A Body of Knowledge for Empaths

Unconscious Competence

2008-11-19T19:16:00Z

Meter Technique:
One great technique to get grounded is Elise Lebeau's suggested volume meter to turn down empathy levels. She has two meters, which is interesting; in my own mind the two meters are combined into one. I think of my meter as a grounding meter. The trick with this technique is you need to install it first through evaluation experiences. In other words if you visualize a meter of your empathy going to zero, or your grounding going to ten, it will be meaningless unless you have first evaluated and numbered what zero feels like and what ten feels like at least several times.

That is the key to this making Elise's meter technique work -- you have to evaluate and number your different states. Then you have your reference points. The first step is trying to ascertain your normal grounding level. What number would you assign that? Just take a general guess. Next you want to spend some time practicing your favorite technique to get grounded and then assign that state a number.

Habit Shifting and Reminder Techniques:
Another good technique is to take a habitual routine such as brushing your teeth, showering, washing the dishes, etc, and turn it into a grounding exercise; feel your feet, feel the floor, grip your toes against the floor or tile, move your awareness in circles through your feet. Feel the weight of your feet, legs, and body. Do a grounding visualization. Basically, the idea is to help change a normal habit into something that can have a grounding effect. This will also help you to practice grounding in a way that lets you reach unconscious competence and "background" your attention toward this task in the long run.

You want to work on being aware of the points in time at which you slip in and out of awareness of your feet. Being aware of those instances when you remember, "Ah! I lost awareness of my feet again! Time to re-focus on them," is the way to work on the threshold between conscious competence and unconscious incompetence. Some people recommend using a wrist watch that beeps every 15 minutes or every hour to check in and focus on the feet; that suggestion is a good one if you really struggle to remember. I would suggest doing it from memory though because then you have to build up some motivation.

Of course if your body has all kinds of traumas and pains stored in it then your desire to be grounded is probably going to be very low. But staying out of your body all the time means that living on this earth is kind of pointless. Self work has to be reflected and tested against other people so that it doesn't become distorted and twisted. My friend Marty says, "You can do everything yourself, but you can't do it by yourself."

Notes on Learning:
Our thoughts and different states of consciousness are tools to help us; a lot of people are misusing these tools. Participating in reductionist or Newtonian level thinking, argumentation, pride, thought relegation and resistance to curiosity constitutes a gross misuse of your tools. One interesting thought is that you want to get to the stage where you think like you're on psychedelics. So that means you want to be asking the right questions in order to be thinking in new ways. That can translate into practicing opening a door or pouring your milk in a super attentive fashion. That can mean spending time out of your day to practice walking. You want to, as Marty says, "Slow yourself down enough to learn what you are learning." What we are taught in school has nothing to do with learning; going from point A to point B requires you to take all kinds of unanticipated tangential paths. So real learning cannot necessarily be anticipated and therefore cannot be reduced to thoughtless repetition. What can be reduced to thoughtless repetition is not learning, but conditioning. Of course there is nothing wrong with learning to be conditioned as long as it is done with awareness.

I remember one psychedelic trip I had where I looked at my body, I mean really looked at it, and realized that I am neither dead nor am I alive; I thought to myself that those categories had nothing to do with what was really going on here -- they were completely irrelevant. Now most people will respond, "If you're not alive and not dead then what are you?" That is the wrong question to ask and definitely a non-inquisitive way to be thinking. A much better question would be, "What state is required to become aware of the perception that I am neither alive nor dead?"

Another great example is with trees. Many people don't believe that trees are sentient or aware. The wrong way to be thinking is along the lines of "How can trees be aware?" A better question would be, "What do I need to do to get into the state of consciousness that will allow me to experience the consciousness of a particular tree?"

I suppose with this kind of thinking anything is possible and the only barrier is yourself. Now if you are at point A, which is wondering how the hell the two above things are even remotely possible and you want to get to point B -- having the actual experience -- you may have to take a whole series of completely seemingly unrelated tangential steps in order to get to point B.

