The aesthetics of metaphors, images,

symbols, gestures, and poetry and in

psychotherapy

Rose Galea

Clinical Psychologist, Gestalt Psychotherapist

4th and 5th April 2020

 We will try to answer some
questions

What are metaphors?

Where do they come from?
How do metaphors aid in psychotherapy?
Do images, poetry, symbols, and gestures also aid in
psychotherapy?
Why the aesthetic value and the aesthetic experience?
 metaphors
•We will start by building on themes related to the questions
above.
•Embodiment
•Cognitive embodiment - sensory and perceptual
•Embodiment and language
•Embodied simulation leading to metaphors
•The use of metaphors in psychotherapy
•Conceptual metaphors
•Imagery
•Symbols
•Gestures
•Poetry
•The aesthetic value and aesthetic experience
Loose yourself and come to your sense

When we speak about psychotherapy we are

referring to the process of verbalising the
inner world of the individual who is seeking
help or support from the psychotherapist.

Angus and Hardtke (1994) state that

successful psychotherapy is the ability of the
client to articulate, elaborate and transform
the self-told life story.
 metaphors
People traditionally view metaphor as a kind of language play where
one thing is described in terms of another for literary or rhetorical effect,

Juliet is the sun.

Cognitive theory which claims that metaphors in language reflect a

fundamental cognitive tendency to understand one concept in terms of
another (Gibbs, 2013; Lakoff &Johnson, 1999).

This potential link between language and conceptualisation has

motivated some psychotherapists to theorise how metaphors could be
used to exploree and possibly change clients’ feelings, values,
attitudes, and behaviours (Wickman, Daniels, White, & Fesmire, 1999).
(Tay, 2016)
The embodied experiences that we go through
need to be worded, however at times we find that
language has its limitations to convey exactly what
we would want to express.

The psycho-corporeal integration emphasises that

the embodied experience could be communicated
through the use of metaphors, images and poetry.
Additionally, the recognition of metaphors improves
aesthetic value judgments (Csatar, Petho and Toth,
2006), and that conceptual metaphors activate new
meanings along with associated perceptions
(Gibbs, 2002)
 metaphor
Metaphor, far from being an ornamental aspect of language, is
integral to the way people speak and think about a wide variety
of human events and abstract concepts.

Yet metaphor is not just something we think by, it is a mode of

being that arises from recurring patterns of embodied
experience. When we say in English, “My new research is off to
a good start,” we do so because movement along a path is a
pervasive bodily experience in everyday life that provides an
ideal foundation for thinking about the more abstract idea of
progress toward some abstract goal (e.g., PROGRESS
TOWARD A GOAL IS MOVEMENT ALONG A PATH TOWARD A
DESTINATION i)
Embodiment

Recently the emphasis on the work of metaphor is including the important

role of the body. Contemporary work on cognition is following this orientation
with terms such as embodied cognition (Johnson, 2007), grounded cognition
(Barsalou, 2008) and cognitive simulation (Cuccio & Steen, 2019).

Metaphor is not just pretty poetry, it is not good or bad logic, however, it is in
fact the logic upon which the biological world has been built; the main
characteristics and organising glue of the world of mental processes (Bateson,
2005).

Goldman and de Vignemont (2009) provided a very useful taxonomy of the

different notions of embodiment. Accordingly, "embodied" means that body
parts, bodily actions, or body representations play a crucial role in cognition.
Embodiment and grounding
The concepts of space - up, down, forward, etc are deeply tied to our bodily
orientation and our physical movement in the world. - up down forwardd backward

In their seminal book ‘Metaphor we live By (1980), Lackoff and Johson describe
that the domain which maps onto the basic spatial concepts inherits a sort of
reasoning, of how concepts connect and flow, which are originally in the structure
of our bodily manipulation of space (facing the future, upright person, head of an
organisation, top of things

Merleau-Ponty, gives us an understanding of what it means to focus attention on

the embodiment of the thinking subject. Merleau-Ponty states that perception and
representation always occur in the context of, and are structured by the embodied
person in the ongoing engagement with the world. Furthermore, the philosopher
also states that aesthetics is also known as sensory knowledge (Robine, 2018),
and defines it as the inter-corporeity, which is described as a primitive kinship
between one’s body and the bodies of other selves and things.
Embodiment and language
Language brings with it limitations particularly at the early stages in life
(Sheets-Johnstone 2007)

