Earlier this month, we began a series on an exciting evolution in our research – led by Jeff King, Ed.D., Assistant Vice President for Transformative Learning at the University of Oklahoma. If you missed Part I of “The Language of Transformation,” you can read it here.

In that post, I told you about a pilot study Jeff and our team conducted based on 27 Stories of Transformation from community members who have healed various types of cancer. The research team sought to determine if, among these testimonials, we would find commonalities of language and experience – so we could use these findings as teaching tools for others.

While that initial sample was small, the team surfaced two things of enormous interest while scanning the testimonials for common language. One was the use of the words “feel” or “felt.” And the other had to do with verb tense, or what we call the “temporal aspect.”

Today, I want to explore both of these ideas a little bit further – and what they mean in the application of this work.


Somatic and Emotional Feeling

What do we mean when we talk about “feeling”? For our purposes, it makes sense to break it down into two areas: somatic and emotional.

“Somatic” means a sensation we experience in our bodies. It might be a tingling or a heaviness in our arms and legs. We might feel intense cold or heat, or something like electricity or a vibration moving through us.

Often, when people have a breakthrough of some kind during a meditation, they use somatic feeling metaphors to describe the sensation of energy moving through them. “It felt like the top of my head blew off.” “It felt like my heart would explode.” “I felt an intense electrical sensation – like I was plugged in to a light socket.” We’ll talk more about these metaphors in Part III.

The other way we “feel,” of course, is through emotion. Those words are often used interchangeably. “Feeling,” when used in this way, has to do with our internal state.

When we’re speaking in terms of transformation, these are what we call “elevated emotions” – immense love, joy, awe, and bliss; overflowing gratitude, deep feelings of compassion, and heartfelt care. Through these elevated emotions, or feelings, we often experience the high states of heart coherence that connect us to something greater – resulting in a change in our mental, physical, and emotional states.

And change is what it’s all about. In the simplest terms, we’re studying language because it’s essential to how we teach the process of transformation. If you’re familiar with our meditations, you might have noticed the language Jeff’s team has uncovered as essential to this process. When I say, “feel it,” “experience it,” “stay connected to it,” “stay aware of it,” “become it” or “fall in love with it” in these meditations, what I’m really doing is encouraging you to fall in love with energy and frequency.

The words “feel it” are important. Since feelings are the end-product of an experience, what you’re “feeling” is the experience of your own personal transformation. When you feel the feelings of your new future, and you remember those feelings, you stay connected to that future.


The ‘Old Self’ Versus the ‘New Self’

“Future” leads perfectly into the next finding surfaced through our research – what we call the “temporal aspect” of language. As I wrote about in my last post, this literally has to do with a sense of time; of the language a person uses to reference a past self – relative to a present or future self.

What Jeff and his team discovered is that people who have changed through this work reflect that change through the verb tenses they use to describe their experience. In other words, they speak of their lives, and themselves, before the transformation using the past tense – and they speak of their lives, and themselves, after the transformation in the present or future tense.

This is fascinating. For these people, there’s a clear line of demarcation. There’s the “old life” and the “new life.” The “old me” – and the “new me.”

As Jeff relayed to us: these people are drawing a line in the sand. They’re saying: I’m no longer the old me. This is it. This is the new me. I’m a different person now.

This, to me, is the ultimate affirmation. When people say: I am this. I am no longer that, the contrast before who they were then – the past – and who they are now – the present – is dramatic enough to see themselves as somebody else.

In other words, their transformation is so total, they’re living in a wholly different self. They no longer identify as the “old me” who had a disease; the “old me” in lack; the “old me” with the old story of suffering and sameness. They no longer identify as the same person with the same past.

On the other side of their breakthrough – whether they’ve healed; whether they’re now experiencing abundance; whether they’re now experiencing love and connection in their lives – they can’t identify with the past self who was sick, or struggling financially, or in survival. Now, they’re a “new me” – and that new me is healthy. Is abundant. Is thriving.

It's as if they’re looking back at someone else in a past life as a new person in a different life.

So now, they’re no longer their past-present personality; they’re their future-present personality. When they relay the story of their lives before their diagnosis … before their healing journey began … before their breakthrough … they use words like “I was” and “I felt.” When they tell what happened to them through this work, and on the other side of healing, those verb tenses shift to “I am” and “I feel.”

When that moment hits, there’s no turning back. And their language reflects that. With absolute knowing, they speak in terms of a new self – and the person they’ve left behind is literally someone else.

And, as they continue to feel the feelings not only of their new present, but their new future, their verb tenses reflect that connection to their future … to that continually evolving version of themselves they will encounter as they continue to change.


Unlimited Lives in One Lifetime

This speaks volumes to the fact that we can, essentially, repeat this process over and over again. It isn’t simply “old me” versus “new me;” there’s another future self out there, awaiting us, that we have yet to become.

Just as we no longer identify as the former self – the one in need of healing; the one in lack; the one suffering; the one waiting for something outside ourselves to change – these testimonials teach us to be careful about identifying, in the present, with the self we are now – the one who healed. The abundant one. The one who changed.

We don’t want to get stuck in an identity – in any identity – because there are unlimited futures available to us. We can, in a sense, live many lives in this one lifetime.

The language of transformation has so much to teach us about how we change, how we process that change, and how we use language to teach that change.

Earlier, I mentioned the use of metaphor when people try to describe sensations or experiences during their meditations. That’s the third aspect of the findings Jeff and I talked about on Dr Joe Live in late October – you can click the link below to watch the entire conversation. We’ll talk more about that in Part III.

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