Time for a little update on my sleep suggestion experiments that I wrote about in my last post. The last few days have yieled some interesting findings in terms of the potential and the downsides of sleep suggestion. When I say downsides what I really mean is the accidental misuse of our pre-sleep time that leads to negative emotions and beliefs into the next day. Most people are suffering from this kind of negative influence at some point in their lives.
We’ve all had the experience of waking up in the morning and just feeling sort of down without knowing why. Maybe later on when your doing the laundry or some other random chore a dream pops into your head that you remember from the night before and your mood upon waking makes perfect sense. What about the dreams and unconscious emotions that occur during sleep which we don’t consciously remember the next day? That’s why its so important to understand this intermediate state and consciously direct it.
Friday night I went to sleep at the usual time for me and neglected to practice my positive sleep affirmations before dozing off. Instead my mind was reeling over what had happened that day at work and constantly replaying some of the negative feelings I was left with that afternoon. I eventually managed to fall asleep and loe and behold what sort of dreams did I have? dreams about my negative encounters at work.
So I learned a valuable lesson when it comes to the moment before sleep. We either use it, or we let it use us. There is no neutral pattern here. A person can learn to consciously clear their mind out of all thoughts but for those of us who don’t live in a monastery its important to make this white noise less nonsense and more useful.
The moments before sleep at night are ripe with potential to either change our preset beliefs in ourselves or to re-enforce them, which is what I’m afraid most people do.
How many people who complain of sleeplessness at night are thinking about all the awful parts of their day as they fade into the hypnagogic state at night? How many people who wake up unrested in the morning, even after seven or eight hours of sleep are just suffering from the after effects of bad dreams and a restless mind?
In short I’ve learned in the last few days that not using this crucial moment will lead to random negativity building up.
The experiments continue and I will definetely be updating more as I learn more about this process myself. There have already been some interesting stories and comments from everyone about their own experiences with auto suggestion and sleep which I will be getting around to putting online soon. A major hope for the blog here is that it will become something of an information hub where the comments can help spread your ideas to others. So thanks and look forward to part 3 here shortly.
-Chris
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I don’t just mean the tiny white lies we tell everyday… ‘ oh that dress looks great on you’ or something like that. I’m talking about all the many ways we play character control when it comes to our own egos and the way we interact with one another. I’m not just talking about the times when we say something is true when it isn’t, I’m also talking about the times we withhold information that we’re worried might make someone hate us. We play rolls everyday, we hold back certain aspects of our personality that we think might ostracize us from the tribe, while we try to magnify and amp up the traits that we think will win us love and respect from the people closest to us. If you had asked me a year ago what I thought of this kind of behavior I would have told you that its the best humans could do, but in the last few monthes, my opinion has changed radically.
It all started when I caught this video on youtube about the therapist and author Brad Blanton.
Blanton puts forward a philosophy he calls ‘ Radical Honesty’ which he explains in his book by the same name is a form of ultimate transparency. Its about refusing to create the layers of self that pass for ‘normal’ in our society and making a commitment to being a single self with a single set of values, commited to telling the truth in every moment. This means not lying…. EVER.
Now I know what your saying… ‘but what if grandma asks me if the cookies are good and they taste terrible…. do I honestly express myself and tell her that her cookies are crap?!’ and I can see where you’re coming from… trust me I can. But I think the average Radical Honesty practitioner would respond by saying something to the effect of ‘ I bet your grandmother has lived through harder stuff than finding out her cookies aren’t any good, and she deserves your honesty more than your sympathy’. I can see the profound truth in a statement like this also…
Now I must admit that I don’t practice Radical Honesty 100% of time… I’m not on that level yet… and if the experiences of A.J. Jacobs are any indication… its a steep learning curve. However I have began to find a handful of people whom I can practice total transparency with. Radical Honesty withing a pair of mutually agreeing friends/lovers.
Practicing Radical Honesty isn’t about telling the truth for some kind of universally moralist reason. Its not because everyone Deserves the truth… its because telling the truth in a certain sense… just the way it is… sets you apart from the distorting qualities of the mind and language and into a state of describing things just as you see them. Blanton says in the book: “When you tell the truth, you are free simply by virtue of describing what is so. This descriptive language evokes a feeling of affirmation, a willingness to be, an appreciation for being alive in the world as it is. When someone speaks the truth, everyone around them is touched and there is hardly anything to say back except, “Ain’t it the truth.” The being within which the mind resides is then speaking and is in charge of the mind rather than getting used BY the mind”
Being honest serves the philosophy of mindfulness and present moment awareness by allowing us the opportunity to describe our feelings and state, moment by moment as it happens instead of as we would like to see it, or as we would prefer it, or any of the other filters through which we tend to perceive ourselves. Radical honesty is about taking away the layers of delusion between Being and mind and allowing there to be just this present moment description of whats happening in your own vast expanse of consciousness.