According to Stern (1985), the most functional and basic parts of a human
being need to be learned and understood by the infant in a primarily nonverbal
way. To survive in the world the infant has to learn to navigate the world. The
babies accumulate representations of objects, are able to anticipate, recall,
have memories of events and repeat them. Interactional patterns such as the
duration of the eye-contact, quality of touch, distance between people and
others are being laid down without the use of language

Language thus becomes a modality of the human body (Gallagher, 2005: 107),
which is born out of movement. Gallagher refers to Merleau-Ponty who claims
that the body converts certain motor essence into vocal form, and that body
knowledge is the foundation on which language rests.
According to Lakoff and Johnson (2003, 1999), metaphors are shaped by
the sense of us as embodied beings, and this is the basis for
understanding all sorts of concepts. Gibbs et al. (2004: 2) agree that “the
poetic value and the communicative expressiveness of metaphoric
language partly arises from its roots in people’s ordinary, felt sensations of
their bodies in action.” They defend a direct link between recurring patterns
of embodied experience, metaphor, conventional, and poetic language

Kövecses (2003), concentrating on metaphors and emotion (“happy is up”,

“love is fire”, “sad is dark”, “shame is a burden”, etc.), provides further
confirmation. He shows how metaphors connected with emotions derive
directly from embodied experience and, given cross-cultural evidence, argues
how man’s actual physiology may well be universal – for example anger does
indeed go together with objectively measurable bodily changes such as a rise
in skin temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate, and deeper respiration in
most cultures Whereas physiological responses do not automatically produce
metaphor,
Embodiment and language
Antonio Damasio (1994) and his somatic marker hypothesis, He claims that
cognitive representations of the external world interact with cognitive
representations of the internal world – where perceptions interact with
emotions.

Emotions are cognitive representations of body states, therefore the body is

considered an important container for these past and present moments.
Damasio’s (1994, 1999) contributions further highlight that it is difficult to
access somatic markers which are at the same time crucial for a narrative
organisation of the client by the use of mere verbal techniques.

He postulates that “the mind is embodied, in the full sense of the term, not
just embrained” (Damasio 1994: 93). Purely verbal psychotherapeutic
perspective need to move towards an inclusion of the embodied experience
 Perception
Barsalou’s (1999) perceptual symbol system theory would support this view: It
shows clearly that cognition is inherently perceptual, and integrates the
positive contributions of the different existing approaches to knowledge,
namely, according to him includes representation, processing, and
embodiment.

Perception is a relatively passive process by which information is received by

a sensory organ (i.e., vision,audition, touch, taste, smell), and then
transformed along some pathway through the nervous system until finally
reaching some dedicated brain area (e.g., visual cortex).

Contemporary cognitive science reveals many demonstrations of the tight link

between perception and action (Gibbs 2006a). Object perception is not an
event that happens to us; rather it is something that we do by looking at the
object
Intersubjectivity and embodied cognition

Recent neurobiological findings claim that a neural foundation for intersubjectivity has been
discovered, which are the “mirror neurones”. Mirror neurons are the foundation of our pre-logic
and pre language understanding and interpretation of actions and emotions in others. These
neurones provide the neurological mechanisms for understanding the ability for core
intersubjectivity (Gallese, 2001). which can “overcome all linguistic and cultural
barriers” (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, 2008).

“We experience the other as if we were executing the same action or feeling the same emotion.
This “participation” in another’s mental life creates a sense of sharing with and understanding the
other, and in particular their intentions and feelings.”
Stern, p.81
The human nervous systems are designed for empathic response and intersubjective resonance,
which generates neural pathways which direct growth and development of the individual (Siegal,
2010)
Embodied Simulation
Embodied Simulation also characterises brain areas involved in the processing of emotion
and perception as well as cognitive tasks such as language comprehension or mental
imagery. This claim holds true even for the comprehension of bodily metaphors, namely
metaphors based on our bodily experiences (e.g., Boulenger. Hank, and Pulvermüller 2009;
Boulenger, Shtyrov, and Pulvermüller 2012; Desai et al. 2011; Desai et al. 2013).

Thus, the processing of a metaphorical expression such as “John grasps the idea” will
determine the activation of hand-related areas of the motor cortex too. It has been
suggested that, in this example, we comprehend the abstract concept of
“understanding” (the target domain of the metaphor) resorting to the physical action of
“grasping” (the source domain of the metaphor).

