At the end of each class in Giving Language to Stress (a 5-week course in Applied Thinking at the Edge) each person’s process is distilled into what I call “talisman sentences.”

What is a talisman? According to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a cabal active in the United Kingdom during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, a talisman is “a magical figure charged with the force which it is intended to represent. In the construction of a talisman, care should be taken to make it … represent the universal forces that you wish to attract, and the more exact the symbolism, the easier it is to attract the force.”

The most important part of the above definition, to me, are the words “charged with the force which it is intended to represent”. In Giving Language to Stress, “charging with the force” comes with accessing different instances of stress as they are experienced in the body.  We sense into situations where we short-circuited under stress, and we sense into situations that we handled in a resourced way. Holding these instances at the same time (“crossing” them) results in a widening and deepening of the bodily felt sense of what stress means for each individual. We become aware of the ways in which those positive and negative experiences are related, uncovering patterns of thought, belief and behavior that we hadn’t seen before. Seeing these patterns allows us to outgrow them. From there, it is quite easy to convert a negative statement about stress into a positive statement that is charged with meaning, representing who we are now.

This intricate work with felt sensing and crossing, over the 5-week period of the class, corresponds to “care taken to make the talisman represent the universal forces that you wish to attract.”

The concept of “forces you wish to attract” seems out of place in the Philosophy of the Implicit, because it implies a separation between “me in here” and “the force out there”. If my bodily knowing implies a next step in which a certain quality would carry me forward, that needed element will naturally unfold in my life, or I will seek it out in my environment. So I would restate that sentence as  “Exploring the experiential intricacy that comes with stress uncovers the implying that has not been met, thus readying the space for the implied process to move forward.”

When the Hermetics say above: “The more exact the symbolism, the easier it is to attract the force”, I say “the more resonant the words, gestures, sounds, images, are with the bodily felt sense of the situation, the more naturally the carrying forward occurs”.

At the end of the process, then, your own talisman sentence becomes a succinct and resonant reminder of what you have learned. You keep remembering it, especially in difficult or confusing situations, as if you were carrying a talisman. In fact, one person charged her ring with her talisman sentence, before going to a potentially difficult family reunion, and had “the best time with them I’ve ever had.”

I asked my body what its experience of stress is.   I explored the steps involved in the Thinking at the Edge protocol and found much to my amazement that what I came up with was very different than the starting point although nothing was lost in the exploration.  The following is my conclusion thus far.

Stress is Love……   When directly experienced without  mental constructions or abstractions, the body’s felt sense of stress reveals contracted spot(s) which is/are inherently awaring and loving. These aware spots are calling us to enter into intimate contact with them.  Each of these seemingly separate spots are delighted when received by the larger field by means of our attention and respect. They want to merge with the Whole.   When welcomed, these contracted spots open and soften to the degree of existential trust.  Inhabiting the entire body all at once and feeling that the space inside the body and outside the body is one continuous space, creates the necessary trust. The more each spot is received with love, respect and curiosity,  just as it is, regardless of degree of expansion or contraction, the more the relationship deepens into a moving forward openness.  Stress, experienced from the body’s felt sense of contracted awaring spots, is a call for existential trust in fundamental wholeness.  When we heed this call, there is a sense of homecoming and a certainty that we belong to ourselves and one another.

–Claire Arnesen, psychotherapist, Sonoma, CA