I realize its been quite a while since I posted anything here and I’m hoping my reader base will forgive me. My writing practice had a couple of hiccups until recently while I’ve been busy with other activities. Luckily not blogging doesn’t mean I haven’t been experimenting.
My latest kick has come from rekindling my nearly forgotten lucid dreaming practice and taking my sleep hacking to the next level. For those of you who might have been living in a cave or intentionally hiding from things that are cool as hell, lucid dreaming is the act of becoming aware that you are dreaming… while you are dreaming. Thus giving the dreamer control over the dream’s content as long as he remains lucid.
There has been an surge of articles online recently about how to get yourself started with lucid dreaming although most of it is just rehashing the information thats already out there for beginners.
Doing reality checks during the day so the habit rolls over into your dreams at night.
Doing the various lucid dream rituals prescribed by Stephen LaBerge like MILD, WILD, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dreaming#Wake-back-to-bed_.28WBTB.29
All very important things for the beginning lucid dreamer. But after reading through what I could find online I was disapointed in the lack of information for intermediate and advanced dreamers. Like so many areas of self development and consciousness exploration everything seems to be geared to the beginner, once you’ve taken your practice beyond that level you’re on your own exploring undocumented territory.
Once you’ve already mastered flying and have “indulged yourself in the sex binge” to quote Tim Ferriss… then what?
Thats what I’ve been asking myself for a while now trying to carve out a plan for exploring some of the lesser plumbed depths of lucid dreaming consciousness.
One of the most interesting philosophical questions posed by lucid dreaming that rarely gets asked seriously is: once you have the power to do whatever you could imagine, with no limitations what-so-ever… what do you do? If I gave you a blank hola-deck and you could be anyone, anything, anywhere…. who would you be? and once all your materialistic and sensory pleasures were satisfied… then what?
When people think of billionaires… they usually imagine people who have everything sipping champagne by the pool on a tuesday for no other reason than they can. But how often is the billionaire satisfied with just a simple life of pleasure. What really happens to a human’s brain when we have everything we want, get bored with it, and have to start looking for new challenges, new horizons proportional to our vision and capability.
I think this is the real gift of lucid dreaming practice. Its an opportunity to find our true passion, that one thing that we would do once we could do anything… in a world where nothing would stop us. The potential for this application alone is enormous but sadly gets buried in the ‘be superman! sleep with run-way models!’ attitude so many lucid dreaming books have.
So that’s my only beef with the lucid dreaming work online. Most of it consists of simple lists of techniques to help the beginner and there isn’t too much in the way of group experiments into the weirder aspects of this powerful state of consciousness. I did however find a great site called SpiritWatch which has an archive of every issue of the ‘Lucidity Journal’ since the early eighties (I highly recommend reading the work by Jayne Gackenbach and Paul Tholey) but besides that and a few forums online there isn’t enough of a lucid dreaming exploration community for those of us who are past the beginning stage and ready to do more with our dreams that just fuck and fly.
One of the far overlooked aspects of LD I’m interested in exploring is the ability to interact directly with the contents of your own mind. The research on using lucid dreams as a tool to achieve physical and emotional healing is sadly lacking. There are countless first person accounts online of people using the dream state to visualize their tumor shrinking, or to interact directly with their unconscious mind to create changes in their waking consciousness.
The same kind of fascinating work on the limits of our own mind is highlighted in the research of dream characters and how much information and abilities they actually possess. I for one am continually shocked at how much valuable information and guidance I can receive from my own dream regulars and some of the accounts online of other oneironauts only drives my point home further that there is a storehouse of insight waiting for us in our dreams waiting to be tapped by those who know how.
Another interesting activity I intend to explore more is the ability of your dream consciousness to separate itself into two different points of awareness and experience two sets of dream sensory input. This means you could be staring up the staircase at yourself, staring down the staircase at yourself staring back up. Its fascinating areas of the mind like this that we discover in the realm of lucid dreaming that shed light on how our own waking consciousness represents the outside world to us and what the limitations on that consciousness really are.
