies ACT suggests that the observing self emerges as a result of language use and is critical to psychological health.

  When you were very young and still acquiring language, you learned to describe events from a consistent perspective. When you described what you ate, or saw, or did, you learned that you had to report relative to that consistent perspective.

  Consider this question: Where is “here?” Very young children have a hard time with this idea. “Here” is not a specific site like an address or a corner of the room; rather, it is the place from which observations are made. Any other place is “there.”

  Consider this question: When is “now”? Very young children have a hard time with this notion, as well. “Now” is not a specific time like Monday or 6 PM, rather it is the time from which observations are currently being made. Any other time is “then.”

  In the same way, consider this question: Where is “I”? Very young children also have a hard time with this final idea. “I” is also a place from which observations are currently made. Observations made from another perspective are “you,” not “I.”

  These verbal relations are deictic, which means to point out or to show. Deictic relations can be learned only by demonstration because they are not material things. They are relative to an observational perspective.

  The sense of a place from which conscious observations are made is a strange sense because, for the person experiencing it, it has no known boundaries. You can never consciously know the limits, because all verbal knowing is with reference to you as a knower. Go back in your memory to your early childhood. Think of a memory. It can be either a fond memory or a painful one. Relive this memory for a few moments. See if you can connect with a sense of looking out at the world from behind your eyes as they were then. Now answer this question and see if you can get to it experientially (not just logically): Who was it who saw those events as they were unfolding?

  Now answer another question: Who was it who ate your breakfast this morning? Picture breakfast and once again see if you can connect with a sense of looking out at the world from behind your eyes.

  Now notice who is reading this book. Again see if you can connect with a sense of looking out at the world from behind your eyes. Notice that you are here in this moment reading, and notice too that the person behind these reading eyes was there when you ate breakfast this morning and was there when you were a child. You’ve been you your whole life, though there have been many changes in your thoughts, your feelings, your roles, and your body. At the very moment that you gaze at these lines of ink on paper, notice who is gazing.

  Hello.

  You have been you ever since you showed up in early childhood as a conscious human being, and your infantile amnesia fell away (about the same time that these deictic frames of I/you; here/there; and now/then made their appearance). This “I” is what some call the observing self (Deikman 1982). It is a sense that transcends both time and space, not literally but experientially since this sense is everywhere you go. Whatever happens to you, it is this “I” that will be part of your verbal knowledge of that experience.

  This “I” is boundless in that you cannot experience anything that you know about (or to be very precise, that you know you know about) without “you-as-perspective” being in it. Why? Because without this sense of locus there is no continuity of c
onsciousness itself; there is no psychological perspective from which to view what is known.

  If this sense of self is experientially boundless (that is, as experienced by the person experiencing), it is also not experienced fully as a thing. That is unique. Almost every event we can describe is experienced as a thing: as an event with known boundaries. Yet here, right in the middle of verbal knowledge itself, is a “no-thing” self. We may believe this sense of perspective has boundaries (e.g., we believe we are sometimes unconscious), but we cannot directly experience them (e.g., we are not conscious of those times). Here, right in the middle of verbal knowledge itself, is an event without distinction. Events without distinction include no-thing (or as our language community came to write it later “nothing”) and they include “every-thing.” That’s it. That is why Eastern philosophies call this sense of self “everything/nothing” and point to it with odd sayings like “Wherever you go, there you are.”

  You may have started feeling some contact with your observing self when you worked through the defusion exercises in the last chapter. You may have been able to watch your thoughts float down the stream of your mind without becoming attached to them. But who is the watcher who observes you thinking your thoughts? Don’t try to answer this by turning this sense of self into a thing. That is precisely what it is not. You know about this sense of self indirectly, for example, by a sense of calm transcendence, or peacefulness. For some, this sense can feel frightening because it may feel as though they are falling into nothingness. And in a nonpejorative sense, that is quite true.

  It is this observing self that we hope to bring you in closer contact with in this part of the book because it is the place from which it is fully possible to be accepting, defused, present in the moment, and valuing. It is immutable and solid, not because it is a thing that does not change, but precisely because it is no-thing at all.

  BEING THE OBSERVING SELF

  Getting in contact with the observing self is a matter of experience. There isn’t a simple formula we can give you to locate this greater sense of consciousness and presence. The route is, and must be, indirect for the reason we just discussed: this sense of self is not a thing (at least, not as experienced from within). What we can do is provide exercises and metaphors that will help point you in the right direction. For most of you this should be enough, because this is a sense that has been with you your whole life. It just was overwhelmed by the content of consciousness. Thus, we are neither trying to establish something nor to discover something. It is more as though we are trying to remember something we know full well, like remembering a song that you’ve been humming in the back of your mind for years.

  The Chess Metaphor

  Imagine a chessboard stretching out to infinity in all directions. On this stage different pieces start to enter. Some are black and some are white, just as in the game of chess. They come close to the center of the board and they begin to align themselves into two separate teams on the different spaces of the board.

  Now imagine that each of the pieces represents a different emotion, cognition, memory, or sensation. Some of the pieces are positive, such as happiness, joy, pleasureful feelings, and loving memories. They hang out together as a team. And some of the pieces represent your pain, fears, and failings. Perhaps you are deeply depressed, or perhaps you have been diagnosed with an anxiety condition. See if it isn’t true that the negative thoughts and feelings associated with these conditions hang out together as a team, as well, but this team is quite different from the positive team.

