Hi Noreen.
The type of metaphor I’m thinking of is not one that is offered to us by someone else, although that can be a very useful thing…really useful in fact and it is, for me, one of Rick’s many great skills. He often offers a metaphor that will just allow me to perceive in a way that I hadn’t considered before and I really love that experience. It can be profound.
What I’m talking about is a bit different than that. It’s what’s often called an ‘embodied metaphor’…a metaphor that arises naturally out of you from a sensation an emotion or an experience. It’s how we are metaphorically representing an experience.
So if you are having an unpleasant experience regarding a particular situation I could ask “And what is that like?” …and you might respond “It’s like I’m walking in mud up to my knees…I can’t run and I keep feeling like I’m about to fall down.”
That’s a metaphorical representation of the actual experience and we can tap and explore within the realm of that metaphor…explore the metaphorical environment so to speak and not step outside of the metaphor. We aren’t commenting about the metaphor we are exploring from within it.
I might ask “And what kind of mud is that? The colour, the smell etc”
Or I might ask “And what do you see when you look to your right?”…or left or up or down or in front of you.
“Oh, I see a wall right in front of me!”…what’s it made of? How high is it…how wide? How deep into the ground is it?
“And I’m stuck in the mud and can’t get over that wall!”
Etc.
Now the thing is all these aspects of the metaphorical environment have meaning…and not just meaning within the metaphor but literal meaning that is experienced in some way, big or small, in your non-metaphorical (if there is such a thing… :-)) ‘real’ life. These are symbolic representations that have a direct relationship with our real, day to day lives and give things a meaning or a feeling. When someone declares “I’ve got the world on my shoulders” they are speaking a sort of literal metaphor, as I call it. They obviously don’t have the actual world on their shoulders literally BUT they are feeling ‘as if’ they do and it will be literally represented by muscle tension, neck pain, fatigue etc. Or “I’m really feeling down lately.” If we explore the metaphor ‘down’ we shouldn’t be surprised to find a metaphorical representation of it…the person is in a hole or a ‘depression’ within the metaphoric environment and then we can explore the physical qualities of the hole or depression and the environment around those things as well. There are metaphorical clues are all through language and it’s really fascinating to me.
So using our original example of you having an unpleasant experience in a particular situation you may have had the sense that you were ‘stuck’ and ‘unable to move forward’ in the situation that had been problematic for you in real life. So, from the metaphor, ‘stuck’ is represented by the ‘mud up to your knees’ and ‘unable to move forward’ is represented by ‘the wall’ in front of you. Metaphors create experience and experience create metaphors…they’re inextricably intertwined. So if we can ‘get you out of the mud’ and ‘over/around the wall’ from within the metaphor then it’s very likely that you will experience a difference in your ‘real’ life. You will begin to feel less ‘stuck’ and more able to ‘move forward’ in a literal sense.
And while we are exploring the metaphoric environment we can be tapping.
So, that’s the basic idea. There are a number of modalities that use this sort of work with metaphor but I’ve never seen tapping incorporated and it’s always fascinated me to combine the two.