Bodily attitudes and sensations contribute to the implementation of cognitive tasks such as
language comprehension and social cognition. Neuroscientific data shows that during
simulation areas of the brain that process bodily sensations are not just confined to the
motor areas but involve also areas related to the experience of bodily sensations. (Cuckoo,
Steen, 2019, p 187).
Embodied Simulation and metaphor

Attention has a key role in deliberate metaphors processing. In fact, it is the attention we
pay to the source domain of a metaphor that makes a metaphor a deliberately processed
metaphor.

In fact, in this view, it is the attention we pay to the source domain of bodily-related
(grasped) metaphors that might determine a significant difference in the activation of
the mechanism of simulation compared to the processing of non-deliberate bodily
metaphors (Cuccio & Steen, 2019 p. 186).

“I’m ready to pounce”,- determines a stronger activation of the mechanism of simulation to

the extent that it triggers the experience of bodily feelings related to the action of pouncing.

In a face to face conversation, by virtue of the activation of this mechanism, both hearer
and speaker should, then, physically experience in their own bodies the bodily components
of the metaphors and they should share this experience, thus, living similar bodily
sensations. Both these conditions might determine a greater communicative effectiveness
of deliberate bodily metaphors compared to non deliberate one.
Metaphors in psychotherapy
Simply put, a metaphor is a figure of speech containing an implied comparison. ...
Here's a metaphor example: "The curtain of night fell upon us." In this metaphor,
the evening did not develop into a velvet curtain. Rather, simple words are being
used to paint a colourful picture.

In psychotherapy, the main objective is the successful communication of profound

inner experiences from one human being to another.

Where verbal language seems limited, the use of movement and metaphor offers
new possibilities.

Lakoff and Johnson’s approach (1980/2003) that metaphor is “experiencing one

thing in terms of another” it becomes evident that if the embodied experience is
the “one thing” words do not necessarily have to be the other, but this may also be
music, drawing, sculpting, movement etc. One may focus on such aspects and
use them as a metaphor to “carry over” embodied meanings.
Group work

Exersize
The curtain of night fell upon us
What meaning would you give to this metaphor?
Can you come up with different metaphors that
capture your current experience?
Source domain - is the bodily experience, or known knowledge
Target domain - abstract

John grasped the idea

These metaphors involve understanding one domain of

experience (for example “sad”) in terms of a very different and
more concrete experience (down). Numerous source domains of
many conceptual metaphors reflect significant patterns of bodily
experience. “In this way, part of how people make sense of and
understand different linguistic expressions is grounded in
embodiment” (Gibbs et al. 2004: 1196).
The image metaphor
Can you close your eyes and bring the image of a loved one

How is this act of perceiving in your mind’s eye similar to your actually looking
at your loved one’s face?

All our experiences and phenomenal world are built and maintained through
the inter-workings of approximation, association and image formation (Geary,
2012; Miller, 1996; Shahar, 2010). Daniel Siegel (2007) expresses his
understanding of this when he discusses the position and the power of images
in relation to brain and long-term neural growth. He states

Studies of mental imagery have now clearly revealed that the act of
perceptual imagining not only activates those regions of the brain involved in
the carrying out of the imagined action, but also produces long-term structural
growth in those very areas. (p. 201)
Embodied Imagery
Images, are not “mental” pictures seen in the “head” but rather, image-based felt
experiences found in the body/mind space and are referred to as Embodied
Images (Faranda,).

This embodied way of working with images is based on the understanding of the
mind as playful and figurative.

Image and metaphor are the basic currencies of emotional and linguistic
experience. Nestled within the “neural fibers” of metaphor and image are the proto
systems of self-formation and self-maintenance.

It is not the mere existence of an “image” that contributes to the therapeutic value,
but rather it is our experiential involvement with an image that brings forth the
increased therapeutic importance.

