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metanymous в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)

If you want to reduce auditory input, you can imagine being in a transparent sound-proof room, and if you want to hear one sound source, you can imagine having a directional microphone and headphones to allow you to do that. Or you could imagine having ears that rotate in different directions, the way a horse does. Or you could imagine a force-field surrounding you like a heavy curtain that muffles most sound, but is thinner in the direction of the sound that you want to attend to.
Recently I was at a small table with four other people. I was talking to the two people opposite me, while the two people on either side of me were also talking quite loudly to each other. I found that I had an image of the two conversations, as two different “lines” between the different people speaking. Somehow visualizing these two conversations as “lines” made it easier for me to attend to one of these “lines” of conversation and ignore the other.
We all also have had times when we disregarded kinesthetic sensations. When watching an engrossing movie, we typically ignore the feeling of the seat we are sitting on. At this moment you are probably not aware of the backs of your knees or your elbows—until I mention them, and then you attend to them, and become less aware of whatever you had been attending to previously. In an emergency, we may even be oblivious to the pain of serious injuries, because our attention is so focused on getting out of danger, or helping someone else.
Reducing internal input
There may also be a lot going on inside your mind during an experience of overwhelm. There are two ways to reduce overwhelm that are almost always useful, no matter what the content of your thoughts, One is to slow down your internal tempo, and allow events to unfold more slowly, so that you have more time to process them. You can do this in whichever of the three main sensory modalities is easiest for you. You could feel the tempo of your bodily movements slow down, you could hear the sound slow down, or you could see the moving images in your mind slow down—or do two or three of these choices simultaneously. When events are slowed down, the amount of information you have to process decreases significantly, and it will be much easier to process it in whatever way is appropriate.