(The audio version of this article can be listened to above, if you’d like to hear this in a nice, soothing voice.)
Today I want to share a practice that I developed over the last few months for a few organizations that I'm currently working with. It’s called the Full SET practice.
SET stands for Sensation, Emotion, and Thought. It is a helpful analogy to remember these three different levels of experience.
This practice can be used to bring greater awareness to your own experience, as a grounding exercise, to check-in with yourself or others, to break out of stuck experience loops, and to increase the range of your awareness.
Sensation
We start with sensation, because it tends to be the easiest to notice objectively.
Are my feet tingly?
Is my body hot or cold?
Where is there tension?
Where is there relaxation?
This can be a really helpful level to ground our experience and develop body awareness, especially if there's a lot going on emotionally or mentally.
Emotion
Next is emotion, which some people may experience in localized areas of the body, or distributed throughout the body.
Emotion is…
Am I sad?
Am I happy?
Am I scared?
Sometimes, there may be blankness here. That’s okay too; you can stay with blankness as a specific flavor of emotional experience – the lack of emotional experience.
You may have to play around to find out what emotion you're experiencing. One way to do that is just to say, “I feel happy.” Then, notice your body and your emotional experience. Does it feel true that I'm happy? Is there something else that I’m feeling? And you can try this with different emotion words.
“I feel sad.” And then just notice what happens in your body. Is it true? Is it not true?
From there, you can just keep experimenting and feeling into the question “What am I feeling?”
There are a million beautiful emotion words we can learn and use to increase the nuance of our emotional experience.
It can also be really helpful to find a feelings list (I really like this one from the Hoffman Institute, which also includes a list of body sensations), and use the feeling words as a guide to help clarify your own experience. This creates more emotional granularity, which is a fancy word for recognizing the nuances of your own emotional experience and being able to label those emotional experiences.
Thought
And finally we have thought.
This is the mental level. What's going through our minds?
“I see a bird flying by.”
”What did I have for lunch?”
”Did I do that task yet?”
Often, thoughts are almost unconscious. We're just barely aware of them, but we may still have a lot of our unconscious attention at a mental level of experience.
This is the trickiest level. So much of the time there are a million thoughts running through our minds that we're only half conscious of. Other times, we're too conscious of them, like with rumination, and there's just a lot going on in the mind.
For the level of thought, it tends to be most powerful to say the thought out loud or write it down. This “externalizes” it and helps create space between us and the thought.
How To Use This Practice
My favorite thing about this practice, besides that it's so simple, is that it’s really good for balancing our systems. Most of us find it easy to access experience levels of experience, and harder to experience others.
For Breaking Out Of Loops
If we ever get stuck in loops of feeling, thinking, or fixation on physical sensations, one of the easiest ways to break out of the loop is to notice which levels of experience aren't being included, and name them.
So if we're only noticing thoughts, we would expand our awareness and bring our attention to emotion and to sensation.
If we’re stuck in a feeling, we would bring our awarenness to the level of sensation and include that, as well as the level of thought.
Increasing awareness of each of these levels of experience, and learning to label and acknowledge those experiences, are crucial skills for building the ability to navigate your own experience skillfully.
For General Growth
Different people will have different centers of gravity when it comes to where their attention flows on a daily basis.
For people who have meditated a lot, sensation may be a primary experience, and there’s a need to reintegrate emotional experience and mental experience into the system.
For others, emotions may be the dominant experience, and the practice would be to spread out awareness into the level of sensation and the level of thought.
For many of us, thought will be the dominant experience.
You can use this practice to fill out the areas of your experience that tend to get less attention.
So if you notice that you're predominantly at one level, you can move your attention to include another level, expanding your awareness of the totality of your experiential system.
Labeling Experience
This is something you can do anytime, anywhere.
You can do it out loud with other people by naming the sensations, emotions, and thoughts that you are having.
You can do it out loud with yourself, making note of what body sensations, what emotions, and what thoughts you're experiencing.
You can make note of it inside your mind.
You can even journal about it. You can make three columns and check in with yourself. What are the sensations I'm experiencing? What are the emotions I'm experiencing? What are the thoughts I'm experiencing?
By doing this, we get a little more distance from the experience, which can allow us to hold it more gently and with more compassion.
If you're curious about expanding your awareness across these levels of experience and breaking out of attentional patterns that drive you bonkers, join me for weekly online practice groups or explore 1:1 coaching with me. Let's connect—you can book a free 30-minute call to feel out the vibes. Links below!
Join me for spicy relational practice weekly online or explore a 1:1 coaching series with me. Let’s connect—book a free 30-minute call to explore what might be right for you!
