Your Three-Channel Experience and Your Internal Compass
Let’s start with a fundamental truth: our experiences are critical to understanding ourselves and the world around us. Consider how babies do it. They rattle, throw, and mouth everything within reach, and they do it for the sheer experience of it. And if they like what they experience, they do it more. It’s how they learn. It’s how we learn. Our experiences shape our understanding of who we are and how things work.
But what exactly happens when we experience something? What’s really going on?
The answer can be a bit complicated, but if you sit with the question long enough, you’ll see that your emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations are intimately involved. These three things shape and define every experience you have. And because they do, I call them the three channels of experience.
Your Three Channels of Experience
These three channels—emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations—carry the raw data your internal compass needs to understand your experiences and orient you to what’s going on. To work effectively, your internal compass asks these three channels to feed it a rich assortment of data.
Barring unusual circumstances, each one of us can access these three channels of experience using a skill I call three-channel perception.
Three-channel perception is your ability to extract sensory, mental, and emotional data from the experiences you have.
What does three-channel perception look like? Here’s a quick example.
Let’s say I’m driving along a road in northern Maine at night. Maybe it’s early summer, and I’m mesmerized by the sparking of fireflies in the dark. And let’s say I’m cruising to the gravelly sound of Johnny Cash. It’s been a relaxing drive home after dinner at the parents’ when, all of a sudden, a deer darts across the road. I slam on the brakes and swerve as the deer looms large at the windshield before bouncing off the car and slipping silently into the thicket.
Stunned, I coast to the side of the road, kill the engine, take a deep breath, and check my three-channel perception to see what it’s telling me about the experience I just had.
First, I might notice my physical sensations: my heart is pounding, like right through my chest. I’m also alert, tense, and my breath is shallow. Next, my thoughts come online, and I hear them say, “That was close. I wonder if it’s injured? I bet the car is dented.” And lastly, I might notice my emotions: feelings of shock, alarm, guilt, and concern.
My three-channel perception is flooding me with valuable information about what just happened, as well as my response to it. In just seconds, I’m offered a rich reflection of my experience. The raw data from my experience, filtered through my perception, is what my internal compass uses to orient me to the situation and guide my best response to it. In this case, it might suggest that I’m shaken and would benefit from a few more minutes to recover before starting down the road again.
Your three channels never stop sending you raw data about your life. But if your basic connection to one or more of them is limited, or in fact shut down, you’ll miss essential information about your experience. Missing information can only skew your perception of what’s happening.
Truth is, the majority of us “make do” using only a fraction of the information our channels contain.
Maybe we can access our emotions, but struggle to capture our sensory/body information. Or perhaps we’re routinely flooded with thoughts, but have no data from our emotion channel.
An internal compass that’s working off limited data cannot be a reliable ally. Limited information won’t help you act in your best interest and see the most effective way forward.
Restoring full access to your three channels can help your internal compass find its True North—the direction of your happiness and wellbeing.
Let’s “check in” to get a sense of how your three-channel perception is currently operating. This is a snapshot only; we’ll do a more thorough assessment in the activities ahead.
What are you thinking right now?
What are your sensations; what is your body communicating?
What emotions are running in the background (or maybe in the foreground)?
Were you able to perceive the full range of your experience along all three channels? And if you struggled with the exercise or had more difficulty with one channel than another, don’t worry. You’re exactly where you need to be to return all three of your channels to optimal functioning.