A glimpse of peace via parts work

Had a cool experience in acupuncture the other day. I was lying there with needles in me in a dark room. I started playing with a kind of Big Mind style parts therapy. If you are familiar with parts therapy, the idea is also similar to Michael Winn’s organ shen spirits, the concept being that you have a family inside you, mostly aspects of yourself at various ages and with different beliefs, desires, traumas, etc. In a therapeutic setting you work to get in touch with these parts, talk to them, help them relate to other parts, grow up, cry, etc.

So I’m lying there and decided to start treating every single thought and feeling that arose in my awareness as a part of me but not fundamentally Me in an abiding sense. When a thought or a feeling came up, I just gently “grabbed” it and placed it in front of me so it was no longer “inside” me. (It also wasn’t repressed because it was in my awareness in front of me.) I was fascinated by how rapidly my mind became very quiet by this exercise and how transparent my feeling space became. Hearing thoughts in my head, my mind ruminating, and then just simply grabbing the part that was thinking those thoughts and putting him outside of me instantly caused that whole source of thinking to cease! Feeling a knot of tension in my stomach and just simply grabbing the part that was feeling that way and placing him outside of me instantly released the tension, the part of me that was feeling that! I kept doing this to the point where I was tossing dozens and dozens of parts, just scooping them up and tossing them in front of me and I kept becoming clearer and clearer, like I wasn’t there anymore.

Finally there was a spontaneous question that came up in the clear space. “Who is the part that is guiding this whole process?”. Then the part that asked this left of it’s own accord, and in that instant I was left with a flash of pure peace. I literally saw a flash of white light and I was awareness without content. For just one brief moment.

Then a bunch of parts got really excited, and one jumped back in and said things like “Holy shit! This is so cool, this must be enlightenment! You are waking up! This is so cool!” LOL! Silly parts.