Push your metaphors. Exercise them till they're exhausted.

Yesterday I suggested a way to get deeper into your emotional process. Let me give you some footnotes:

Emotional process is an Edwin Friedman idea. He develops it his book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. This is an extended discussion of the idea of being stuck, emotionally and conceptually, what Friedman calls "Imaginative gridlock", and of how "Quick fixes" reveal a failure of nerve relative moving beyond one's stuckness, one's boundaries. Friedman points to the "nerve" of explores like Columbus and Magellan and how they broke through the imaginative gridlock of 15th century Europe to found new worlds.

Here's a quote:  "Anyone who has ever been part of an imaginatively gridlocked relationship system knows that more learning, will not, on its own, automatically change the way people see things or think. There must first be a shift in the emotional processes of that institution. Imagination and indeed even curiosity are at root emotional, not cognitive  phenomena. In order to imagine the unimaginable, people must be able to separate themselves from surrounding emotional processes before they can even begin to see (or hear) things differently." p. 31

Exhausting one's metaphors is an idea I found in "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is a non-fiction book about brains, both human and artificial, by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil." 
Kurzweil is discussing how he works toward new ideas and approaches. He says he gets a group of thinkers together and asks each thinker to teach the group the basics of their field as it applies to the challenge before the group. He then asks the group to create metaphors for these basic concepts as they relate to the challenge. Then he has the group scrap these initial metaphors and work to create another set of metaphors. Pushing people to imagine and create beyond their initial set of metaphors leads into new territory...he calls it going beyond the safe boundaries. 

Here's my point. Exhausting metaphors is an imaginative experience. It is also emotional. I find pushing through successive layers of metaphor engages my emotional processes and  brings me to places where I see and hear things differently.

Work on it!