Priming, Engagement, Affirmation, Continuation, Change

I've benefited greatly from studying the Buddhist Abhidhamma to some extent. The Ahidhamma canon basically presents something like a psychological equivalent of the periodic table of elements. With Abhidhamma-based vipassana (analytic or insight meditation), one can become quicker and more thorough at recognizing the nature of various moments or experiences. Essentially, by learning to deal with experience at a rate faster than the speed of thoughts, one becomes very honest and clear about one's world--especially about one's immediate, pinpoint experience. This can become a very thorough process, a very precise way of experiencing. By becoming quick, precise, and clear with one's attention, we can stop instigating and feeding the normal emotional problems, ambiguities, and delusions that tend to create the usual suffering within human life. (That's a simple version of the basic story.)

Just reading this story in the right amount of detail (which would be the fitting amount of detail for me to become clearer--"right") has helped me recognize the potential in the method and within myself. It's a good method, but the texts strike me as too detailed for everyday application that isn't reductionistic or doctrinal. In other words, there is so much in the texts that one could spend a lifetime or eight trying to study well enough to understand. And we all know academics' tendency to get caught up in studying their topics and then not really getting into doing those things. Luckily, good things are often very simple and clear, so we can often grasp things or have a genuine feel for them without understanding them thoroughly; if we couldn't do that to some extent, relationships would be impossible.

To draw from another body of work, I want to add in that Stages of Change theory and motivational interviewing outline a similar process to Abhidhamma meditation, but at the speed of conscious thinking, the speed at which we formulate our ideas for conversations. This is much slower and less precise than the Abhidhamma stuff, but it works for thinking about all of it in the beginning and then being able to talk about it. (Many traditions talk about the quickening of one's soul or attention, so Abhidhamma isn't unique in that--it's just impressive for being so detailed and systematic.)

Okay, one more angle and I'll be able to lay out my points. Stages of Change has been most often utilized to help addicts and anyone trying to help addicts to get a grip on what happens in the decision-making process and how addictions often run rough-shod over one's decisions. So the stages of change laid out in this theory are most often thought of in the sense of time that it takes to overcome an addiction (months to years).

My question has been: how can we take this phenomenally productive sort of approach and apply it at the speed of conversation? Or, in other words, how can we think and talk about walking through the entire decision-making/motivational process at everyday speeds? How can I apply this stuff right now to anything I am experiencing? The meditators have their answers in Abhidhamma and other sutras, the folks working to overcome addiction have an understanding and way of communicating laid out in Stages of Change theory and motivational interviewing, so what about everybody else in everyday situations?

Simply put, there are two different processes involved--speaking in general terms and about everyday speeds. The order of these two processes is different, but the steps or parts are the same. What's more, recognizing how they are different yet also the same can clear up a ubiquitous misunderstanding about how people motivate themselves and others. This process is not technical and doesn't need to be seen as complex or hard to understand. Each person's experience of their own mind is enough to begin with.