Projected Personalities

Connectedness and Loneliness

Tool Kit

28th July 2026

The toolkit

The toolkit.

Introduction

This page contains information that supports the connectedness journey. It has the following sections:

  1. Journaling resources Go
  2. Life Line Graph Go
  3. Meditation, visualisation Go
  4. References Go

1. Journaling resources

Below are some great resources on journaling provided by reputable organisations:

  1. Journaling your thoughts and feelings - lifeline.org.au - here
  2. How to start journalling - headspace.org.au - here
  3. Journal therapy - Wikipedia - here

2. Life Line Graph

The life line template as an svg file is here.

A life line is a graph that shows your feelings of happiness or sadness over time. The vertical axis has very happy at the top, neutral in the middle and miserable at the bottom. The horizontal axis is time from the year you were born to the current year. To help jog your memory about things, at the bottom of the graph note down significant things at the date they happened - like periods of schooling or employment and with who, and where you were living. Then very simply, and without over thinking it, draw your life line indicating how you felt at any given point in time.

Once you have the line, study it. Your subconscious would have told you whether you were happy or not - now it's time to examine that and understand what was going on in your life. Almost certainly your life line will have high and low points: look at them and think hard. The point here is to build up a picture of the people and things you really like and which made you happy: a particular place where you liked living, a particular type of person makes you happy, a work activity that makes you feel fulfilled. Jot these things down in your journal.

3. Meditation, visualisation

Meditation is one of the most useful and frustrating things you can do. Useful because it really does calm your mind and if combined with visualisation, can really help you achieve great things. Frustrating because people glibly say "Oh try meditation!" and it's not necessarily that easy. The simple reason it's not that easy is that one of the aims of meditation is to calm your mind, yet in this modern world our minds are churning over thoughts at a horrific rate. If you sit still and try not to think of anything, within a few seconds you will be thinking about whether green is the right colour for the living room, why you never liked courgette, how Robin really is an arse, why are you 20 kg over your ideal weight and how you're never going to do that thing with lube again - or a thousand other random ideas.

Meditation and visualisation are really valuable, so we must tackle this and get it to work for us. This is the process I suggest you try:

  1. Learn how to waste time.
  2. Practise getting into a meditative state where the objective is to think about nothing at all.
  3. Use you meditative state to concentrate on a single thought.
  4. Use your meditative state to engage in a guided meditation.
  5. Use your meditative state to drive your own visualisation.

Wasting time

Do you allow yourself to waste time? Do you ever just go to the park, sit on a bench, and do bugger all save for looking at the people walking past, or watch a tree sway in the breeze? I think most people don't - they put themselves under so much pressure to be "productive" all the time. Well, if that is you STOP. Choose a place, preferably somewhere in nature where you can sit peacefully and undisturbed. Then start going there on a regular basis and do nothing. Just let your mind wander - stay there, wasting time, till you realise your thoughts are no longer wandering, that they have become calm. Nature really helps with this. This first step reminds you that you can be at peace. It's an important learning. The side benefit of this activity is that you may make good connections with other people (or pigeons) in the park while you're wasting your time - could turn out to be not such a waste of time after all.

A meditative state

There are countless thousands of books, websites and apps on meditation and how to do, and feel free to consult any of them. Following is my simple guide.

Location - it's a good idea to find somewhere indoors. That way you won't get rained upon or blown away by the wind. The place should be peaceful and where you won't be disturbed. I find sitting upright in bed is a good place, or even a comfortable chair. If you lie down there is a very good chance you will fall asleep. Keep your body open - I find it best not to cross legs or arms, or even let your hands touch. Set your phone to aircraft mode so that you won't be disturbed, and bring up the stopwatch app. Just before you are about to start, start the stopwatch app, then close your eyes and relax.

The first thing to do is just listen. There may be many sounds you can hear. Pick each one in turn, work out what you think it is, then push it away. It may still be there, but hopefully will no longer disturb you. Once you have dealt with noise, concentrate on your body. Without necessarily wiggling anything, see if you can sense your toes, your left then right. Then move up to your calves and get a feel for what they are doing. Carry on through your thighs, your bottom, into your chest and spine, finishing up with the top of your head. Are you "in touch" with yourself? Don't worry if you are not. It takes practise to get fully connected. Then concentrate on your breathing - in through your nose and out through your mouth - just breathing. Gently squash all other thoughts. This is the practice to get a calm, peaceful mind. Keep that going for as long as you can. When you feel like you've had enough, slowly open your eyes and stop the stopwatch. Don't move for a little while, but rather assess how you feel - any good?