Four steps of learning:
1. Conscious incompetence
2. Conscious competence
3. Unconscious incompetence
4. Unconscious competence

Step one: Conscious incompetence
This is when you start with a skill, for example, riding a bike. You might be starting to be able to balance on the bike for 2-3 seconds.

Step two: Conscious competence
This is when you get a little bit better at the skill. You might be able to finally balance but still have some trouble turning, braking, or changing to the right gear on a hill.

Step three: Unconscious incompetence
This is when you are getting good enough at the skill that you don't have to devote the entirety of your conscious awareness to the task, but still have to slip in and out of being aware of what you are doing. You haven't quite mastered it yet to do it completely without thinking.

Step four: Unconscious competence
You can completely execute the task or skill without any thought or awareness. At this level you would be able to ride your bike without your hands.

Between each step you can imagine thresholds. I suppose you could even imagine support and resistance levels on those thresholds. What are you unconsciously competent at? Remember the SAID principle; you always get better at exactly what you do. So if you are really ungrounded all the time it is because, for whatever reason, you have become unconsciously competent at being out of your body.

Transparency Matters

2008-10-29T22:52:00Z

"That vision of the big winner somehow emerging from the last minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino."

The world we are heading toward is one where transparency reigns supreme. This is the fruition of the realization that everything opens into everything else. Terrence McKenna talks about this phenomenon; he tells us that nothing is unannounced. He says, "This is like a weird quality of experience, you can't learn this from physics or economics. Maybe you can learn it from economics. Nothing is unannounced. Everything is preceded by the shock wave of its coming."

Most people respond to the mini shock waves and micro vibrational currents that are hidden in plain sight around them, but without knowing why. You might say that opaqueness is merely a mis-perception on some level. Empaths experiencing excessive transparency might want to check out this post. I promise my next post will be on topic with information on grounding tips and healing touch. So what about the level of transparency in the financial markets?

Mirroring the sentiments of the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, Brother Ali, the legally blind albino rapper from Wisconsin, asks us in his song The Puzzle:
"Whose to blame for the state I'm in?
I play my cards but somehow I can't win."

The specifics of the situation are, of course, no puzzle to the financial mongoose Max Keiser. He has an interesting response to the above lyric. In his Rigged Markets video he asks, "Are the so called free markets rigged? Check kiting, bear rating, front running, back dating, look back trading, pump and dumping, wash sales, match sales, blank check IPO's, parking stock, painting the tape, market timing, late trading, shearing, spring loading, bullet dodging, oh and my favorite naked short selling. These are just a few of the many many oh so many ways that brokers, bankers, and CEO's use to defraud other market participants." No wonder Brother Ali can't win -- by himself he doesn't have any market clout.

In a recent radio interview David Wilcock says, "What I'm proposing here is that if you as the individual taxpayer are standing there in front of the IRS and they're auditing your tax returns they demand that you have transparency -- meaning that you're going to show them everything to account for every dollar that you spent and where it goes. What I'm saying is that with the power of the Internet we now have and will create transparency for the world elite -- for the government and for the corporations. There won't be hidden balance sheets. There won't be Enron engineering of the books. It's gonna be websites that you log into and you can actively audit companies in terms of where the money is going; you can actively audit the government and see where the money is going and you won't be able to hide things anymore. Now that sounds ridiculously Pollyanna-ish, but you get enough people pissed off and that's exactly what's going to happen because nobody is going to want to put up with this anymore when it gets to the point that their basic quality of life is being infringed upon. And so what we're seeing right now is things moving to the point where that will be inspired in people." In the short article "Transparency is the essence of market economy" Keiser explains in more detail the workings of the current situation.

