Memory Resolution

Memory as Living Resonance

Memory is often spoken of as though it were a static archive—something stored neatly in the brain, retrievable like a file from a shelf. Yet lived experience suggests something far more dynamic. Certain memories do not remain in the past. They continue to vibrate through the present as emotional tone, bodily sensation and reflexive expectation, often coloring subtle shifts in perception and interpretation of experience. A painful memory may tighten the chest before a thought is formed. A joyful memory may soften the body and open the breath. In this sense, memory is not merely cognitive recall; it may be understood as an active field of resonance that shapes how reality is felt and interpreted in each moment.

In my work as a counsellor, I was consistently confronted by the central role memory plays in the suffering and concerns of those I was helping. Within the existential safety of the therapeutic relationship—held in the quiet containment of a room and supported by the attentive presence of another human being—I noticed that a significant majority of the concerns clients brought forward revolved around unresolved memory. Whether expressed as fear, grief, recurring emotional patterns or relational difficulty, prior experience appeared to continue exerting influence long after the originating event had passed.

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This led me to examine possible models of how memory is formulated and held with the goal of designing an approach that could assist in reconciling the kinds of memories that continue to disrupt lives. I want to be clear that the model presented here does not necessarily conform to current scientific orthodoxy. It is offered as a theoretical therapeutic framework—one designed not primarily to explain memory in purely neurological terms but to work with memory to facilitate transformation and relieve the stress and discomfort carried by the client.

My early understanding of memory formation was guided in part by my training in Neurolinguistic Psychology which proposes that human experience and memory are internally represented primarily through three dominant sensory channels:

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• Visual — what we see

• Auditory — what we hear

• Kinesthetic — what we feel in the body and emotionally

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Within this VAK model, memories are formulated, internally accessed and reconstructed through these representational systems. I began to think of memory as something like a compressed archive—a kind of zip file in which the sensory aspects of immersive experience are filtered, organized and stored. This was a useful beginning, but something essential still seemed absent.

If memory consists only of stored VAK information, why do some memories evoke warmth, ease, and pleasure upon recall, while others produce irritation, fear, or distress? The missing piece—the one that seemed to carry the greatest therapeutic significance—was electrical charge. Attached to every VAK file was a judgement and evaluation of that particular memory as being either positive or negative. With the model VAK-C, I began to understand memory as functioning within a polarized field, carrying either a positive or negative emotional charge that becomes attached to the sensory content of the experience. With the addition of charge, memory no longer appeared contained as simply as neutral storage file but was now experienced as residing in a polarized living field containing both life-affirming and life-restricting experiences. Positively charged memories seemed to support and nourish the nervous system, while negatively charged memories acted more as irritants—persistent influences that continued to disturb physiological and emotional equilibrium.

 

The Polarized Field of Memory

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Human experience is rarely received as neutral. Long before conscious thought fully interprets what is taking place, the nervous system is already engaged in a rapid and largely unconscious assessment of significance. Each encounter is evaluated in relation to safety, threat, belonging, pleasure, uncertainty or loss. This evaluation emerges through the interplay of autonomic response, emotional resonance, bodily sensation and reference to prior conditioning.

By the time the thinking mind begins to construct a narrative, the body has often already established how the experience is to be felt—and the particular charge that will become associated with the memory.

Experiences encoded as threatening, traumatic or overwhelming tend to organize around contraction, vigilance and protection. Experiences encoded as nurturing, coherent or meaningful organize around openness, safety and vitality. These positive and negative poles are not moral categories but energetic orientations within the nervous system. Over time, they become living attractors, influencing how new experiences are filtered and integrated.

Memory begins to function less as recollection and more as atmosphere—a field condition through which life is continuously interpreted.

 

Brent Baum and the Holographic Memory Field

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While somatic and cognitive frameworks help explain how memory is internally encoded, they do not fully account for the way certain experiences seem to occupy a larger atmosphere of consciousness.

It is here that the work of Brent Baum offers a particularly resonant framework. Baum proposes that memory may not be confined solely to neural circuitry but may also be experienced as reflected in a holographic field that surrounds and interpenetrates the physical body. Within this view, each emotionally charged experience leaves an imprint not only in the tissues and autonomic nervous system but also within a larger organizing field of embodied consciousness. Much like a hologram, in which each fragment contains the informational pattern of the whole, each memory trace may carry the emotional, sensory and symbolic structure of the original event.