These are just two of the topics I want to expand on in the next few weeks as I write more on the topic of Lucid dreaming and keep you all updated on my own personal experiments into conscious self growth using this method. Matt and I plan on doing some reviews of some of the books we’ve read and have recently begun to incorporate the use of various supplements to increase our lucid dreaming potential, all of which you will definetly be reading about in future posts.
As always anyone who would like to share some of their experiences with lucid dreaming, especially experiences pertaining to bending the boundaries of what people may consider possible… even in a dream, please feel free to share them either in the comments or email us at the blog, we’d love to put some up. Otherwise look forward to more posts in the future and the Focused-Awareness Blog coming back into action online.
-Chris
More stuff on the web: Stephen LaBerge and the Lucidity Institute LD4All Not my favorite site design ever but a good online community with some interesting posts. Paul Tholey Some collected English articles by one of the most interesting oneironauts I’ve read about. Be sure to read his great paper called ‘The Importance of Light Heartedness’
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When you think about yourself in the third person, you’re thinking about the way you appear to the people around you in your life. You’re thinking about the interpersonal image that you’re communicating to the world. The existentialist Jon Paul Sartre constantly reminds us that being a good human means taking responsibility for your actions.
When you behave in certain ways you’re taking on the responsibility to show the world how you think a person should behave in that context.
That’s why our image of ourselves we hold in our minds should be consistent with the kind of message we’re sending out to the world.
I’ve talked before about my love for affirmations and what they can do for your life. I’ve even experimented on myself with a number of different methods for developing effective affirmations, and it hasn’t all been easy. I’ve had a mixed bag of experiences while trying out things like positive self talk during the day while I work, practicing positive visualization while I fall asleep at night, things like that. I’ve had some positive effects and some negative effects but after going back over my own experiences and notes carefully, certain trends started to develop that made the difference between affirmations being effective and affirmations failing to make the desired change.
This key factor determines whether your self talk is going to be effective… and its truly simple.
Think about it… Focused-Awareness Blog has been rolling around the ideas required to align yourself with the kinds of things you want to accomplish and BE in your life. Everything is about where we place our attention and the kinds of thoughts we think. We practice seeing in our minds eye, visually, what we want to achieve. We verbally repeat the commands to ourselves that we want to ingrain deeply and start to live by. We take care of our body/minds to optimize as best we can our potential for awareness and more expansive self growth. But none of this will truly change you without one simple thing…
The assumption of change.
This idea goes by different names in different self development philosophies but the jist is simple… if you aren’t acting AS IF your visualizations and affirmations are true… YOU WON’T CHANGE!
I know this is shocking to alot of arm chair self development people who enjoy cracking open a good Tony Robbins book and indulging in a fantasy of actually getting off their ass and changing themselves but its true.
No amount of mental energy is going to cause you to change if you don’t walk out the front door and start occupying the frame of mind that you want to act from. Its that simple.
I was practicing a technique some people call Mirror Affirmations, which is really just the simple act of making solid eye contact with yourself in the mirror and repeating what it is you want to believe about yourself. Basically affirmations in the mirror, you get it.
I spend most morning doing my little routine which involves some meditation and grounding practice but I’ve been mixing in the whole mirror affirmation thing after I brush my teeth, before I head out the door. The results were suprising.
Growing up I had what you might call confidence issues, which if lefted unchecked I might still have to this day. So one of the important qualities I like to try and ingrain in myself in an unapologetic/confident attitude about who I am and what I want from this life.
Now all that is fine and I’ve made all sorts of progress but the real changes in my internal frame have come from this assumption of change that is so important.
If I do the mirror affirmations and walk out the door telling myself ‘Ok, I’m going to have a great day today, I’m walking tall, feeling good, grounded and mindful’ etc that might help me start to take actions in that direction, but I think for most people who practice affirmations they quickly find that its not just as easy as telling yourself the magic words and heading out there. You have to DO something about it.