In the same vein as Wilcock and Keiser, blogger Hjálmar Gíslason tells us that, "Today we live in a very different world. Real time communication and crunching of terabytes of data is within the reach of pretty much anybody. 'Quarterly', let alone 'annually' is not something we settle for when it comes to news, communication or even entertainment. 'On-demand' and 'real time' is the name of the game. Why should we settle for anything less in our investments?" I would suggest that the traditional linear graph of stock prices is an artifact even in real time. We should be able to see real time capital flows on a global and even geographical level. "Ask the Experts" guest Bud Burr and Ron Paul talk about the importance of transparency and central bank collusion as well.

So how do you, as an individual, increase transparency? Localization is one way you can directly participate. Supporting slow food and your local CSA is a great first step. From the individual investor's perspective there are many organizations out there. InsiderCow sounds like an interesting idea, although I have no personal experience with them. Shadowstats.com reports adjusted, accurate, government statistics rather than official "massaged" data. One book I just purchased that looks interesting is The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer; he talks about alternative currencies. A great place to get information is iTulip -- check out their forums. As an aside, you can check out some of the exhibitors that were at the recent bioneers conference: RSF, Calvert, Griton Capital, and MicroPlace.

So how does this all tie into empathy? You only have to look at the people managing this ponzi scheme to answer that question. Keiser tells us: "That Wall Street Journal study that was done a year ago or so proved that people with slight brain damage make better money managers because they have no empathy. Empathy kills performance. So naturally the whole system is skewed toward brain damage. So you have brain damaged, non empathic, terrorists managing an 800 billion dollar slush fund." So it is no wonder why the whole system is set up to obfuscate information and narrow consciousness.

It seems surprising to me that more people are not interested in Empathy. You can use it to access full body altered states of consciousness at will without taking any drugs. It is even possible to use it to expand your awareness out of your body and into drugs themselves and experience drug states. Just be sure not to tell anyone that because it sounds so fucking nutty. So in essence the whole world is a potential cornucopia of psychedelic like trips when you are able to empath strongly. The black market drug industry would take a huge hit tomorrow if everyone could learn to move their awareness, or assemblage point, out of their bodies. Unsurprisingly, the illegal drugs that proliferate are the ones that are cause fixation and consciousness myopia -- for obvious economic and political reasons.

There is good work being done however. A MAPS project, under the auspices of Valerie Mojeiko, is doing important work using MDMA in therapy to increase self empathy levels for people suffering from PTSD. At the recent bioneers conference Ralph Metzner said, "That's what trauma means -- that you don't have empathy for yourself." MDMA is a perfect choice to work with trauma survivors because it increases empathy levels so significantly while leaving the ego in tact.

Events and Links

2008-10-01T15:53:00Z

Quotes from Terrence McKenna:

"Times are related to each other -- things happen for a reason and the reason is not a causal one. Resonance, that mysterious phenomenon in which a vibrating string seems magically to invoke a similar vibration in another string or object that is physically unconnected, suggested itself as a model for the mysterious property that related one time to another even though they may be separated by days, years, or even millennia. I became convinced that there is a wave, or a system of resonances, that condition events on all levels. This wave is fractal and self-referential..." (True Hallucinations, 172).

"Quantum physics makes similar pronouncements when it states that the electron is not somewhere or sometime; it is a cloud of probabilities and that is all one can say about it" (True Hallucinations, 196).

According to Terrence McKenna's Timewave Zero, some very interesting ingressions into novelty are about to occur very soon. These are the upcoming graphs with the default zero date (Dec 21/2012):

October 7th 2008:
(this decline doesn't start to bottom out until December 2008)

February 13th 2009:

June 25th 2009:

January 16th/17th 2011:

It will be interesting to see how the drops in the timewave pan out; we certainly live in "interesting times." I went to the UFO Expo in the South Bay area this weekend. I saw David Icke, Sean David Morton, Clifford Stone, Robert Perala, Preston Dennett, and a couple other people speak. Oddly enough, the focus on UFO's was not as extreme as I would have thought; I had never attended this kind of event before. Quite a bit of the discussion was about consciousness and evolving into more enlightened states and ways of being. I met one guy that steamrolled me with tons of information. Thanks Robert!