From this perspective, the body and its surrounding field are not separate domains but expressions of a single continuum of memory.

Healing, therefore, involves more than remembering , reliving and releasing unresolved emotional content of an event. It may also require re-patterning of the resonance through which the body and the field continue to hold it.

 

The Bio-Location of Memory

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This understanding invites us to move beyond the conventional assumption that memory lives only inside the brain. Memory may be more accurately understood as a distributed phenomenon—held within neural pathways, encoded in the musculature and viscera, patterned through autonomic response, and extended into a subtle field surrounding the body.

To describe this phenomenon, I began using the term Bio-Location of memory. I use this term to describe a theory of the way the memory of an experience may  stored  not only within the physical body but also within a surrounding field of embodied consciousness that extends beyond the physical. While the body is the most immediate expression of memory, bio-location theory proposes that it may not be its only location.

There appears to exist an organizing field in which emotionally charged experiences continue to resonate. This field is not separate from the body; rather, it may be viewed as the body’s extended ecology of meaning.

A deeply painful event can create a field of contraction that persists long after the original experience has passed. The nervous system may continue to scan for danger, while the surrounding field carries a corresponding atmosphere of fragmentation, pressure or dissonance.

By contrast, memories associated with coherence, belonging, love or profound meaning tend to generate an expansive field effect—one that supports openness, creativity and relational trust.

 

The Role of the Imaginal

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If this field-based understanding of memory is to be therapeutically useful, the next question becomes practical: How do we access and transform it? This is where the Imaginal becomes central. The Imaginal provides a methodology for accessing the memory field and bringing its subtle contents into awareness. When this process is aligned with interoception and proprioception, it becomes a powerful agency of reconciliation.

Interoception allows us to sense the internal physiological and emotional tone of the memory in the body. Through an inward scan, the body can often reveals a location where a memory is being held.

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The invitation may be as simple as:

“Point to where you feel that memory in your body.”

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Proprioception, the act of pointing to the location where memory is felt, provides a physical confirmation of the location of the interior felt sense.  When the client uses their hand to point to the place where the memory is felt, the location becomes experientially real.

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In this way:

• The Imaginal opens the possibility of accessing a stored memory

• Interoception locates where the memory is stored within the felt sense 

• Proprioception provides external confirmation of the reality of the felt sense

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The next step in the process is to identify the memory’s Bio-Location in the surrounding field outside and around the body. The client is invited to allow an image related to this particular memory to arise in the Imaginal perception. 

Imagine a picture associated with that memory and move your hand that is pointing to the internal location to a new place outside your body where you intuit that picture is residing. 

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Often, a corresponding point in the surrounding field becomes perceptible and the client will reach out and touch the corresponding bio-location of that internal memory in the external field. In this simple process we are creating a neural link between a perceived memory, the location of its felt sense within the interoceptive field, a proprioceptive confirmation of that location and now an external correspondence or bio-location that carries an Imaginal reference to the memory.

 

The Therapeutic Process of Repatterning

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Once three things have been established, the memory content that is carrying a negative charge, the location within the body that is subjectively felt as the physical location of that memory and the corresponding bio-location of that memory in the external field, we can begin the therapeutic process. The goal of the therapeutic intervention is to create a simple polarity shift in the memory data, one that will successfully shift the negative charge to a neutral charge.  One of the simplest and most effective process to neutralize a negatively charged memory is relocational repatterning. The client is first reassured that the content of the memory is not being erased. The VAK information remains available to consciousness. What is being transformed is the charge.

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The invitation then becomes:

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“Now that you have located where in the field the original memory is located, think about where in the surrounding field could this memory be moved so that it no longer disturbs you and may instead become a source of learning and an inner resource?”

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Before relocation, the client is invited to gather any wisdom or meaning that may be retained from the experience.

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What can you learn from this experience so that once you have the learning you never have to experience it again in the same way?

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Once the learning is gathered, the client is advised to move their hand from the original bio-location position that represents the negative charge to a new position in space. The new position is predefined as a location where the memory no longer disturbs you, where you will never have to experience it again in the same way and where you will feel the best possible outcome becomes available to you.