When you practice a lot of affirmations yet walk around still acting and behaving the same way, what you’re really doing is draining your positive statements of their power.
Think about it…
If I tell myself all day long that I’m confident and assertive and I walk into work that day and fall right back into my old behaviors while still using these affirmations, I’m creating a negative association in my nervous system between SAYING I’m confident, and ACTING unconfident. I’m literally making my positive affirmations work against me.
This is why the assumption of change is so critical. For deep seated habits and belief patterns change isn’t always simple. Its not as easy as just performing some NLP move and WHAM you’re all better.
Thats why for me, I know that physically pushing myself into areas that make me confident is the first step and using the affirmations to change my internal frame comes second to the real world effort.
Thats what I’ve learned from using mirror affirmations. When I know that I’m going to push myself into encounters today that will make me grow as a human, then those affirmations and positive statements can be support beams helping me feel congruent with the way I’m acting.
So here’s a little challenge for the folks who have been keeping up.
Make a commitment to yourself to do one thing that pushes you into being the kind of you want to be. If you’re terrible at saving money, make a serious commitment to stop spending frivolously even if you can only manage to really commit to it one day. Maybe you’re shy and you make a commitment to meeting at least one new stranger a day for a week. Whatever it is, take a moment to really appreciate the importance of making this commitment to yourself and enduring whatever suffering it might cause you to break those old patterns.
Now that you know its something you’re really going to do whether you want to or not, you can start working on the part of you that ‘wants’ to do it. Now try those affirmations, visualize yourself from the outside being the kind of person you really know you are. Look yourself in the mirror and remind yourself that your doing this no matter what so its time for your mind to jump on board.
The key to making the switch is behaving as if its already true. Remember the assumption of change and don’t wait to start being the person you aspire to be.
Thats when these tools work. No one is demanding perfection or an instant 100% change, all you really need to do is make that initial commitment, that you will DO something, then tech like affirmations and creative visualization really start to make the difference.
So after my last post which was decidedly a little anti-tech, I’ve decided to switch it up and offer a couple useful pieces of NLP knowledge that I use to keep my state positive and happy. I shouldn’t have to remind everyone though that over dependence on this kind of thing is not healthy at all. This sort of technique is powerful and does produce immediate changes, but changing your state is only part of the process. The real insight comes when you start to realize that any changes you make could have been made anyway with no technique at all, the technique gives you something to use and believe in until the desired state is only a thought a way.
For example, I once read a story by a guy who was notoriously good at meeting women. He said that in high school he had been terrible and lacked any inkling of social intelligence. Needless to say, his love-life was non existent. When he started to learn a few interesting lines or some good jokes to open up conversations at bars, he thought it was kind of tacky to have a canned introduction, but they gave him something to say so he wouldn’t end up standing there shuffling his toes looking bored. He eventually found himself doing better and better, able to relax and open up, be confident and meet the kind of people he was interested in. He started to realize that the openers and routines that he used to use weren’t necessary and he could just walk up to a girl and confidently say ‘hello’. The openers weren’t that impressive in and of themselves, it was the confidence they gave him which was making others interested in meeting him.
Using these kinds of NLP techniques is the same way. The change you’re trying to make is really only a thought away, just like the process you go through when you remember something. You don’t need to rub your elbow or say some magic phrase to remember something, just the simple desire to do so and it happens. The process of self change can be just like that when you build up enough reference experiences to realize that change doesn’t have to be hard.
In the meantime getting to the point where you have those reference experiences can be difficult. That’s where these kinds of tools come in. Use them to get where your going then leave them behind once you get there.
