Why We Visit Imaginary Places to Understand Real Feelings

Ask someone how they are feeling and you will often get a pause, then something like ‘fine’. Ask them what the feeling would look like if it were a place, and a surprising number of people answer at once. A grey beach. A room with the furniture under sheets. A hill that is steeper than it looks.

A feeling with edges

An emotion is hard to hold because it has no outline. It is just a heaviness or a hum, somewhere in the body. Give it a setting and it acquires edges. You can walk round it, look at it from the other side, notice that there is a door you had not seen. Metaphor does not make the feeling smaller or prettier. It makes it easier to approach, which is a different thing.

What story can do that advice cannot

Advice arrives from outside and invites an argument. Story arrives from inside and invites a reaction. When you are standing, in your imagination, on a shipwreck beach looking at what the tide has returned, your response to it tells you something. Maybe you feel an urge to pick things up and tidy them. Maybe you want to walk on. Neither is correct. Both are information.

This is the idea behind The Inner Atlas, our new members e-book. It does not tell you what to feel in the Hall of Mirrors or on the Mountain of Weight. It lets you go there and see what you do.

Why it suits quiet minds and busy ones

People who find stillness difficult sometimes do better with this than with a plain instruction to watch the breath. There is something to follow, so the mind is occupied while the deeper part gets on with its work. And people who already meditate find that a landscape gives them a different angle on the same ground.

Try a very small version

Tonight, before sleep, ask yourself where today would be if it were a place. Do not think about it for long. Take the first image that comes, and notice whether you want to stay there or leave. That is the whole exercise. If something interesting turns up, you may want to write it down.

The Inner Atlas is in the members area now, in English and Spanish.