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It has been my observation, that once a memory with a negative charge is bio-located in space and then moved via Imaginal processes to a new location, the negative charge of the original memory can be effectively neutralized.  A significant amount of clinical applications of this intervention seems to indicate that a negatively charged memory cannot exist in two places at the same time. While the content can remain the same in two different locations, the charge associated with that content appears to be attached to the location that was established at the original time of the experience. It can be difficult to switch a negative memory to a positive memory, however when confronted with a memory being moved from its original negative location to a new location with a predetermined positive intent, i.e a source of learning and an inner resource, the original negative charge and the intended positive charge effectively cancel out each other and the new location is assigned a neutral charge. Through a simple process of bio-location, utilizing a combination of interoception, proprioception and the Imaginal, irritating negatively charged memories can be neutralized in the field. The client is then given time and space to allow the nervous system and symbolic field to reorganize. The memory remains. But its electrical charge changes.

 

Case Illustration

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I received permission from a client to share her experience with this process.

She came to me in her late seventies carrying an unresolved grief that had haunted her since early adulthood. In her twenties, she had entrusted the care of her elderly dog to her parents while she was travelling out of town for two weeks. Upon returning, she discovered that they had decided to put the dog down without informing or consulting her. The sense of betrayal and loss from this experience became a recurring emotional theme throughout her life.

Through the Imaginal process described above, she located the feeling residue of that memory in the region of her heart and identified its bio-location in the lower right quadrant of the field in front of her body. After consciously retrieving the learning from the experience, she was invited to move the memory to a location that felt more complete and restorative. For her, this emerged as the upper left quadrant. The symbolic act of moving the bio-location that had held the negative charge to a new space created the potential for the negative emotional charge attached to the incident to neutralize and her nervous system to reorganize itself around the shift in polarity. In subsequent sessions she reported that the resentment and grief had significantly softened. What remained was no longer an active wound, but an integrated memory held within a more coherent field of presence.

 

Reconciliation as the Recovery of Presence

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At its deepest level, memory reconciliation is not an act of correcting memory. It is the recovery of presence. What wounds us most deeply is often not only the original negatively charged event but the way its unresolved content continues to organize our inner world. The body braces before there is threat. The heart closes before there is relationship. Perception narrows before possibility can be felt. In this way, unresolved memory compromises our capacity to inhabit the present.

When memory is engaged and reconciled through interoception, proprioception and the creative capacities of the Imaginal, a new mode of presence begins to emerge. The body no longer needs to organize itself around conditions that belong to another time. The past is not denied. It is not erased or reduced. It can be consciously transformed to provide a larger and more compassionate field of awareness. Through this process, what was once held as wound may become wisdom. Challenging memories can be re-patterned and reconciled and the nervous system can open to new opportunities for experience beyond the boundaries established by negative conditioning.

 

IMAGINAL TRAINING

Enhancing Positive Memories.

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While therapeutic processes tend to focus on release and clearing of negatively charged life events held in the embodied and holographic memory, the same Imaginal tools can also be useful to recover, enhance and strengthen positively charged memories. If as our model reveals, positively charged memories are life supportive and reinforcing of good inner feelings, then this work is equally valuable and provides significant encouragement to someone processing more shadow oriented material.

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Here is a process that uses multiple Imaginal strategies to achieve that result. It is a complex Imaginal and interoceptive sequence so you may need to read the instructions a few times before actually practicing the exercise. 

Create a comfortable, safe place for yourself where you will not be disturbed. Place your feet on the ground, take a few calming breaths and allow everything flow for a few moments.

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Go inside and retrieve a memory that holds a positive charge. 

Pick something you experienced in your life that can be considered a highlight reel. An experience of success, joy, confirmation or self validation. Find one of these memories inside yourself. 

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Using Imaginal interoception, scan your body and notice how you feel inside when you recall that particular memory.

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What emotions arise, what colours are associated with that memory, what images or symbols, if any, arise from that memory. Make sure it is the quality feeling that is positive and one you would like to strengthen and reinforce.

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Next, imagine creating a photo that represents that memory. 

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Let the Imaginal do the work and extract a significant moment from the memory and take a photo. Imagine holding that photo in your hands. 

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Notice how you feel when you look at it. 

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This is called anchoring the interoceptive state.  Now let’s make some changes to the photo and watch what changes in the interoceptive state.

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If the photo is black and white, make it colour. Notice what changes.

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If the photo is color, make the colours brighter and more vibrant. Notice what changes.

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If the photo is fuzzy, make it sharper and clearer. Notice what changes.

You can add a sound or musical background if that appeals to you. Notice what changes.

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Make any changes you wish that results in an increase of the good feelings that arise with that memory.

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Next, imagine there is a computer or TV screen or a large picture frame floating in the space in front of you. 