That’s where the idea of spatial anchoring is going to really help you. We’ve talked about the notion of anchoring before but in this post I want to focus on anchoring’s relationship to the environment around you. I.E. Spatial Anchoring. Here’s an example:
The Visualization Walk
Find a place where you’ll have five or six feet of floor in front of you and behind you. Standing where you are, close your eyes and imagine a quality of yours just as it is. For instance if your trying to build more confidence, start by imagining a situation where you exhibit the level of confidence you have right now… however much or little that is. Make an effort to see yourself first from the third person, as you imagine you appear to others, then imagine seeing the same situation through your own eyes, in the first person.
Remember to make the picture bright and clear.
Really spend a minute or two feeling this state out. Its not just about seeing the image, its also about getting into the sensations in the body, the sounds, everything. Do whatever it takes to bring this image alive to you.
Now were going to take a step backwards. When you step backwards imagine your confidence decreasing. Think of a particularly un-confident scene from your life. If you have never felt less confident than you do now, make up a scenario that to you would seem a notch down from the situation we imagined at first. Feeling yourself getting less confident as you take a step backwards and notice how easy it is to move into a worse state than the current one. You simply subtract a certain amount of confident qualities from the last step. Adding qualities should be just that easy.
Now take one more step backwards and really get into the worst possible version of the state you’re working on. Imagine yourself at your least confident, least secure, least whatever and really get to know that nasty state. Remind yourself as you imagine it first in third person, then in first, that moving down in state is simple, just as simple as moving up.
Now step forward. Spend a second or two back at this point before taking another step forward and into the base level state we started from. Now I’m sure you can guess what to do next. Take a step forward and into a more confident you, a calmer, healthier, happier you. This is where you have to actually use that third person view to really see what kind of qualities you need to amp up to achieve the state you’re pushing for. Remember how easy it was to turn down certain qualities and imagine yourself worse off, now we’re doing the opposite and spotting those qualities in yourself that your higher You would possess. Maybe she stands a little taller, has better posture, maybe she carries herself with a different calmness and more grace. Maybe he’s reading more and going to bed early, maybe hes out socializing at night and going to bed later, its really up to you but remember to make the picture big and colorful. Make it as real as your mind’s eye can make it.
Once you’ve spent enough time in that higher state, open your eyes and march confidently back into the world. Know that at any time you can turn the space around you into a sliding dimmer switch of resourceful abilities. You can turn the volume up on the qualities that you already possess and become the kind of person you’ve only been dreaming of becoming.
That’s just one possible way to do it. You get the basic idea though. When you use spatial anchoring your teaching your nervous system to associate certain parts of the environment with certain types of states. By stepping backwards first into a lesser or more negative image you’re brain is getting the idea that each state is really just a combination of certain emotions and images in your mind. By changing our relationship to them and exploring how easy it is to make them worse, we also notice how flexible a state is and how easy it can be to imagine ourselves better.
Now go out and do something useful with that resourceful state, don’t just sit there feeling good, go make the world a better place.
I read a fair amount of psychology /self improvement literature and I’ve mentioned before how I consider myself a bit of a self help junkie. However there is a such thing as going overboard with it and a number of gurus and talking heads you’ll come across online are definetley capable of taking the idea of self improvement way too far.
My friend Rob calls it ‘the endless pursuit of tech’. The idea that becoming a better you is not only possible but hey… it should be easy. Tech refers to exactly the kind of stuff I love and the core ideas behind this blog. Think NLP, Tony Buzan, Lucid Dreaming, Meditation, all tools to change your consciousness, change your state, and eventually change your life conditions. Psychological devices that are designed to make the transition easy… like pressing send in your inbox.
Well in this post, I want to talk about something totally different than Tech… I want to talk about the opposite of tech. Good ole’ willpower.
Plain old fashion just doing it. I know it seems almost too simple to even write about.
Today at work I found myself engaging in an ancient piece of human communication technology called ‘talk radio’. Just one minute of talk radio commercials will hammer it into your head how much of a million dollar industry self improvement tech has really become. There’s an easy way to do everything now a days. There’s an easy way to loose weight, to become a millionaire, get out of debt, meet women. There is a special little gimmick around every corner that offers you the magic cure. Are there easier answers out there? or is this kind of marketing just creating the impression in alot of peoples minds that self improvement techniques are all bunk and the only people who succeed are those with success in their genes?
