An experience can reach us without becoming something we know how to live with.
The Waldorf workshop I attended in August 2018, with two teachers contributing different perspectives, placed considerable emphasis on digestion. Alongside the Spoken Word as a vehicle of Creation, it offered me another way to think about what happens when we encounter the world.
The following is how I understand that idea.
I picture each sense as a sensory digestive system, and the mind as an experience-digesting system. These are not separate compartments. What I hear can affect how I move, what I feel, what I expect and whether I am willing to speak. What I do with my body can change how I encounter a sound or understand an event.
Together, they belong to a whole-being process through which Life reaches us, takes shape within us and becomes something we can respond to.
This is my personal understanding, informed by the workshop and my own experience. The whole-being digestion model I describe is not an accepted mainstream theory in medicine or psychology. I am not a mental health professional, and the ideas and exercises here should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health assessment, treatment or support.
Receiving is not yet digesting
Hearing a sound, recognising it, feeling comfortable with it and understanding its significance are not the same thing. Nor are remembering an event, explaining it and becoming able to live with what happened.
An experience may be too intense, unfamiliar or difficult to bring into relationship with the rest of our life. We may know that it happened without knowing what to make of it. We may react before we can understand the reaction. Something from long ago may still influence what we are willing to encounter now.
Within this understanding, an experience can reach us before we have the capacity to digest it. It may remain stuck, continuing to influence how we sense, feel and respond long after the original encounter. I use this model to explore possible connections between undigested experiences, persistent sensory difficulties, trauma and mental illness.
Its value to me is the question it opens: what happens to an experience after it has entered us?
Not everything has to become pleasant. I can understand an experience, retain what is useful and still decide that I do not want it again.
Equanimity: feeling without being driven
Digestion, as I understand it, means that an experience gradually loses its emotional hold on us. We may still remember what happened and retain what we learnt, but the memory no longer pulls us so strongly into antipathy (aversion) or sympathy (desire). A new encounter becomes less likely to send us down a path already determined by an old experience.
The direction is equanimity. This does not mean becoming numb, indifferent or unable to feel. We can experience pleasure, pain, affection, disappointment and desire without each feeling immediately deciding what we must do. We remain engaged with Life, but have more freedom within that engagement.
I connect this with Stephen Covey’s Habit 1: Be Proactive, particularly the freedom to choose our response between a stimulus and the behaviour that follows. I picture that freedom as a gap which may initially be so small that the familiar reaction seems to happen immediately. The work is to enlarge that gap: to notice what is happening within us, recognise the possibilities before us and choose how to respond.
Consider an example: we tried to help someone but were scammed out of our life savings, and afterwards we dread helping people. We may understand how the scam worked while still experiencing every request for help as a threat. Forcing ourselves to give money despite that fear would not demonstrate the freedom I mean; it could expose us to another loss. Protecting what remains and dealing with the financial consequences are necessary work, not signs that we have failed to digest the experience.
Within my digestion model, the change would include the betrayal losing its emotional grip: a new request no longer feels automatically like a repeat of the scam. We can examine the particular situation, check what we are told and decide whether to decline, offer practical help or give an amount we can afford. We might still decline all requests for money while rebuilding our own security. The loss remains real, but the earlier betrayal no longer decides every response for us. Replaying the incident without any greater freedom to respond would not demonstrate this change.
By choosing freely, I mean becoming open to the full range of possibilities available in the situation, rather than only those permitted by our habitual desires, aversions and scripts. The feeling remains part of the experience; it no longer has to be an instruction.
Digestion does not erase our history. It loosens history’s hold on what we are able to become.
Exploring the senses in degrees
When an experience is difficult to approach, I do not see the only choices as avoiding it forever or forcing myself through its full intensity.
There may be a smaller, more manageable way to encounter it. We could explore one sound, one movement or one part of an activity, with room to pause and notice what is happening. As familiarity and capacity develop, a fuller experience may become possible.
The aim is not simply to endure more. It is to become able to distinguish and engage with more of what is there.
A sound that initially arrives as an undifferentiated disturbance might contain a beginning, a movement, a rhythm and an ending. A movement might become more understandable when slowed down or explored in parts. We can ask what changes when the experience becomes less crowded, more predictable or more under our own control.
Going deeper need not mean making the stimulus stronger. A quiet sound can be explored deeply. A simple movement can reveal something that a more complicated exercise conceals.
This is an approach to exploration, not a promise that every sensory difficulty will disappear through practice. Painful or damaging stimulation is not something to push through in the name of development. Sometimes the useful change is to the environment, not to the person encountering it.
The movement within words
The workshop’s attention to vowels, consonants and the movement within words made this especially tangible.
A word has a written form and a dictionary meaning. But it also has a life in the act of being spoken. It unfolds through breath, articulation, rhythm, emphasis and movement. We can recognise it on the page without having entered all of that experience.
For an ordinary illustration, compare reading “I am here” silently with speaking it. Then put the emphasis on “I”, and next on “here”. The words remain the same, but we can attend to what changes in our breath, voice, posture and sense of addressing someone.
Exploring a sound this way goes beyond pronouncing it correctly. We can notice how it begins, what is held or released, and how a gesture changes the experience of giving it form.
