What we would like to do next is to offer you an exercise to increase your sensory experience, and to distinguish between sensory experience and hallucination. This exercise has four parts:

We want you to sit in groups of three. One of you we'll call A, one B, and one C. A, your job is detection. B, your job is to practice experiencing different kinds of experience. C is simply an observer, and can also help A and B keep track of what to do next. B, you select, without mentioning anything verbally, three different experiences that you had which were very intense experiences. They can be from any part of your life, but make them distinctive, one from the other; don't take three similar occasions. You can just identify them by dropping inside and finding representative examples, and simply number them one, two, and three.

Then hold hands with A and announce "one." Then go internal, drop out of sensory experience, go back to that time and place, and have that experience again without any overt verbalization. Take a minute or two or three to relive that experience fully…. Then announce "two" and relive it…. Then announce "three" and relive that....

Now there is one incredibly important factor. For those of you who are very visual, it will be imperative that you do not see yourself there, but see what you saw when you were there.

For example, close your eyes and see yourself from above or the side somewhere, riding on a roller coaster, just about to go down that first big drop.... Now step into that image of yourself inside the roller coaster and see what you would see if you were actually there riding it. Those are very different experiences. The kinesthetics come in profoundly once you break the dissociation of seeing yourself over there, and put your perceptual position inside your body on the roller coaster.

As you go back and find these three experiences and re-experience them, it is important that you do not do it dissociated. You may begin by seeing yourself; then get inside the picture. When you are inside the picture and you feel the experience in your body again as you did before, you begin to squeeze A's hand, thereby cuing them tactually that you are now having that experience.

A, your job is simply to observe the changes in B, as s/he goes through the three experiences. I want you to watch skin color changes, size of lower lip, breathing, posture, muscle tonus, etc. There will be many profound changes in B that you can see visually as B goes through this experience.

B will do exactly the same thing as in Part 1: s/he will announce "one" and re-experience it, then "two" and "three."But this time A will not only watch the changes but describe them out loud. C's job is to make sure that all the descriptions that A offers are sensory-based descriptions: "The corners of your mouth are rising. Your skin color is deepening. Your breathing is high and shallow and increasing in rate. There's more tension in your right cheek than your left." Those are descriptions that allow C—who is watching as well as listening to your description—to verify, or not, what in fact you are claiming. If A says "You're looking happy; now you're looking worried," those are not sensory-based descriptions. "Happy" and "worried" are judgements. C's job is to make sure that A's descriptions are sensory-based, and to challenge any utterance that is not sensory-based.

This time B goes into one of the three experiences without identifying it by number. You just pick one of the three and go into it. A sits there, again observing B, saying nothing until s/he finishes that experience. And then A, you tell B which experience it was: "one," "two," or "three." B continues to run through those three experiences in any order other than the original order, until A is capable of correctly naming which experience you are having. If A can't do it the first time through, simply start over again. Don't tell them which one was which, or that what they thought was number one was really number three; just tell them to back up and start over again. It's a way of training your senses to be acute.

This time B goes into any one of the three experiences again and A hallucinates and guesses, as specifically as s/he can, what the content of that experience is. And believe me, you can get very specific and very accurate.

In parts 1, 2, and 3 we ask you to stay in sensory experience. In part 4 we're asking you to hallucinate. This is to make a clean distinction between sensory-based experience and hallucination. Hallucination can be a very powerful, positive thing. Anybody who has ever done a workshop with Virginia Satir knows that she uses hallucination in very powerful and creative ways, for instance in her family sculpting. At some point after she has gathered information she'll pause and sort through all the visual images that she has, preparatory to sculpting or making a family stress ballet. She will change the images around until it she puts them on the family by sculpting them. That's a case where hallucination is an integral part of a very creative and effective process. Hallucination isn't good or bad; it's just another choice. But it's important to know what you are doing. OK. Go ahead.

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All right. Are there any comments or questions about this last exercise we did? Some of you surprised yourselves by the guesses you made, right? And others of you scored zero.

Whether you did well or not is really irrelevant. Either way, you got important information about what you are able to perceive, and whether or not what you hallucinate has any relationship to what you perceive.

You can take the training we're giving you and you can notice as you are communicating with a client or a loved one that the responses that you are getting are not the ones that you want. If you take that as an indication that what you are doing is not working and change your behavior, something else will happen. If you leave your behavior the same, you will get more of what you are already getting. Now, that sounds utterly simple. But if you can put that into practice, you will have gotten more out of this seminar than people ever get. For some reason, that seems to be the hardest thing in the world to put into practice. The meaning of your communication is the response that you get. If you can notice that you are not getting what you want, change what you're doing. But in order to notice that, you have to clearly distinguish between what you are getting from the outside, and how you are interpreting that material in a complex manner at the unconscious level, contributing to it by your own internal state.

The exercise you just did was essentially limited to one sensory channel. It was a way of assisting you in going through an exercise in which you clean up your visual input channel. You also get some kinesthetic information through holding hands. You can do it auditorily as well, and also kinesthetically. You can generalize that same exercise to the other two systems. If you are going to do it auditorily, A would close his eyes. B would then describe the experience without words, just using sounds. The tonal and tempo patterns will be distinctive and since A's eyes will be closed, all he has is the auditory input.