Fungus Fair
Sat & Sun, Dec 6–7, 2008. Sponsored with the Mycological Society of San Francisco.

http://www.greenfestivals.org
The Green Festival has events in Washington DC, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and Chicago.

http://www.bioneers.org
Environmental conference in San Rafael, California.

http://www.fungi.com
Paul Stamets is a mushroom guru. Learn to grow your own edible gourmet mushrooms or learn about mycorrhizae and how fungi is critical to the soil's ecosystem. You can also find out how fungi can be used to clean up soil polluted with heavy metals and hydrocarbons -- aka mycoremediation. I highly recommend the tea products they sell.

http://www.theliterature.org/The_Fifth_Kingdom
Mycological Resources.

http://www.breworganic.com
If you brew beer, or know someone who does, this is a wonderful co-op to support. All of their ingredients are certified organic. No GMOs, chemical residues or pesticides. I have brewed several 5 gallon batches and they came out great.

http://my.opera.com/Vorlath/blog
Cleo Saulnier is working on a kind of programming method called Flow Based Programming. No more thread management, total concurrency, parallel execution, unlimited multi-core support, no functions, component based. J Paul Morrison has a whole book describing in detail the principles and ideas behind flow based programming. You can visit a list of people and organizations involved in FBP on Morrison's site. Trillions of dollars will flow into and through this kind of software in the future. Cleo is really at the front end of the bell curve and doing something amazing. Guys like this are as rare.

http://tatianahealingcenter.com
This lady's story at the 2008 UFO Expo was very interesting. I think they said that this was only one of two or three times she had spoken publicly. Basically she says that she had a three day experience with some beings; they helped her become a healer. She had hundreds of people lining up in Poland to get a session with her. Definitely worth checking out.

http://www.tbrnews.org
This is supposedly an insider in Washington leaking information. I think there is some racist stuff and other controversy about the author involving stolen identities. You have to read between the lines and decide for yourself.

The 2012 Enigma by David Wilcock
This is a very interesting video. He discusses Empathy around 16:00.

The Holographic Universe
This is a great book.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com
Mike C Rupert is an ex LAPD officer. He has articles on Peak Oil, CIA drug running, and all kinds of stuff. He has closed his business so you will have to visit his blog to read new material by him.

Story of Roy Rife and Cancer

Spirulina (Blue-green algae)

Ed McCabe. Flood your body with oxygen

SAID Principle

2008-09-21T19:00:00Z

Specific Adaption to Imposed Demand. This is a direct reference to Z Health material. The basic idea here is that you always get better at exactly what you do. Period. Your body and mind adapt to exactly what you do. So if you sit at the computer all day for years with poor posture then you have become an expert at doing that. There is going to be some lateral transfer across other domains as well. So your posture will probably be equally poor while walking and sitting at the dinner table if you have become an "expert" at the aforementioned posture.

Interestingly, this lateral transfer seems to be initially pretty minimal; you have to get really really good at something for it to effect you in other domains very strongly. So even if you are an expert at riding your bike, it does not necessarily mean that you will be able to go on a long hike without tiring yourself. Personally, I am learning this the hard way. I have focused on doing certain movements in a shaky way, without noticing, and that shakiness has started to transfer into my normal movements. So now I have to stop those movements, re-do an entire series of movements at a more subtle and smooth level for several months, just to get back to where I started.

I have been kind of lazy and reluctant to make this post as I have not been creating any new techniques or applying the SAID principle very wisely in my own life lately. I noticed that recently I had a case of insomnia that could simply be boiled down to the SAID principle as well. I had habituated myself to meditating, reading, thinking, being interrupted in the middle of the night, and going to sleep irregularly; basically I was doing everything except going to sleep when I was in bed. Once I stopped doing most of those things and re-asserted my old pattern of going to sleep at a regular time I was able to get some sleep, even though it did take a week or so to get back to normal.

It might seem a bit odd to make a post about this topic. But this principle can be used as a "filter" for everything in your life. So you can apply it to things like meditation, being in your body, attention, etc. If you get really good at meditating with your eyes closed sitting in a quiet room that does not mean you will be an expert at meditating outside on a street corner with your eyes open.

