We live in an ever-increasingly abbreviated world –
and I’ve been drawn towards and susceptible to this genre or meta-niche of
linguistics, ever since I discovered my schooldays peers calling me “PJ”.
On another youthful occasion, I can remember quite vividly the day we arrived
for a maths class and discovered SOHCAHTOA written on the board from the
previous lesson. There was a low hum of hushed voices saying “what does it
mean?” Someone said it sounded like “Krakatoa”, so maybe it was a volcanic
island to the west of Java. Turned out we were all wrong!
As a young football fan I was magnetically attracted to becoming a QPR
supporter, and latterly, just as I was drawn to working in IT, I similarly just
couldn’t resist embedding myself deeply into the unconscious of NLP.
But I digress, and as you should never try to catch a Digress by its tale, I
will depart from the wonderful world of the abbreviation and the acronym PDQ.

Walk the Floor

Earlier
this year I met a very interesting lady at a networking event, and we compared
notes about our respective working passions. In the course of our discourse I
happened to mention how important physical movement can be in terms of the
embodiment of changes we might want to make in our lives. Methodologies and
models such as TimeLine™ Therapy, Perceptual Positions, Clean Space and
Metaphors of Movement make particular use of how physically changing
perspectives can facilitate a level of intuitive embodiment that we just cannot
engage with easily in the comfort of our own mind.

“So,” I
said, “the mere act of walking the floor or changing your spatial location can
leave certain perceived associated feelings in one place and allow you to
notice different ones in the new place. This can often be a catalyst for
profound change.”
“I see,” she said, “that’s really interesting. So if I feel bad
about something and go for a walk, then this might be why things often feel
different when I come back.”
“That’s right. To help change anything, I’d recommend walking the floor because
it can help in many ways!”

“Walk
the Floor,” she said. “Mmm… I like that! I shall always remember you
as the ‘Walk the Floor’ Man.”

However –
it’s not just about leaving our chair or going for a walk – there’s more that
can be done with such an exercise.
If we go through a state-break routine and dissociate from the feeling(s) at
Position A before we step away and go somewhere else (Position B), we can leave
a lot of stuff behind that we don’t want, at Position A. **
Most of us will go out for a walk, for instance, still carrying our ‘burdens’or
churning things over in our mind – and even if we resolve things on our walk,
we might still bring some of the ‘baggage’ or ‘litter’ back with us,
metaphorically stuffed into our pockets. Leaving it ‘bagged up and binned’
somewhere else is arguably a much better idea. 

** (There is a small caveat here – Position A is now sullied with negative energies and associations, so if you are able to – I’d invite you to ‘bag and bin’ these too. Otherwise you might find yourself re-adopting the energies as you reoccupy a particular chair, for instance, with all the same sitting postures as before.)