When you have to stop before you express yourself fully and think of the ‘right way’ to say something, you’re engaging in a type of strategizing… thinking about how to make your ego look good to the people you’re communicating with. I appreciate that this philosophy doesn’t always seem to work out when it comes to getting people around to your point of view… as can be seen in the recent attempt of Blanton to run for congress… Unfortunatly people aren’t always ready for the truth and their anger or marginalization of you as a truth-speaker is something you have to exept in order to walk the path of Radical Honesty.
Even though I don’t practice 100% Radical Honesty out of my own fear of rejection and insecurity… I do try to push myself harder and harder every day to be truly honest even when I might be afraid. One of the most important steps in this journey toward Total Transparency is finding a relationship with a friend or a partner and commiting together to have some time to sit down and share each others thoughts down to the nitty gritty details.
Now I realize this takes a serious amount of trust and courage on both parties involved but the benefits are endless. Taking the time to sit down with someone, face to face, eye to eye, and begin the process of laying your soul bare. Tell each other your own life story, with an emphasis on all the parts that you’ve always been too afraid to tell anyone. Realize that we all have embarrassing, awkward, immoral, or otherwise weird moments in our lives and no one is perfect.
Being there with someone whom you love and trust, and sharing your darkest most twisted moments in life with one another will blast open the insecurities of your mind. You’ll start to see the suffering that isn’t just an aspect of your life but an aspect of human life in general. The end result of this kind of true transparency and laying bare the real story of your life won’t just liberate your own energy from distorting and controlling. Blanton maintains that whenever people are naked both psychologically, emotionally, and even physically in front of one another…. they fall in love.
They realize that first the first time in their life perhaps, they are a single authentic being, raw, naked, uncut in their totality. Staring into the eyes of someone just the same, just as confused or lost. Recognizing even for just a moment that they’re together, that they feel for each other, that we’re all together in this and that true happiness can never occur in a vacuum. Please find at least one person in your life that you can have an honest, transparent, expressive relationship with…. we all need to feel what it feels like to be loved for being EXACTLY who we are, imperfections and all.
-Chris
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“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”
Henry David Thoreau
Take a moment to imagine your own personal little ‘happy me’. Your own, one of a kind, internal representation of the success you’re striving for in life. Most of us have some idea of how we’re going to look once we’ve achieved some level of success in our life. Maybe you have one image, or a handful, take a second here to actually look at them objectively, or as objectively as possible.
When we imagine the stereotypical ‘happy me’ walking down the street, basking in the glory of our own joy… whats so different about that person in your imagination?
Does happy me have a stronger body? more hair?
Maybe you can’t see it in the picture but does happy me have a college PhD? or some kind of fancy new business title to be pleased about?
what is it about this happiness idol in your mind that differenciates them from you? and will that thing really make you happy?
Mindfulness and Happiness
How much of your own potential happiness that your experiencing RIGHT NOW goes unnoticed, while you unconsciously derive a little burst of motivation from imagining someone else your going to be in the future. We stoke little flames of delusion that keep us going and give us an excuse for our lack of presence right now. We have to do more than understand intellectually, we need to deeply realize for ourselves that the past is over, and the future can’t be dealt with in any meaningful way until it becomes the present.
What does it mean to do something consciously as opposed to unconsciously.
I think its important to always remember that mindfulness as a concept or idea is really just the base state of human satisfaction.
Think about, when your dwelling on something someone said, or something that might happen in the future, by the very nature of your actions your declaring that you aren’t interested or don’t want to be in this moment. Your investing your mental energy entirely in the future or the past and the present moment goes by in a sleepy, unintentional haze.
The times in every day human life when we are naturally focused on the present moment always goes hand in hand with the sensation of being deeply grateful or deeply satisfied. Seeing your children after a long day at work, the post coital glow of making love, the sense of absorption some of us feel when doing a job we love.
It only makes sense that learning to shut off your internal chatter would leave you in a non-comparing state of mind, which by its very nature must be a satisfied state of mind. Try to remember in the coming days the importance of staying in the moment and focusing on what is in front of you. Not just so you can bring your total energy and awareness to the task at hand, but also because letting go of the past and future means finding the joy that is already present in the now.
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