I do not mean that every sound contains one hidden interpretation which everyone must discover and repeat. I mean approaching the sound as something to experience, rather than only a symbol to identify.
This is part of what I call entering the invisible parallel universe behind speech, sensory experience and Creation. The outward sound or movement remains observable. The living significance within it is something we have to encounter.
A description can point towards that dimension without supplying the encounter itself.
This also helps explain what I mean by soul play. We are not merely rehearsing a finished self for an audience. Through participation, we may discover something that was not previously available for us to express.
Listening and speaking belong to the same encounter
Within this whole-being picture, listening and speaking are closely connected.
Listening can help me discover what I am trying to give form to. Speaking lets me hear and feel a sound through the act of producing it. I am receiving an experience and participating in its creation.
This makes me interested in whether becoming more comfortable with listening could support greater freedom in speaking, and whether speaking in a manageable, self-directed way could change my relationship with what I hear.
The connection is a possibility to explore, not an automatic transfer. Recognising a sound, forming it, tolerating its intensity and feeling safe enough to speak can present different difficulties.
My own history of speaking softly illustrates why those distinctions matter. Difficulty expressing myself in Mandarin and the unpleasantness of other people’s reactions both affected how much I spoke. I did not need the later, fuller experience of a conscious self before I could sense unpleasantness and instinctively reduce my exposure to it.
That is one reason I find a whole-being approach useful. The relevant experience is not confined to a belief I can state or a pronunciation I can correct. It can include the sound, the effort of speaking, the response I anticipate and the impulse to withdraw.
Returning with capacities we did not have before
Anyone at risk of self-harm, harming others or other dangerous behaviour should seek professional help rather than rely on these personal exercises. If there is immediate danger, contact local emergency services. Do not force yourself to continue an exercise that becomes overwhelming.
There are experiences we encounter before we have the ability, understanding or support to work with them adequately.
Later, we may be able to return with something that was missing then. We may have more language, a wider understanding of people, greater freedom to choose, or more ability to remain present while feeling something uncomfortable.
The event has not changed. The person approaching it has.
I do not understand this as condemning my younger self for failing to manage something. That earlier person had to live with the capacities and circumstances available at the time. What I can do now need not have been possible then.
For an ordinary uncomfortable experience, returning might begin with one manageable part rather than attempting to recover everything at once. I could examine a remembered exchange, notice what I understood at the time and distinguish that from what I understand now.
The aim could be a fuller encounter with what happened. But fuller does not have to mean recreating the original intensity or remembering every detail. It can mean bringing more context, feeling and choice into something that previously allowed only one reaction.
Between sympathy and antipathy
The balance between sympathy and antipathy matters here.
By sympathy, I mean the movement towards an experience: attraction, identification and the willingness to enter it. By antipathy, I mean the movement away: distance, separation and refusal.
If I am pulled entirely into an experience, I may lose the room to examine it. If I reject it immediately, I may never discover anything beyond the rejection.
I want to become able to approach without being swallowed, and to step back without having to deny what is there.
This does not mean that every refusal is a problem to overcome. Sometimes distance is necessary, and a boundary is the lesson worth keeping. Digesting an experience does not require approving of what happened, forgiving someone or returning to an unsafe relationship.
Reviewing experience backwards
One exercise that fits this approach is to recall an experience in reverse order.
A backward review also appears in Steiner’s writing as a spiritual exercise: approaching the day’s events differently from their habitual forward sequence and practising a different relationship with one’s own experience. That is its historical context, not proof of a therapeutic or memory-enhancing effect.
For ordinary reflection, I would begin with a short, reasonably comfortable event rather than a distressing childhood memory. Here is one way I would approach it:
- Begin at the end. Recall the last part of the event, then the part immediately before it, continuing backwards through what you remember.
- Attend to the separate moments. What did you notice, feel or do at each point? Do not rush to the explanation that normally summarises the whole event.
- Keep memory and interpretation separate. What do you actually remember? What are you concluding now? Leave a gap as a gap rather than inventing what must have happened.
- Return to the present. Ask whether anything now deserves a different understanding or response, then let the review end.
For example, I might work backwards through making a cup of tea: sitting down with it, carrying it to the table, pouring the water and preparing the cup. The subject does not have to be dramatic. The exercise is in directing attention differently.
Changing the order gives me another way of approaching the experience. It may bring something to my attention that my usual summary passes over. That does not make the resulting account automatically more accurate.
Changing perspective requires the same care. I can consider how an interaction might have appeared to another person without pretending that I now remember their experience or know their thoughts.
The purpose is to loosen an automatic way of reviewing Life, not to manufacture certainty about the past.
Digestion is different from endless replay
I would judge the usefulness of reflection by what it makes possible, not by how often I repeat it.
Am I noticing something I previously missed? Can I distinguish the event from the conclusion I drew about myself? Is there a response available now that was not available then? Can I return to the rest of my day?
Repeatedly circling the same accusation or frightening image is not what I am aiming for. More intensity is not necessarily more understanding, and more time spent remembering is not necessarily more integration.
For me, digestion means that an experience can take a place within Life without having to occupy the whole of it. I can retain a lesson, recognise a loss, correct a habit or set a boundary, while remaining available for something new.
The aim is not to become untouched by Life. It is to become more able to meet it.