Techniques:
The SAID principle is important for creating techniques as well. You may spontaneously come up with a technique like balancing on one leg with your eyes closed; however, if you have been perpetually standing with your weight on one leg for many years then that exercise will not help you to fix the problem in your knee from the imbalance of standing so awkwardly for so long. The creative urge that came up with the idea for the exercise will help you bring awareness to your legs and knees and help you locate the domain where you need to pay attention to. So you need to evaluate techniques you come up with closely; give them a pass through the SAID principle filter by asking yourself, "What am I getting better at by performing this exercise or technique?"

The best techniques are the ones that you create for yourself. Creating your own techniques will be a total custom fit for you. I cannot stress enough how important it is to create your own exercises. In one example I was outside and I saw a leaf hanging from a spider web; I took the web strand inside and looped it through a piece of tiny paper and hung it up on the shelf.

Creating your own techniques from scratch can be difficult without first trying a range of someone else’s techniques. Once you get into the process of learning new chunks, or slices, of perception then you can start coming up with your own stuff – no matter how random it seems or feels to you at the time. Often you will have no real “goal” in mind other than to create something new that will increase your awareness.

Something as simple as brushing your teeth with your opposite/non-dominant hand can be a learning exercise that can teach you new things for months. Additionally, running a normal pattern backward can be very interesting.

Observe the landscape around you; more importantly, use the landscape to increase your awareness. Lastly, it is worth noting that most techniques are amazingly simple yet incredibly powerful. Most people will completely overlook a powerful technique or think of it as a practical joke just because of its apparent simplicity. This is an interesting paradox and also the reason you see such exorbitant fees and prices for meditation workshops with such a huge focus on initiation, commitment, and ceremony. The actual technique is usually something a grade school kid could come up with. In fact in the book Awareness through the Body you will find that all of the exercises are intended specifically for school children.

Designing techniques to explore your problem areas is important as well. There is no need to over-think this at the initial level. Do what comes naturally. Interestingly, if you create your own techniques you will intuitively work on your problem areas without even knowing it. So there is no real need to obsess about a per exercise objective at the initial stage. My own perception was so completely conditioned that having any kind of goal for an exercise would have been a huge roadblock at the initial stages. What I needed was simply to explore and de-condition my awareness for a few months without any expectations as to what might happen. You can worry about integrating it all later. When you reach a slightly higher level of experience and knowledge then you start having the faith and mental freedom to accomplish specific goals in a session or technique. But in the beginning knowledge can be a burden and barrier to exploration.

The slicing and pacing aspects of the SAID principle:
You also have to take on slices that you can handle. For example, we can consider a person that hasn’t swam in a long time but is still pretty fit. You will still need to titrate the experience of a new physical activity to a level your body can handle since it will be working in a new way overall. Failing to do this will result in injury and leave you at whatever prior level of fitness you had previously achieved; then you have to spend time resting and healing and eventually start over at that prior level. This holds true for energy work, physical fitness, intellect based work, etc.

When it comes to pacing yourself faster is not necessarily better. You have to go at your own natural pace. Progressing too fast can be a big problem. Being unable to integrate everything you learn in a way that you can actually use could hit you so hard that you actually end up progressing slower, not at all, or actually regressing. More is not necessarily better; if you constantly train your body or mind in an overtaxing manner then you will screw yourself in the long term. It is better for me to simply just enjoy the exercise I am doing rather than have a goal of getting better or stronger. There are obviously different aspects of the SAID principle that you may have to discover yourself for your own unique mind and body.

Tom from Astral Dynamics says, “It is good to remember, too, to keep working with your hands and feet long after you have started working with the primary chakras as well. I made the mistake of thinking that since the hands and feet were starting points that there was nothing to gain from continuing to work with them, but I found out otherwise eventually.” I thought his comment was particularly worth noting because it is important to remember to go back to basics and refine previous slices.