This is the kind of image that is less metal picture and more felt-experience. This is
an image that is neuronally connected to the systems of emotion, motor, and self.
The Brain on Images

“Images continue to be formed, perceptually and in recall, even

when we are not conscious of them. Many images never get the
favour of consciousness and are not heard from, or seen directly, in
the conscious mind. And yet, in many instances, such images are
capable of influencing our thinking and our actions. A rich mental
process related to reasoning and creative thinking can proceed while
we are conscious of something else.” (Damasio, 2010, 2012, p. 76)

There is evidence that play, metaphor, and image, are outward

manifestations of brain systems that are integral to self-
representation, self-formation, self-protection, and self-integration.
When viewed collectively, recent research and theory from
neuroscience and neurobiology reveals strong evidence for this
inter-relationship of image, self and healing.
The complexity of self through noting that countless maps (images) are simultaneously
being generated, integrated and monitored in a coordinated manner. And most importantly,
that when these maps are experienced, they are more aptly referred to as “images.” Neural
image formation then, appears to be intimately linked to the processes of self-representation
and self-formation.

Another layer in understanding the relationship of the image-making brain to our sense of
self is found in the realm of emotion. Panksepp (1998, 2003) contends that the foundations
of self are to be found in the “basic emotional circuits” (p. 199) of the brain. And according to
Damasio (2010, 2012), our feeling states are, in essence, images of emotion “made special
by their unique relation to the body” (p. 80).

The general capacity of the brain to simulate a state that isn’t actually occurring (as we do
during a therapy intervention), as in the “as if body loop” and the mirror neuron system, we
have an area of the brain that has all the equipment to generate, maintain, and I would
suggest further, repair the very fabric of self. Accessing this system then, in a therapeutic
context, is availing oneself of the functional and architectural capacity to re-establish, re-
integrate, and re-mobilize dissociated, fragmented, and frozen parts of the self.
 Group work - dyads
Mental Image
1.Go to the place you would visit first after the isolation/
distancing is over
2.While discussing with another, try to bring up the image
that your client is trying to convey
3.Discuss with her/him the image you got from her
description and the embodiment that you experienced -
sensations etc
Symbols
Grainger (1990) writes about the intrapsychic qualities of symbol, namely that
which is in between; a bridge between inner and outer events. Metaphor and
symbol can therefore be described in psychological terms as the bridge
between the unconscious and the conscious and also between what is me and
not-me.

Tuby (1996), a Jungian analyst, describes the symbol as the third presence
that reconciles the conflicts between the unconscious and the conscious.
When we carry Tuby’s idea of a reconciling third presence out of the inner
world of the psyche and into the therapeutic space, we can begin to perceive
symbol as something that connects two people, a bridge of understanding.

The presence of a symbol can bridge between the conscious and unconscious
of the client and therapy and the middle ground approach or as in gestalt the in
between at the contact boundary
Gestures

Another area where we see the relationship of metaphor to affect and body is in gesture.
David McNeill (1992, 2007) has brought together tremendous research and theory on the
nature and meaning of gesture. He has effected unification between language and
gesture which provides support for our grounding of metaphor in the body.

Contrary to the once held idea that gesture was perhaps an early form of communication
predating verbal language, McNeill has convincingly shown that gesture appears to have
had a parallel ontological development. Metaphoric gesture is the body’s expression of a
felt bodily experience and, as such, is governed by very distinct brain regions from
voluntary gesture (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; McNeill, 2007).

Gesture as metaphor then, is propelled by an out of awareness system designed to

illuminate the relationship of one thing to another. For instance, if I were to try to
describe a process of work that needed to be stretched out, extended, elongated, I might
bring my two hands together in front of my chest and draw them out repeatedly as I
struggle to find expression for this feeling.
Poetry

Poetry is a tool that may be used in therapy to aid in emotional healing and
personal growth. It brings about insight, clarifies foggy issues, and bring a
smile to faces of people experiencing, anger , depression and anxiety. It can
be used to help clients overcome a number of emotional struggles, such as
traumatic experiences (Anderson, 1999)

Similar to symbols metaphors and dreams poetry has an indirect approach to

express emotions that may be difficult, risky and otherwise deemed
inappropriate by the person. Yet these feelings when painful are likely to grow
if left unexpressed, once expressed healing can occur (Anderson, 1999).

The aesthetic value is the beauty contained within poems, the images they
crate and the psychological effect that this beauty has on the reader. The
aesthetic value of poetry has long been recognised and its healing effects on
our lives , where it transports us and help us engage in the deeper meaning
of our lives.
The rhythm in poetry helps us to know that we are inextricably
connected to nature and to the universe. Additionally the rhythm and
pattern of a poem whether it rhymes or not, has the soothing emotional
effect - like rocking a baby.