I’m afraid the answer, like many answers in life, is neither black or white. There is alot of great techniques out there, hopefully you’ve already read about some of them here on the site, but what about the no-technique approach? What if for some of us… the reliance on ideas and philosophies about HOW to “do it” is the very thing that keeps us from the simple doing of it.
Many people thinking having information is a good thing. having techniques means your equipped. You hear therapists and self help gurus of all shades saying things like ‘ you need to understand your problem clearly, you need to become aware of the situation, visualize success, change your modalities’ all great advice, for certain things and certian people. But here are strong cases that occur in real life, and often times having a knowledge of different change modalities like NLP or something will obscure the clarity of purpose a person has about reaching a goal, when they are waiting until they feel like it to make that next leap.
Over thinking can occur.
One of the important aspects of living the life of constant improvement is being able to push yourself to make an attempt even when you have a very slim chance of success.
You’re building the Do It habit.
The Do It habit is basically the simplest form of self improvement philosophy ever.
Most of us at some point or another do make a decision to do something different with our lives. Perhaps we’re a bit over weight, maybe we’re in debt, whatever it is… we decide one night and emphatically declare to ourselves that we are going to make a change now. How often do we make that first decision under the influence of strong emotions? How often do you wake up the next day to begin your new habit or your new pattern and find that the subsequent individual choices you have to make after the emotional honey moon wears off is part of the challenge?
Its easy to commit to quitting smoking when your aunt gets emphezema. But a week or two down the road when your work buddies are stepping outside to smoke, those neural pathways will light right back up. The emotional state that made your decision to quit so clear now seems hazy… and its not such a big deal if you don’t stick to it… or just have one… you can always start again tomorrow…
Discipline in certain circles has a muddied meaning it’s started to aquire alot of negative associations with it. There’s a growing idea that a person can only conquer a fear by getting over that fear mentally first. Or a person can achieve a goal only by visually believing that they can do it. The do it habit is way different in this respect.
Its about doing it even when you don’t think you can, and even when you don’t feel like it.
Out of the comfort zone and into the sky.
When you start on day one of any new goal or task its easy to get daunted thinking about all the decisions that your going to have to make a head of you. If your starting to hit the gym and get in better shape then you know its not just about making the initial decision to sign up, but making the decision every single day to put one foot in front of the other and go… whether you feel like it or not. You won’t get your perfect body in the first visit… but what you do get is a positive reference experience.
The more you see yourself doing what you want to be doing, the more you believe in your ability to do it. It never occurs to classically trained pianists from a very early age how amazing their skills are because they have no reference experience to what its like to NOT be good at playing piano.
Likewise many people who begin a new habit, or try to break an old reoccuring fear will have only negative reference experiences at first and its important to force yourself, against your own comfort, in order to achieve that first taste of success. Momentum is the key word here… like attracts like. But the only way to get out of a really serious funk is to stop perpetuating the idea that your failing… force yourself to take one step in the right direction every day. Eventually it will become so easy you won’t even need to think about it anymore… goals will accomplish themselves, all you need to do is prove you’re worthy of the challenges and just do it.
Related reading on the web:
Just Do It – another post with some tips for doing it. Remember the key is action without over-thinking though! Self Acceptance Vs. Self Growth – A great post by Steve Pavlina about the line between accepting yourself for who you are and pushing yourself to new levels of growth. Pushing yourself to the Limit – The story of a man who pushed himself physically and mentally to run his first triathlon with only 32 days of training.
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Its clear to anyone who doesn’t live in a cave that there are many problems in the world right now. There’s children starving in countries gripped with war and conflict. There are incurable diseases, terrorist attacks, people losing jobs, and fat cats laughing all the way to the bank with their hard stolen money. There are so many people working on the ground level to deal with these kinds of things but as with all complicated problems, not only do we need to catch the water dripping from the leak… we need to patch the roof.
