“Tracking?”

Hi Brendan, hope everything is well!

I have a question about “tracking,” more so about tracking holistically. By holistically, I mean applying to more than how to track someone’s body movements, but also to things such as tracking what is going on in someone else’s mind, or tracking what is going on in a team-based sports match. I just added a preamble below to help clarify what I mean by tracking, if needed.

At your past summer retreat for the Art, as you were demonstrating a technique, you would ask the group if we were “tracking” what you were doing. I recall responding to that with “yes, I am tracking,” but really I was not and was just believing that I was. I now see that one of the barriers that would prevent me from being able to track was projecting my own beliefs about how to do the technique onto what I was perceiving. This doesn’t seem like tracking, but rather guessing how to do the technique. Seemingly by definition, I am not tracking anything at all, except my own thoughts. Thus, I realize now that I have no idea how to do tracking, so the not-knowing has come up.

All that being said, I am training to become a therapist, and understand that it would be extremely useful in order to do the job well to be able to actually track what is going in someone else’s experience (whether explicit/implicit), rather than to project my own beliefs/assumptions onto the other person’s experience based upon my own experience. Could you speak about what you find helps you be able to “track” another person’s experience, and potential barriers that you find in doing so effectively?

If anything is unclear, please let me know, and I can try to reword some stuff. Thanks for all that you do.

– Bryan