Catharsis can occur as a result of reading and writing poetry, poetry

interrupt negative self-images, takes the focus off ourselves. Poetry in
psychotherapy allows for reflection, decision and redirection after
release of painful or confusing emotions

Rainer Maria Rilke claimed that only through a poetic language can a
“higher truth” be expressed. (I am so afraid of the word of man) he
comments on the inadequacy of language for expressing basic human
perceptions Rilke claims that human-kind kills the nature of things and
that only the lyrical, poetic can still perceive the “singing of the things”
Poetic iconicity
Although Reuven Tsur’s (1992, 2003) work in cognitive poetics never explicitly refers
to the notion of iconicity, his approach incorporates the relation of feeling and form
that is considered a necessary element in poetic iconicity. He argues that the effect of
poetry is to slow down or disrupt the conceptual processes that lead to constancy and
coherence (cognitive stability) and efficient coding of information (cognitive economy),
those elements of the mind that enable us to function “normally” in the world.

Under this view, what poetry is doing, like all the arts, is to bring us, for at least a little
while, into a certain relation with the world. This relation is variously described in the
arts, in different philosophies and religions, as expressing the inexpressible, ‘stopping
to smell the roses’, becoming one with the universe, to capture, in Merleau-Ponty’s
terms, the primordial experience of the invisible.

Poetic iconicity creates in language sensations, emotions, and images that enable the
mind to encounter them as phenomenally real. As Merleau-Ponty (1962: 404) notes,
moments of great danger and great love can trigger this response. It is what it means
to live wholly in the present moment, to grasp the phenomenally real.
The phenomenally real - the unseen world “from which the soul receives
its most rarefied nourishment. Everything existing in the visible world is
the imperfect mirror of this hidden reality” (Wheeler 2006: 23). This
“hidden reality” is the flip side of our everyday experience and may be
accessed at any moment.

John Burnside (2005: 60) describes it well as an excursion “into the

quotidian”, into Paul Eluard’s autremonde – that nonfactual truth of
being: the missed world, and by extension, the missed self who sees
and imagines and is fully alive outside the bounds of socially-engineered
expectations – not by some rational process (or not as the term is
usually understood) but by a kind of radical illumination, a re-attunement
to the continuum of objects and weather and other lives that we inhabit.
Bracegirdle (2007) points out how poetry, as a representation in words and
the interpretation of those words has been discussed for centuries. In her
research, she proposed to her clients that they use poetic forms of writing
such as lines and stanzas, and in doing so provided them with a containing
structure. Her findings highlight how that which cannot be spoken can indeed
be represented through the use of allegory, symbols, and metaphor.
Who starts the metaphor?

The gist of the middle-ground approach is that

metaphor should be observed, analysed,and
understood as a product of interaction between the
perspectives and intentions of both therapist and client.
Whether it comes up from the client or from the
therapist.
Exercise Group work

Dyads - While one talks about anything that she wants the other while being attentive
and listening, tries to come up with a metaphor, or image, gesture, symbol or poetry
related to what she has been listening to
Alternate
Protocols for Working With Client Metaphors

Seven-Step
Interview Protocol a Six Step model
1. Notice metaphors. 1. Hearing a metaphor
2. What does the metaphor 2. Validating the metaphor
look like?
3. Explore metaphor(s) as 3. Expanding the metaphor
sensory image(s).
4. What is it like to be, what is 4. Playing with the possibilities (
your experience of, and what could include others in the client’s life)
are you feeling as you [the
metaphoric image]?
5. If you could change the 5. Marking and selecting
image in any way, how would
you change it?
6. What connections (parallels) 6. Connecting with the future
do you see between [the
metaphoric image] and the
original situation?
7. How might the way you
changed the image apply to
the current situation?

