When practicing navigating through a scene by using The Unfolding Structure, some people may find the original imagery of unfolding the scene doesn’t work for them, because it makes it seem as if you are manipulating an external object, rather that entering into a feeling state.

Here’s an alternative formulation of the navigating technique, one that works better for me:

For each moment of the scene, I will go inside of it and open it up in order to discover the next moment. I begin the scene by experiencing the feeling-state quality of the first moment, and then I go inside of that feeling and open it up to find the next moment, which brings me someplace else. I then go inside of that feeling-state and open it up to find the third moment, and continue to navigate from moment to moment through the scene by using this method.

Go inside is mainly a reminder to myself that my movement in the scene is always inwards, towards the feeling and not merely following something along, and certainly not moving away from the feeling. If I experience, during one moment in a scene, that I am hanging off of a cliff, I then explore what’s going on inside of the feeling of hanging off the cliff. If I feel calm and quiet during one moment, I then explore what’s going on inside of this calm. If I become a character who is an obsessively orderly person, compulsively arranging things into categories and files, I then explore what is inside of this compulsive behavior.

 What I don’t do is to simply follow the scene along, simply see what happens next.

Using this navigation technique, the scene becomes like a set of magical Matryoshka dolls, in which you go inside of each moment in order to discover the next moment. However, due to the peculiar properties of exploring inner spaces, when you go inside of a feeling-state, the place you discover on the inside is likely to be larger than the outside, not smaller, in the sense that it is more richly detailed and feels more expansive. Since the inside is generally larger than the outside, the process of exploring by moving inside can continue indefinitely.

The second part of the formulation, to go inside the moment and open it up, is a reminder to allow hidden, latent images and feelings to become manifest in the scene. (This is discussed in detail in this post.)

A good way to practice this formulation is a form of the alternating exercise, a scene in which you go back and forth between saying a few lines of text using real words, and saying a few lines using nonverbal vocal sounds. Every time you return to using nonverbal sounds, you can use it to go directly inside of the current feeling. Then, every time you allow words into the scene, you can open it up by allowing the words to reveal hidden content in the scene. You don’t have to be too fussy or keep track of when you are going inside and when you are opening up. Just keep going back and forth between verbal and nonverbal vocalizing, and remember to constantly move in, towards the center of the current feeling-state.

Once you have trained yourself to navigate through a scene by constantly moving inside of the current feeling, rather than merely following the energy along, you can do the same thing without needing to use nonverbal vocal sounds.