Interesting Links:

These are some interesting links that have crossed my path recently:

Dr. Quantum Presents: A User's Guide to Your Universe

Meditation Expert

Raw Reform

Kiva

Blocking Mechanisms

2008-08-19T18:59:00Z

As an empath you may have different states locked up inside your system from the past. I have found quite a few states that I knew originated from other people in different parts of my system. Simple meditative focus on different parts of the body is usually enough to explore and dissolve these states. But some areas can be difficult to reach if they have been blocked off. A few types of basic blocking mechanisms I have encountered during meditation include the following:

Simple ignoring:
This form of blocking is quite simply ignoring something or someone and will usually produce guilt. The main quality of this state is a watery sleepy feeling. Heavy underwater sensations may be felt as well.

Awareness withdrawal:
This can usually be noticed from the painful physical effects of partially withdrawing your awareness from part of your body. When you restore full awareness to that part of your body you will feel better to some degree. Actually, with total and complete withdrawal of awareness I will feel nothing at all in that area of my body. So pain may be there, but you have blocked it out. Restoring awareness will usually increase the pain initially until moved through to deeper layers at which point the pain will dissipate.

Transparent wallpaper effect:
This is a devious kind of "programming" or form of blocking. Imagine a room with three solid walls all with sunflowers painted all over them. Now imagine that in this room there is a fourth virtual wall that is just a projected image with sunflowers on it -- it looks exactly the same as the others. In reality you can walk through this fourth wall and into a new space, but it will feel like there is nowhere further to go. This same effect can be created inside your own internal space. In my experience instead of a clearly defined wall with sunflowers it is more like the fourth wall feels transparent, but you don't see/feel anything beyond it, so it feels like you can't move your awareness any further, when in fact you can. I suppose that is counter-intuitive -- a transparent wall that you cannot see beyond; that is why it's a blocking mechanism.

Unconscious gap effect:
This is the most difficult form of blocking I have encountered. I was meditating on a tight spot in part of my body that I felt like I couldn't get access to. For weeks, no matter how hard I tried to pull my awareness into that spot it just wouldn't go beyond a certain point. I then accidentally moved my body into a different position and moved my mind away from the meditation into something else entirely for about 2 seconds; then I re-shifted back into my meditation to find I had now gained access to the space I was trying to enter. It was almost as if I had to bridge this gap by becoming unconscious for a moment of that space. Logically it makes sense now since if that spot had become so unconscious then the only way I would be able to move my awareness through it would be in a similarly unaware fashion, i.e., with an unconscious movement.

This unconscious gap effect would seem, to me, to have some striking ramifications. I noticed that I was able to increase my motor control of brushing my teeth with my non-dominant hand by running an unconscious series of thought patterns. In other words, when I used to brush my teeth with my dominant hand I normally wouldn't even pay attention to what I was doing and just be off in some mental space thinking about various things. I suppose that is what most people do. However, when I started running that same inattentive mental process with my non-dominant brushing hand I was able to increase my motor control! This brings up the topics of hooks/anchors, filters, and SAID principle, which I will discuss in my next post.

Non-productive overlays:
An overlay is just what it sounds like. You take one state and overlay another onto it. Now this is not inherently a blocking mechanism or a bad thing at all. If used correctly it can really help you out. In NLP they use an overlay technique called a “swish” to confuse your system into removing negative programming. Hypnotherapy seems to be primarily based in overlays and anchoring as well. There are at least two forms of overlays. There are productive overlays and cover-up overlays. Overlaying states in order to cover up blocks, layers, or systems is counter-productive.

Some guided meditations may instruct you to relax and then bring “peace” to your body, emotions, and mind. In my opinion this is an example of a non productive, and negative, overlay – in this example you would intentionally be overlaying the void level onto your body, emotions, and mind levels. The void level does not belong there. If you want to chill yourself out then go into the void, but do not project or overlay it onto other levels of your system. I noticed that while doing a blockage dissolving technique, layer by layer, that some of the layers were void layers. In my opinion they did not belong there and, like other crap stuck in my system, those void layers disappeared after being worked through with my awareness.