Kopp and Craw (1998). bSims (2003); Sims and Whynot (1997).
Art object

What is created is a symbol – primarily a symbol to capture and hold his

“

own imagination of organized feeling, the rhythms of life, the forms of

emotion” (1953: 392)

Langer’s understanding of an art object describes that it is not the

resemblance of life that is represented in an art work, but the semblance,
the illusion of vital life in its rhythms, sensations, emotions: what Henry
James called “felt life”. That is, as Langer (1953: 245) puts it, “every
successful work of literature” is not a representation, expression, or
imitation of life, but “is wholly a creation… an illusion of experience”:
Body work and movement

An understanding of the lived experience can be reached

through the process of moving, without the necessity for further
verbalisation. Much of the knowing remains in the body,
building on the early basis of primary intersubjectivity
(Trevarthen 1977), or intercorporeity (Merleau-Ponty 1973

In a study by Panhofer (2009), it was found that through the

process of moving, words had been reduced but also become
more concise; they had taken shape and also gained
containment through image and metaphor (Lago 2004).
Working with metaphors through the aesthetic experience

Thomson (2018) describes the aesthetic dimension and the

aesthetic process as, ‘focusing on the present moment, letting go
(of preconceptions; of aspects of the self; and judgments), venturing
into unchartered personal territory, observing and understanding the
process from inside’. This often entails a non-directive approach.

These aspects which have been deeply experienced by individuals

often demonstrate a corresponding growth of self-awareness and
insight into difference within self. When we manage to be in the
aesthetic process, which has the characteristics of mental freedom
from excessive reactivity and reliance on un-reflected thoughts and
actions, we would be engaging into what Perls (1969) claims as to
“stop thinking. Lose your mind and come to your sense” (p.69).
Developing the therapeutic potential of aesthetic values

A growing body of interdisciplinary research shows that environments,

which are experienced as aesthetically pleasing and unthreatening,
automatically affect our nervous system, our emotions and our
cognition and hereby support general health processes (Nilsson et
al., 2011); according to Aesthetic-Affective Theory (Ulrich, 1993),
which has an evolutionary approach, positive affects and stress-
reducing processes are generated automatically in certain natural
environments related to our history of survival.
Aesthetic experience and psychotherapy

When practicing aesthetic experience a wordless silence can emerge. In addition, when we
explain the relational aspect of gestalt therapy, it is considered as a unique experience
which contributes to the ‘real experience’ which emerges between the therapist and the
client, and takes place ‘between’ (Spagnuolo Lobb,2013).

It is within this space that real contact is experienced between the two, in the here-and-now
space that is co-created. Francesetti, Gecele & Roubal, (2013) claim that using the aesthetic
concept for evaluation at the contact boundary, involves the felt experience, which is implicit
knowledge, that is pre-verbal and pre-cognitive (Francesetti, Gecele & Roubal, 2013).
Adding on to this, in his book “On the Occassion of the Other’ Robine (2011) describes the
situational activity and gives examples of Merleau-Ponty’s view of the body as being the
expressive space.

“Meaning animates my body as it animates my nascent word. Intentionality and corporeity

mutually awaken each other. It is not with clear meanings or an elaborate thought that the
other person communicates with me”
Robine, p160
Thus, going to the embodied experience is how aesthetics is practiced, which as we have
seen is translated through embodied metaphors
 The word

Everything is in the word

The shaping, the volume

The background, the present

The past and the next

It changes the present

Reframing the past

The hope of the future

The surface and what emerges

The body sense, and feels the experience

And travels in the form of a word

It becomes in between

And becomes the relation

Where we change each other

You change me, I change you

We become anew after the word

 Conclusion
Therapeutic metaphors and narratives are often used in therapy to provide new conceptual
understanding since they can communicate often difficult abstract life concepts (e.g. acceptance
and self-insight) in a more tangible way (Hayes, Strosahl,&Wilson, 2003). A metaphor is a figure
of speech whereby a physical phenomenon object is used to describe something less concrete,
thus transferring the qualities and characteristics of the former to the latter. According to Ortony
(1975) metaphors have several qualities in communication: they express abstract ideas that
would be hard to communicate otherwise; they provide complex information in a compact manner;
and they convey the information in a rich and vivid way

When working in therapy; maintaining the connections to body, emotion, and image, as well as
maintaining, in myself (the therapist), a deeply felt experience of connection to the client, her
feelings, and her images. My willingness to be present, to get my hands dirty, if you will, becomes
what we might call a shared embodied experience. Such an experience is facilitating to the
healing potential of image work through fostering mutuality and engendering a safe enough space
for letting go.

Surrendering is not something one can access voluntarily. It happens in the moment at the
contact boundary, where there is less self, as we become engaged and enter into the world of
embodied images, our own conceptualisations of self fade from view.