Symbolic Modeling is a language-based method of engaging your mind-body systems to promote health and well-being. You will discover and explore your embodied metaphors, the ones uniquely formed by you to describe the way you interpret the world. You hold these metaphors in your body and mind; consciously and subconsciously they influence how you respond to and interact with the world. Through the Symbolic Modeling process, you will make new discoveries and connections about these metaphors, and they will begin to change. Once these shifts occur, changes in your everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions can follow, and health issues, which have seemed intractable, may begin to heal.
Clean Space is another method of accessing information about which you may have been unclear. As the facilitator directs you to move through space, you gather information from different points of view. Organizing ideas and thoughts, and being clearer about the relationships between them, fosters clarity, direction, and motivation.
How is Symbolic Modeling done?
Symbolic Modeling which has three basic components:
Metaphors: these metaphors aren’t created the way you might pick one when writing a poem; instead, you experience them as they already exist in your mind, and you are now discovering them. The images that make up your metaphors relate to one another, and it is in these relationships that the patterns of your behavior, feelings and thoughts are mirrored.
Clean Language: The Symbolic Modeling facilitator uses a unique sentence structure, based on your exact words, to ask questions about the images you describe. The facilitator focuses your attention on their details and their relationships with one another. You’ll notice the facilitator’s speech does not sound like ordinary conversation; it is grammatically awkward and very sparse. This encourages you not to engage cognitively or conversationally with the facilitator. S/he is there to guide your exploration of your metaphors, not to interpret their meanings or add observations or determine what you should do with them. This is very much a client-centered process.
Modeling: Together, the facilitator and you are working on developing a full picture of your Metaphor Landscape. Through a series of questions, and possibly over a number of sessions, you will collect details about your metaphors by and through which you have stored your experiences and responses to those experiences. Think of building a model town for a train garden. It is full of objects which serve a variety of purposes. You might have a train, running on a track, which may split in places. The tracks may go by a bank, a school house, and homes. There may be switch controls which regulate the train’s going and coming. About each of these, there will be added details and purposes.
Similarly, you and your facilitator are creating a model of your internal metaphors to explore. In a surprisingly emotional and visceral way, you’ll discover there are things you want to change with these images, and your facilitator will help guide you through discovering how that can happen. As changes occur with your metaphors, profound shifts are also felt emotionally, as the mind seems to ‘rewire its circuits.’
To assist in creating health, often we need to go from “I can’t change” to “I can.” Both Symbolic Modeling and Clean Space assist you in honoring the highest and best in yourself, deepen your understanding of who you are, and foster the change you seek.
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