  Now imagine that the various pieces start doing battle. It is a long, bloody war and pieces are being hewn and smashed to bits all around you. This battle has been going on for years. The black pieces are fighting with the white pieces edging in for the advantage while the white pieces desperately retaliate, trying with all their might not to be taken over by the enemy. They must fight because from the perspective of each “team,” the other is life-threatening.

  In the introduction, we began this book with a similar scene, but you yourself were in the battle. We suggested that this book was about learning how to leave the battle, not learning how to win the war:

  Unknown to [that] person, however, is the fact that, at any time, he or she can quit the battlefield and begin to live life now. The war may still go on, and the battlefield may still be visible. The terrain may look very much as it did while the fighting was happening. But the outcome of the war is no longer very important and the seemingly logical sequence of having to win the war before beginning to really live has been abandoned.

  When you first read this, it was probably just an abstract idea to you. Now you are further along, and you can begin to consider the possibility that it was only an illusion that took you into battle in the first place. You’ve been acting as if your favorite emotional and cognitive team must win this chess match. But that makes sense only if the white pieces are you and the black pieces are not. In that posture, you must fight because such polar opposites are direct threats to your survival.

  If “I’m a bad person” is 100 percent true, then “I’m a good person” is destroyed, and vice versa. Thus, leaving or abandoning the battle is not an option. It is a death sentence. The war must go on and you must win it, because you’ve jumped on the back of the White Queen and nominated her to be you. She (and thus you) cannot afford to stop fighting.

  But suppose none of these pieces is you? In this scenario, who are you? You can’t be the chess player: that is still someone trying to win the war and defend certain pieces over others. There is only one part of the metaphor that is in contact with all of the pieces. If you are not the pieces—if you can still be you and not have a huge investment in the outcome of the war—then who are you?

  Being Who You Are, Not Who You’re Not

  What if you were the board on which this game was being played? Think about that. How does that fit for you? What if you aren’t defined by your pain, but rather you are the conscious container for it. What would this mean for you?

  To start seeing matters from the perspective of the board is to get in touch with the observing self. At the level of the board, all of the pieces are held as they play out their endless game. There are only two things the board can do while staying at “board level”: (1) hold the pieces (all of them) and (2) take them all along for the ride as the board itself moves on. In order to move certain pieces around, you must go from who you are (a conscious human being aware of all of these reactions, that is, from board level) to who you are not (identifying solely with specific emotions, thoughts, or memories and not others). Said another way, you never really were in this war to begin with. It was all an illusion.

  The next exercise will help you to momentarily contact your observing self. We say “momentarily” because the observing self cannot be looked at, by definition. For one thing, it is not experienced as a thing. For another, if you could look at it, who would be looking? You can only catch glimpses, like an afterglow. But at another level, wordlessly, you’ve been present all along, as concrete and certain as the chair you are sitting in or the floor beneath your feet. The battle finally will recede as you settle in to the vitality that comes from being who you experience yourself to be (the observing self) without demanding evidence from your mind that would consist of seeing your observing self. The battle can begin to recede in importance when you operate from the basis of who you are, rather than who you are not.

  EXERCISE: Experientially, I’m Not That

  This is a meditation exercise. The instructions are simple so you will be able to memorize them and then do the exercise without having to look back at the book. Simply get seated comfortably in a chair in front of a small desk near a wall. There should be several objects on the desk. Take a couple of deep breaths and then start by looking at a spot on the wall while breathing deeply and regularly. Keep your eyes on one spot for at least ten to fifteen seconds or thereabouts.

  At some point after that (don’t rush it)
, it will occur to you experientially that you are looking at the wall, and thus at an experiential level (in some sense of the term) you are not the wall. This is a distinction that is available in direct experience. We are not talking about the verbal belief that you are not the wall. If that were the point, we wouldn’t need a meditative exercise since few of us believe we are the wall.

  If your mind begins chattering to you about the truth or falsity of this belief (“Well, in one sense you are the wall. After all, you are the sum total of your experiences…blah, blah, blah”), just thank your mind for the thought, notice that the person observing even that thought is not itself the thought you are observing, and then turn your attention back to the wall. Don’t let your mind rush you through this, and don’t collude with your mind to try to figure this all out. This is not a verbal exercise, it is an experiential one.

  When that experiential distinction between the observing self and the events observed comes into awareness, just notice it and gently file it away (do not try to believe the distinction or your mind will start chattering away, arguing, interpreting, and so on). Now turn your gaze to an object on the desk. Repeat the same process with the new object (look at the object until the distinction between you, the conscious observer, and what you are conscious of occurs to you experientially, not merely as a matter of belief or disbelief). Continue doing this until all of the objects have been looked at (do not rush it!).

  Then close your eyes and notice one at a time whatever pops up in your consciousness (bodily sensations, thoughts, and so on) in exactly the same way as you did with external objects. After you have done this several times (do it as many times as you like), finish by opening your eyes and repeat looking at the wall until the experiential distinction between looker and what is looked at becomes apparent.