A good metaphor is how you can either visit Disneyland or you could bring a whole cast of people, props, sets, and rides into your neighborhood from the park (assuming you could do that). The problem with the latter form of visitation is that you have all that stuff in your neighborhood when your vacation is over and you want to end the visit.

The purpose of a productive overlay isn’t to cover something up. It is to overlay a state, that you know works for you, into a problematic space so that you can get a new perspective on why you are having trouble in that space. For example, overlaying a pleasant stomach state into a problematic chest area. I would do this by first focusing on my stomach and shifting into that pleasant state. Then I would hold that state while shifting part of my awareness to the problematic space in my chest.

This basic overlay is a form of holding two states, or spaces, in your awareness at once. You need to practice holding multiple objects/states in your awareness to do this. Creating your own awareness splitting exercises is a great idea.

Locating and dissolving blocks:
As an empath your system is most likely so tuned that you can simply tell yourself to auto-focus or locate a blocked area to work on for a meditation session. Then your body and awareness will respond, usually pointing to a painful place. With this information you can get started and go deeper into that area with your awareness. This is a bit easier than manually scanning your whole body all over for painful areas and allows you to locate hidden blocks from areas you might have skipped.

The inner dissolving technique is a great way of working through blocks, states, and energy which may have been overlayed into parts of your system.

Movement Awareness

2008-07-23T04:02:00Z

Grounding Techniques:
You can't reasonably expect to rely entirely on mind techniques and visualizations to ground yourself -- unless you understand that every layer and every inch of your skin is your mind too. There is a strong need for people of an empathic disposition to be grounded in the body. That means spending a significant amount of time learning to move your body consciously -- with as much awareness as possible.

Your feet are the place to start as they are directly in contact with the ground all day long -- they are your connection to the earth. Learning how to move your flexor and extensor digitorum brevis and longus muscles as well as the hallucis muscles will help you integrate and access your natural grounding state.

You can start doing this by moving your toes as subtly as you can in micro movements with as much awareness as possible. Notice if there is a difference in the feeling of plasticity in one foot compared to the other. Much like NEW, you can re-create this movement in your mind alone and feel your energetic pathways firing. Using your awareness to just hold your focus on your feet is a good practice as well. According to Robert Bruce the amount of tingling and pain experienced is proportional to the amount of awareness you have lost in that part of your body, i.e., just how much those pathways have been shutdown due to lack of use.

A good session to help open up your feet and leg pathways is to do the micro-movements for 10-20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute massage and end with some NEW feet and leg exercises -- moving your awareness back and forth from your sacrum to your feet. These simple three exercises make my legs shake as if I had just exercised for an hour. These exercises will shift your awareness down into your feet and help you tune into your natural grounding state.

A key goal is becoming aware of the ability to move. It is also important to become aware of the quality of your movements. Your body and your consciousness are not separate. You can significantly increase your ability to ground by working on opening up the neural pathways in your legs and feet. These are informally called "secondary and tertiary chakras." It is recommended to work on these pathways for upwards of one year; like anything else -- you have to put in real work to get real results.

As a final note, muscles have origin and insertion points which basically means the points that the muscle connects to the bones. It is a good idea to focus on all potential movements from the origin to insertion point of a muscle.

Transitional Movement Awareness:
Becoming aware of your transitions is a great starting place to examine unconscious habits. When you are on psychedelics everything becomes super interesting; you become fully involved in the mere act of opening a door or putting down a glass. But normally most people don't put that much awareness or interest into it. That is an interesting discrepancy.

When an activity becomes habitual, like opening a door, it is possible for all kinds of mental or even physical habits to become "hooked" or "hijacked" into those transition spaces. Ever had a song stuck in your head? It's not really "stuck" in your head -- you have decided to put it on repeat and then become unconscious of the mechanics of that habit. The key is to find out exactly WHEN that happens in your movements (mental or physical).