Try doing that simple exercise on a regular basis - every day is good. Over time you should be able to get to that calm, breath focussed state easily. Once you're there, it's time to move to the next step. The time on the stopwatch is simply to give you an idication as to how long you were meditating, and there is no right or wrong answer. You will find your own ideal duration - it's just good to know what that is.

A single thought

Getting into a meditative state is great. You should come out feeling calmer, more relaxed and generally OK, all of which have tremendous value in their own right. But we can do more, and achieve more.

The next step on the journey is to cultivate and hold a single clear thought in your head while you are in that calm meditative state. Let's start with love. Get yourself into your meditative state and then in your mind, as best you can, create the sensation of being loved. You don't need to think of words - just try and express how being loved makes you feel. If you don't think you have ever had that feeling for real then create the sensation you would like to have being loved. Stay with that feeling for a while, enjoy it, cherish it, then share it by pushing it out. Imagine you've become a wonderful love transmitter and all you want to do is send love out to the rest of the world. Keep going for as long as feels comfortable and then stop and open your eyes. I am confident that exercise will make you feel better, and better about the world.

Love is one thought. Others include feeling safe, being at peace, and generating positive energy.

Guided meditation

Guided meditation is where you listen to a voice while you are in your meditative state. The voice guides your feelings around an issue. There are literally thousands of free guided meditations on the web covering everything from being calm to weightloss, and reducing anxiety and stress to calming your mind for better sleep. There are so many available I can't really give you a recommendation here, other than to suggest that you:

  1. Search for what looks like a reputable provider,
  2. Pick a subject from their offerings that feels most appropriate to you,
  3. Experiment with the free meditations first and see how you find them.

OK, I will give you one recommendation, but only because I trust the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Try their Mindfully series.

Visualisation

The reason I am suggesting using guided meditations is so that you can get used to the idea that meditation can affect real change in the way you feel, and even in the way you behave. This final stage of visualisation is where you get to take control and write your own narrative. Visualisation is used by high performance atheletes to plan and practice before a big race. It is used by executives who are facing complex negotiations and want to achieve certain outcomes. It can be used by you to rehearse meeting somebody for the first time, or the steps you need to take to create an artwork, and even as a way of helping you determine what your true purpose in life is.

A study recently published in the journal science [1] indicates that the same brain neurons used to see an object are reactivated when a person imagines that object again. The ability to hold a mental image in our heads allows humans to remember past experiences and imagine new ones. It underpins how we generate art, music and creative writing, and helps us plan and navigate by simulating actions and outcomes before they happen. If we can create scenes and experiences in our own mind (visualisation) we are better prepared for when it happens in the real world.

The basic visualisation process is:

  1. Identify what it is you want to achieve,
  2. Write down a very simple script - the steps you will take to achieve your goal,
  3. Read through your script and remember it as best you can,
  4. Enter a meditative state,
  5. Play the script in your mind visualising yourself achieving all the outcomes you want,
  6. Repeat as many times as you feel is appropriate.

Following are a couple of script examples:

Joining the art class

  1. Keys, cards, bus pass, inhaler, water bottle, drawing kit, jacket - make sure the front door is locked.
  2. Bus stop, No. 7 bus at 17:48, sit on the top deck - look in the gardens.
  3. Get of Ashmore Street, walk to Community Centre - find art class room.
  4. Look for Peter the group leader, you spoke on the phone - no hassle, be yourself.
  5. Find your spot, get set up - say hello to the person next to you, tell them your name, find out theirs.
  6. Listen when Peter introduces the life model - purpose of the session.
  7. Focus, make the best drawing you can - at the break talk to your neighbour again.
  8. At the end if somebody suggests going for a drink say YES.

Finding purpose

  1. You wake up. Sun is shining through the window.
  2. The bed is super-comfortable. You lie there relaxed.
  3. Get up, go to the kitchen, make tea.
  4. You take the tea to the bedroom and get back into bed.
  5. Peaceful, calm, no need to rush.
  6. You have the whole day to do whatever you want - ask yourself what will that be ...

In this case let your subconscious answer your question. Something will bubble up from the depths of your mind. Write it down before you forget. If you do this several times in a very natural, unforced way, and you keep getting the same or similar answers, then you are well on your way to finding your true purpose in life.

4. References

  1. A shared code for perceiving and imagining objects in human ventral temporal cortex - Science, 9 Apr 2026, Vol 392, Issue 6794, pp. 207-215, DOI: 10.1126/science.adt8343