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See the borders of that object and if you want, give a specific colour to both the frame and borders.

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Now, take that photo from your hands and move it onto that screen or frame.

It is really useful to move your physical hands to apply the photo to the frame. Just move your hands and put the picture on the frame in front of of you.

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Notice what happens to the interoceptive state when the picture of your positive memory is now projected on the external frame. How does seeing your memory there in front of you in all its color and clarity and sound make you feel.

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If the positive feelings are still intact, then

Using your real hands grab and hold the right and left side of the frame.

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Now, just as you can enlarge a photo size on your phone by pinching and stretching, while  holding on to the sides of the frame, begin to move your hands sideways, right hand to the right, left hand to the left.

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This movement results in the expansion of the photo in size. Notice what changes in the feeling state. If the external movement succeeds in increasing the positive feelings, then you have created a neural link between the external photo size and your inner experience. Your nervous system is responding to the photo being larger by increasing the intensity, in this case positivity and pleasure, of the inner state to match the larger outer size.

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Now adjust the size of the frame so it feels best to you. This could be making it even larger or just finding the right size that you want it to be so the feelings are exactly as you want the to be.

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Next, use your imagination to turn the frame into a blanket and wrap the photo/blanket around you in the most comfortable way possible.

Stay in this embodied state as long as you like.

 

Why This Process Works

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The Imaginal when combined with both the interoceptive nervous system and the proprioceptive nervous system, provides a significant yet relatively unexplored technology for therapeutic re-patterning of nervous system states. Our model assumes that memories are stored with VAKC, visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and electrical charge. The charge can be negative or positive. By starting this process with a retrieval of a positive charged memory, there is greater safety and possibility that the adjustments and shifts of particular aspects of the memory, called memory modalities, will result in good feelings.

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Once the retrieval process is secured and a positively charged inner memory has been accessed, the next steps is projection. Projection is a natural part of how the mind works so in most cases this will not be difficult. The visual component of the memory is externalized and  projected as an image or photo, first onto the hands and then on to a frame or screen located in the space in front of the body.  The nervous system recognizes the content that has been projected as originating from an inner source. It establishes a neural link relationship with the projection that is alive and actively responsive. Tibetan Bön psychology uses the imagery of a mother/son relationship to describe the inner state (mother) and external projection (son). The changes made in the modalities of the projection, such as depth of color, brightness, contrast and eventually size of the projection, often trigger a corresponding somatic felt sense that resonates emotionally within the body.  In this manner we can utilize Imaginal processes to impact and transform the architecture and design of our inner world.

 

The hands are used during the process to activate proprioceptive responses in the typically unconscious part of awareness. Proprioception is a confirming modality. Its messages confirm where we are in space and how we are physically interacting with objects in the world. By using the hands to move the projected image onto the Imaginal screen or frame, our brain receives confirmation that this is a real experience. Once the image from the positive memory is projected on the screen with our hands, the conditions are set for change work. We have already optimized the modalities to trigger a suitable positive felt sense.

 

Next we use the proprioceptive nervous system to increase the intensity of those feelings by adjusting the size of the projected image. Not everyone is ‘wired” the same but a standard response to making the image larger is to sense an intensity and increase of the corresponding inner feelings. A larger and wider projection tends to create an increase in the sense of intensity of our inner feelings. By testing to confirm that this link has been made and that the size of the projected image and the subjective report of shifts in inner feeling states has occurred, then the client is given free will to resize the projected image in any way that provides optimum positive feelings.

 

This is somewhat neurologically inventive as most of the time we perceive feelings connected to memories as being rigid and fused at the conception of the experience. With proper guidance and observation, we learn that the nervous system and memory processes are significantly more fluid and feelings originally associated with a memory can be transformed in numerous ways that may be helpful to increase integrative functioning in daily life. 

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Self-hugging is a powerful soothing and grounding tool used to regulate the nervous system, reduce stress and improve emotional well-being. It mimics the comfort of physical touch from others, triggering the release of oxytocin the "love hormone" and lowering cortisol, the stress hormone. The Imaginal allows us to play, so by transforming the expanded flat image of the projection into a blanket, we can effectively wrap ourselves in a self hug and embody and reconnect with all the changes that have been performed so far in the process. The Imaginal provides access to symbol and myth. We are symbolically returning the wayward son to the mother, bringing with him all the treasures of his mythical journey of transformation through Imaginal landscape.