I was recently read a post by Jonathan Mead at Illuminated Mind about starting revolutions and it got me thinking… if I was to start a revolution what do I honestly care about enough to devote myself to it.
The idea of finding what your passionate about through the lens of what you would be willing to start a revolution for strikes me as a powerful tool for any person trying to find fulfillment in their life.
What in the world means so much to me, what am I so deeply committed to that I would be willing to wake up early every morning and go to bed late every night. What do I love so much that I would answer email, hand out fliers, spread information with all the passionate frenzy that makes up the life of a revolutionary?
There are so many injustices and things in the world that I feel passionate about, so many political situations, so many people suffering who I want to help but then I have to ask myself… Whats the most I can do for these people utilizing the skills I have and the things that I know I’ll be able to wake up and give 100 percent to for as long as it takes?
Sure, I could sign up and volunteer for an organization that moves food to the third world. I could even just go and volunteer for the local Food Not Bombs group in my town and feed the hungry here. These are great ideas, necessary ideas, but what about something a little more abstract. These kinds of activities are curative… what could I start a revolution in that was preventative.
I slept on it the other night, focusing on the question before I went to sleep, ‘what am I passionate about that I could devote my life to it?’ and some point in the next morning I had my answer.
The thing I care about the most, the very activity that lies at the root of all misunderstandings is the human race’s inability to pay attention. I want to start a Revolution in Attention.
Now I know that kind of answer might seem too simple for a lot of people. I don’t mean to imply that paying attention will cure all our ails but lets stop and think about what our lack of awareness about the world and the people around us has brought us to.
Daniel Goleman writes about a form of intelligence he calls ‘Emotional Intelligence’ as opposed to the more cerebral left brained sort of mind we usually associate with problem-solving and remembering information. What this means is that some people are better than others at processing data but might not be as developed in other areas like controlling and dealing with their emotions and the emotions of those around them.
Now I don’t want to fall off topic and get into exploring the specific ins and outs of Goleman’s philosophy which is already written about ad infinitum in other blog posts and articles all over the web. I only bring it up because I want to touch on the fact that I personally believe emotional intelligence is the outcome of practicing the simple act of paying attention.
While the role genetics plays can’t be left out, the amount of emotional awareness a person will have about herself and the people around her will be dramatically increased when she makes paying attention, rather than living in her own head, a priority.
When we stop to look around us, at the people, at the environment, at the technology… it’s impossible to not care. Its really even more than just mindfulness I’m talking about here. I’m talking about simple understanding in an intellectual sense too. Do you know the name of that person you pass in the hall at work every day? Do you know what’s two blocks south running parallel to the street you drive down every single day? How often do you just look around and explore… just for the hell of it?
This week, find some time to explore the things you already think your familiar with. Explore the people, places, things… just for the child-like enjoyment of knowing. Take a walk somewhere you haven’t been, maybe even start a conversation with a stranger you always ride the bus with because *gasp* it’s allowed and you might even end up having a great experience. Really start to pay attention, not only to your feelings and your own thoughts, but to the subtle expressions and cycles going on all around you.
That’s my revolution, which in a sense I’m already working on right now. Its a revolution that’s been going on for thousands of years really, maybe even more, ever since the first proto-human began living more in his own thoughts, fantasies, and fears than the rich green living world around him. Perhaps my revolution isn’t even a revolution at all in the usual sense. We aren’t taking to the streets, we aren’t marching with picket signs past the white house. My revolution doesn’t make much noise Its coming quieter than that. My revolution is about looking around you, looking inside of yourself and taking the time to notice what life is really like… then making the decision to act. Who knows… maybe you’ve passed the person who will change your life a thousand times already… but you’ve been too inside your own head to say ‘Hi.’
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