Lifemapping

Mindmapping a situation, and letting the parts turn up in the margins.

Description

Parts Mapping starts from your parts. Lifemapping starts from a thing — a decision, a conflict, a problem, a something. You write it in the middle of a page and then wait.

What speaks up gets written down and connected. “That will be hard.” “I failed before.” “What if people won’t like it?” “I like writing”, and then immediately, from somewhere else, “sometimes”. Each comment joins whatever it is commenting on. Keep going until it goes quiet. What you end up with is a map of the parts that have opinions about this particular thing, which is a far easier question than “what are all my parts”.

It is also a partial answer to the hardest problem with doing parts work alone: it is very difficult to notice when you are blended, and the parts most likely to volunteer to run your solo practice are managers who like checklists and want to fix things. Those are not Self. Writing everything down without arguing with any of it gives them less room to steer. The long version, handwriting included.

What Lifemapping is NOT:

Not journalling, and not a pros-and-cons list — you are collecting the statements, not evaluating them. Not a replacement for working with someone else either, for the reason above.

Examples:

“Committing to writing a post every week”, and a part instantly adding “for a few weeks”.
A voice offering “I mostly love having written”, which turns out to be a different part.
Running out of objections and seeing that the map has three clusters, not one problem.

see also:

Parts Mapping; Trailheads; Blending & Unblending; Self-like Parts; Inner Alignment