The gears are turning, clean and efficient, so you haven’t even considered if you are being led astray by others. Here’s how you can transform robotic thought.
Overview of "The Gears Are Turning" Metaphor
NOTE: The introduction is the same for each of the four intensities of The Gears Are Turning Metaphor. If you have already read it, you may want to click to skip.
Are you being told to get it in gear? Maybe you’re telling yourself that. Are you gearing up for a presentation? Are you gearing down after a long week at work? Is something getting you geared up?
Gearing up. Gearing down. Getting in gear. Typically we identify these metaphors in our body somewhere, and we might relate it to the gears in a car. But the one metaphor that pretty much always puts us in our head, is THE GEARS ARE TURNING. And that’s the one we’re going to focus on this week.
Hello, my name is Karen, and this series grows out of my book, Emotion Commotion, and The EAT Program™. In these videos, I help you Locate, Describe & Transform™ the emotions that interfere with you making your best decisions.
Your emotions present as images and metaphors, so each week I explore new imagery, always looking at it from four levels of emotional intensity: extreme, high, medium, and low. The imagery that I present: yours can look completely different. The best way to go through this process is to focus on your imagery; just use mine as an example.
Four Emotion Intensities with Four "The Gears Are Turning" Metaphor Images
- For the extreme intensity video, I’m using gears in a robot head.
- For the high intensity video, I’m using imagery that reminds me of the Bronze Age, so it’ll be an historic issue.
- For medium intensity, I’m using golden gears that are leaving, in part, the head, and turning into vibrant bright lights.
- And for low intensity, I’m using gears that have mostly left the head – some are still in it – but there’s a multitude of bright colours that are filling, and giving me an idea of, a creative space in the head.
The Gears Are Turning: Extreme Intensity Emotions
As we take a look at the extreme intensity video, we see very clean, sharp precision gears, and you would think, well, this could be a very positive image. And for you, it might be, so remember, always look to your own imagery to represent your emotions. But for me, I see a robot, and what that tells me is, you aren’t thinking: Someone else is turning your gears; someone else is getting you geared up; someone is gearing you for action. The robot is just doing what it’s told to do. So if you want to transform this imagery, you want to think of getting rid of the gears altogether.
There’s a really good chance, because it’s such a clean image, that you aren’t even aware that something or someone is gearing you to think in a particular way.
These gears are very complex, and it brings to mind for me – it could be completely different for you – but it brings to mind for me how the media and opinions can gear us to act or believe something that we might not actually believe or act on, if we thought for ourselves.
So let’s go through the LDT™ process.
The Gears Are Turning: Transformation #1 - The Gears In The Head
Locate: The starting place is in your brain, in your head, and your thinking.
The description: The gears are turning. But I’m also coming up with the description of a robot, and specifically this image. It’s very detailed, so I can expect that one transformation isn’t going to be enough to get myself into healthy balance.
Look at your own transformation, and what you might do with this image – how you might “take it apart” is the word I’m getting, because that’s what I want to do.
I don’t want to dissolve anything; I don’t want to melt anything. I want to take apart each intricate piece, and I want to keep them in containers, in a workshop, in a very organized fashion, with the belief that some of these gears, I’m going to want back – but I’m going to want to have control of them. I don’t want to be a robot: I want to be thinking for myself.
Very quickly, I can imagine these gears coming out of the head, getting organized, and leaving me just with this robot face image.
The Gears Are Turning: Transformation #2 - The Robot Mask
And the next transformation for me: I see that as a mask that I take off.
In other words, I’m becoming aware: by turning my thinking inward to myself, by working through my transformation, I’m becoming aware of how I acted like a robot, believing anything that somebody else was telling me, without thinking or researching it myself first.
So:
- The gears are out of my head.
- The next metaphor was the robot: I’ve removed the mask (that’s another metaphor).
Everything seems organized, but now I’m aware that these gears in my thinking were turning into gears of action: I was taking action based on somebody else’s beliefs that I took on. I’m now seeing gears in my elbows, in my wrists, in my knees – and I want to remove them as well.
The Gears Are Turning: Transformation #3- The Body Gears
The same idea comes to mind, but this time, I also need to clean them off. I feel like they’re a little “yucky,” for lack of a better word, so I give them a good rinse in some salt water or in some vinegar, clean them off, and then store them away.
The Gears Are Turning: Transformation #4- A Good Rinse
Now, with the gears all out of my body, all out of my head, I want to give myself a good rinse inside and out. And I just imagine water rushing through me, water rushing over me, and just giving me a good clean off.
A Lot of Little Transformations
This might seem [an extremely detailed] transformation for you – truly, go with your own flow. You just want to get yourself into a place where you feel calm, relaxed, and aware, and bring yourself into balance between your thinking, between your emotions, between your intuition.
For my final transformation, now that I’m aware that I was acting in a robotic manner, I want to just sit quietly and allow my intuition to choose which gears I need to bring back into my imagination, into my imagery, in order that I can move forward in the right gear for me.
The Gears Are Turning: Closing
The caution, with the imagery I’m using this week, is:
- Beware of robotic thought, where it’s not even your ideas that you’re putting forward.
- Beware of historic issues or historic beliefs that are coming forward, that don’t serve you anymore.
- Be aware of gears in your head that might be turning nicely, but that you just don’t need to be thinking so much, and you could allow intuition to come in.
- And finally, be aware of emotions, intuition, and thinking all being in balance.
Especially if you’re talking about group projects, extreme intensity emotions, extremely complex emotions or situations, you might need to take some private space and work through your transformations one-by-one. For low intensity emotions, for some low complexity emotions, even if they’re higher intensity, it might just take a deep breath, relax, and let the image transform quickly, while you keep going about your day.
I respectfully acknowledge that this video was recorded on the traditional territory of Mi’kmaq people.
For more information on transforming negative emotions with the Locate, Describe & Transform™ process, check out theEATprogram.com.