You Can Talk to Your Heart?

Copy of doc with comments

@October 25, 2024 10:29 AM (EST) – @October 25, 2024 12:18 PM (EST)

The One Thing

Make concepts concrete.

• The concepts are valuable but only if the reader understands how they manifest in the world.
• You do this very well with the “whack-a-mole” anecdote about comparing yourself to other founders. It makes the concepts of disturbances and consciousness patterns visceral, relatable, concrete.

Feedback

• Even when it’s not confusing who is saying what, it can still help to add occasional dialogue tags (e..g, “Carol said”). It serves as a pause in the dialogue, and it helps your reader picture who's talking. The word "Carol" conjures the image of her in my mind.
• This is a thought (from the perspective of you at the time of this story). I suggest italicizing it to indicate that it's not your thought in the present, with your reader, as you're writing this: What the heck is going on?
• Another option, without italics, is this: "I thought, What the heck is going on?"

“I used my mind to ask the question and to my shock, I got an answer back. I noticed a soft “yes” in my awareness. In conjunction with the answer, my shoulders began to drop and the space in my chest started opening. What the heck is going on?”

• I love the careful word choice here. It brings me into your mind and body during this experience:

“As soon as I asked, the same soft voice gestured that it was no longer needed.”

• Your chapter and section titles really draw me in. I especially like this pairing:
• “You Can Talk to Your Heart?” & “A Big Ball of Patterns”
• This is vague to me. Can you make it more concrete? What sort of feelings would arise and signal a disturbance? I only just learned "patterns." “Disturbance” is a new term that I want to understand.

“Each time I went into a disturbance, a similar sequence of events occurred.”

• Mixing metaphors: I like this image and this whole sentence. It helps me understand the feeling. But this conflicts with the "download" metaphor before. I suggest choosing one or the other: digital data vs. a physical packet.

“It felt like there was a packet that contained thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.”

• Compression & Flow: I took a stab at compressing this paragraph. There's a lot of important information in it, but I got lost on my way through. I don't wan this to feel prescriptive. Please just use it as a guide to make your own edits.

“Each time I went into a disturbance, a similar sequence of events occurred. First I’d encounter all this information in my awareness related to my reaction. The information just appeared in my mind automatically all at once as if I was downloading something vs. some linear process that I was making happen. It felt like there was a packet that contained thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. I learned I could reliably access this packet by going into the disturbances and simply asking my heart questions. When I did this, I’d often see flashback memories from earlier in my life. It became obvious that some formative experience created this automatic way of responding without me even realizing it. The interesting thing was that on the other side of the packet, there was a part of my being that felt vastly different. It was calm, loving, and at ease. The more I did the practice, the more accessible this part of my being became. I wasn’t quite fully sure what this was, but living from this place seemed a lot better than the trigger fest.”

My goal here is to structure the paragraph as a sequence of events, and end with a reflection on the practice. My edit:

“Each time I spoke to my heart, a similar sequence of events occurred. All this information would just come to my mind automatically, all at once. It felt like receiving a packet that contained thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. When I did this, I’d often have these flashbacks of earlier memories. It became obvious that some formative experience had created this automatic way of responding, without me even realizing it. But there was a part of my being that was vastly different and not disturbed. It was calm, loving, and at ease. I learned that I could reliably access this part of my being by going into the disturbances and simply asking my heart questions. The more I did the practice, the more accessible this part became. I wasn’t quite sure what this was, but living in this place seemed a lot better than the trigger fest.”

• This is a great example of “teacher voice,” and it flows nicely from the personal anecdote before it:

“This process and early work with Carol helped me realize that the primary obstacle preventing me from joyously moving through life were my unhealthy consciousness patterns. Consciousness patterns are the fixed ways of dealing with the information that you perceive. They cause you to think about and react to similar situations in a habitual way. An example pattern might be when you see someone who has more success, money, or status than you do, you automatically get down on yourself. Or maybe when you face some uncertainty in your life, you automatically begin to experience doubt and anxiety.”

• I love this sentence. It really lands with a punch, and it's relatable. My first thought: I want to be free from my patterns too.

“I thought this inner complex of comparison, self-judgment, and unhealthy ambition was who I was instead of an old set of instructions taking me for a ride.”

• This is great! It meets the reader where they are and gets them excited about what they’ll learn:

And because it was all I knew, I thought the patterns were who I was. I didn’t realize that there was this mechanism behind the scenes creating my mental experience and directing my behavior. And I certainly didn’t know I could change it.

Resources

Roy Peter Clark on the Ladder of Abstraction, in his article, “Show and Tell”:

Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like “freedom” and “literacy.” Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy and public policy lurk. In that place, teachers are referred to as “instructional units.”

Main idea: Communicate meaning using both abstract concepts and concrete examples.