October 2026
I do a monthly Q&A for students of my course. Here is a question from September 2026, and an edited version of my answer.
In IFS there's the concept of the Self, which is said to carry certain innate qualities — things like clarity, calm, and curiosity. You mentioned that thinking from a place of spacious awareness feels different, more wise. I can definitely notice my own thinking becoming clearer and more "wise" when I drop into that open state.
What do you think of IFS, and do you think there's some kind of innate wisdom we can tap into by accessing certain states?
For anyone unfamiliar, IFS stands for Internal Family Systems, developed by Richard Schwartz. And I'm going to try to constrain my answer rather than type a few thousand words, which is a risk on this topic.
I should also say that I'm not an expert on IFS specifically. Except for having read No Bad Parts, my experience with parts work comes from my now four-year training with the Aletheia Advanced Coaching Program. This has an enormous focus on parts, and is inspired by IFS, but it diverges from IFS in a number of ways.
Let's start with these two traditions that use parts explicitly. They both claim that parts exist, where parts are semi-autonomous sub-personalities that have a pretty limited view of how the system (you) works. They have a goal, which is often to prevent you from feeling something, or to get you to feel something. We could also call this 'conditioning', as it's learned early in life.
It's often said that "parts always have good intentions", but I've found that some people really, really hate this view. Instead, I prefer to say that parts always have goals that make sense to them.
For example, a part might want you not to feel ashamed, and its strategy for doing this is to get you to reach for your phone and put a YouTube video on to distract or numb you. This action has a bunch of consequences. The rest of you might not see this as 'good', but the part doesn't see any of that. Its goal is for you not to feel ashamed, and it succeeded. Other parts might have things to say about your YouTube use, and so you end up bouncing from part-driven behaviour to part-driven behaviour.
For me, parts explain what I have seen in Alexander Technique, but which Alexander Technique has limited theory for. The language I use in module 3 on the autopilot is influenced by these ideas. A stimulus can trigger a part, the part takes over and does whatever its strategy is to achieve its goal, making an image it has of how you and the world should be feel real. An interesting parallel here is that Alexander Technique's inhibition and IFS’s un-blending are probably very similar moves.
Importantly, parts-based behaviour happens in parts-shaped ways, i.e. with my Four Spectra of Presence moving away from presence and towards autopilot (zoning out, contraction, fixation, and stuckness). Parts are not only psychological, but psychophysical, hence muscle tension and straining. In my view, trying of the kind I describe in the course is evidence of a part in action.
Let's now turn to that spacious, open state you mentioned. IFS calls this Self, Aletheia calls it Presence. For transparency, I don't know if Self and Presence are exactly the same thing. I think that Aletheia's 'Presence' and mine are the same place, or at least very close, but I'm holding it lightly for now.
One view of presence is that it's what's there when parts aren't running the show. Rather than having a sub-personality take over, with its limited and rigid conception of what should be happening and how things should be, the whole of your being can remain involved. From the inside this feels like the other end of the Four Spectra of Presence: fully there, spaciously aware, un-fixated and available to act or not act.
You describe "my own thinking becoming clearer and more 'wise' when I drop into that open state." We could explain this simply: you can see the bigger picture, rather than being caught up in a single story with a single appropriate strategy.
There are two other lenses, depending on whether you prefer a neurological perspective or a spiritual one.
For the neurological lens I'll point you towards Iain McGilchrist and his work on brain lateralisation. He suggests that each hemisphere of the brain has specialised for a different way of attending to the world.
Briefly, his idea is that the left hemisphere seeks to apprehend the world, to control and manipulate objects within it. It analyses things, i.e. breaks them into pieces so that the pieces can be looked at in isolation. Its attention is sticky and it finds it hard to switch focus. It is certain and overconfident about things and itself.
The right hemisphere, by contrast, seeks to comprehend the world, to see it as whole before seeing the detail. It is able to see context, flow and the relationship between things, and it can deal with uncertainty, the unfamiliar and paradox.
His main theory is that these two hemispheres are supposed to work together, with information going first to the right hemisphere (to comprehend the whole), passed to the left (to apprehend the pieces) and then passed back to the right to be reintegrated into the whole. But, he says, modern culture has tipped the scale towards left hemisphere dominance, meaning that "we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it" (The Matter with Things, p7).
So to answer your question from this more neurological view, perhaps presence is that state where there is appropriate functioning of both hemispheres, rather than the left being allowed to dominate.
If I were feeling bold, I might claim that, from this perspective, what I'm teaching is the skill of noticing when the left hemisphere dominates the relationship and gently bringing the hemispheres back into appropriate relationship with each other (epistemic status: maybe? ask me again in 10 years).
At the same time, there are two cautions here. One is that his work is contested. The other is that much of McGilchrist's work is based on studies on patients with brain damage where the differences are clearly amplified. I think there's something really important in McGilchrist's work, but it's worth holding lightly.
Finally, there is the spiritual angle. Steve March, who developed Aletheia, draws a lot from the Diamond Approach, which is an explicitly spiritual tradition, itself influenced by Sufism, Buddhism, modern psychology and other things. One of the core claims of the Diamond Approach is that Presence has a long list of different qualities, which sound like IFS's qualities of Self.
For example, where IFS has Curiosity, Compassion, Calm, Clarity, Courage, Confidence, Creativity, and Connectedness, the Diamond Approach talks of Compassion, Unconditional Love, Joy, Value, Strength, Will, etc. These are different 'flavours' that Presence can show up in depending on what's needed in the moment. This also just seems true to me now, as a matter of experience, but I have no evidence to lean on besides that.
In short, you ask "do you think there's some kind of innate wisdom we can tap into by accessing certain states?" And my answer is simply 'yes'. I've experienced it often, and I've seen others experience it often. It just seems true to me by now.
Here's a reading list if you want to go deeper:
IFS: No Bad Parts, or perhaps one of the other books by Richard Schwartz
McGilchrist:
Diamond Approach: