Miki mentions that this exercise helps you to drop the storyline. When I get more time I'd like to come back and update this post with thoughts on other ideas I had about using an exercise like this and how they relate to the snippets I've pasted in below about dropping the storyline.
From http://byakurenzen.blogspot.com/2014/07/right-thought-ii.html
My favorite practice is Pema Chodron’s instructions:
· Drop the storyline
· Stay with the underlying energy of the moment.
From http://www.auraglaser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/September2012CWJournal.Aura_.Glaser.pdf
... What happens when we drop the storyline, the conceptual narrative, and enter directly into the underlying energy of experience? What happens when we stop trying to figure it out, explain it to ourselves, or find someone to blame, and just feel it? However painful the emotion, be it grief or rage, loneliness or shame, the underlying energy is one shared by all humans since the beginning of time. Touching it directly, staying with it, opens our awareness and our heart. It opens our world. ...
From the book The Wisdom of No Escape: And the Path of Loving-Kindness by Pema Chodron:
... recognize what’s happening with you and you say to yourself, “Thinking.” Then you let go of all the talking and the fabrication and discussion, and you’re left just sitting with the weather*—the quality and the energy of the weather itself. Maybe you still have that quaky feeling or that churning feeling or that exploding feeling or that calm feeling or that dull feeling, as if you’d just been buried in the earth. You’re left with that. That’s the key: come to know that.