If you really struggle with being aware at these points a good way to approach it is simply to over-invest interest in the act of opening a door.

Some people claim that your ability to do an activity with one side of your body also increases a propensity for your neural pathways to do the same movement with the other side of your body. If this is in fact true then it means that becoming aware of the transitions in a movement is just as important as the still points in the movement.

Basically, it is important to be aware of yourself during movement transitions. This will help pull yourself out of "auto-pilot" mode. Pay attention to these transitional moments in your activities so you can grasp which mental or even physical habits you have set on auto-pilot and forgot about. Once you become aware of these habits and when they occur you can begin to de-program them to your preference.

The Toothbrush Exercise:
You can internalize and experience some important perceptions with this fundamental learning exercise. The concentration exclusion/isolation can be applied to any movement in your body. This exercise is a good building block demonstration for isolating your awareness and learning from it. Each step below can be done alone or during the same brushing session -- it's up to you. What normally has become a totally unconscious movement activity for most people can be turned into a neural re-balancing awareness exercise.

1. Start brushing your teeth with the hand that you never use to brush them.
    Do this from now on for most of your brushing. This will change the contours of your gums and
    toothbrush so go back to the normal hand for a week if you experience any problems.
2. Switch hands a few times and feel the awesome difference in fine motor control.
3. Focus on just your mouth.
4. Focus on just the brush.
5. Focus on just your hand.
6. Focus on your hand and then switch to focusing on the mouth.
7. Focus on how you have to transition your hand from one position to another as you move the brush around your
    teeth. This aspect seems to be the key to matching the greater motor control of your dominant hand so it
    deserves extra examination.
8. Notice any habitual mental patterns/thoughts during your brushing.
9. Notice any habitual body positions during your brushing.
10. Add several of your own observations.

Shower Evaporation Exercise:
This is a pacing technique designed to increase your patience and awareness of slower movement. This exercise probably seems silly on the face but much internal movement inside your mind happens at a similarly slow pace and it is good to be able to adjust to that rate of movement. Basically all you do is open the shower door after you are done showering and don't dry yourself off. What you do is wait for the water to evaporate off your body. Try to focus on the water and your skin and specifically the rate at which it evaporates. You want to tune into that rate and movement.

Focus on the Body

2008-07-09T20:30:12Z

The body has three anatomical planes -- Frontal (Coronal), Sagittal, and Transverse. If you are doing meditations on parts of your body you do not want to get caught doing it from a two dimensional perspective. Almost all of the chakra pictures you see are some colored circles on a two dimensional body. Focusing only on one plane will end up leaving out 80% of the information and states you would otherwise be working with in your system.

This means that you want to be moving your awareness in your body in a three dimensional fashion. For example, let’s say you have recurrent pain in the left side of your chest and associate this with an unpleasant state of mind. A good starting exercise would be to place your awareness at the left pectoral and move your way into the ribs, lungs, and heart; after staying there for as long as you need you can slowly move into the posterior quadrant of your left side, then to the right posterior and finally back around to the right anterior, making a full circle with your awareness. This is a kind of modification or addendum to the Inner Dissolving Technique.

Why is this important and what does it have to do with empathy? Empathy is merely an expanded, or even narrowed, sense of awareness with someone or something outside your system. The real question you have to ask yourself is: once I get grounded and centered, and can move my awareness freely, what am I going to focus on? You can choose to focus your awareness inside your own system or outside. There is no real answer to say which is right. The only problem with focusing outside is that those states cannot be maintained over the long term unless you anchor them or can find correlate states inside your own body. Even so, it is highly unlikely that it would be good for anyone's system to constantly be tripping out. After a certain period of being high for so long, in a state that is not from your system, you enter a threat response mode. Of course I am not saying this is a bad learning exercise -- it just isn't where I'd want to be all the time.

Very few people are going to tell you that inner exploration, cleanup, re-programming, and overall work is going to take you months or even years to get results. No one would be able to sell any products if they told you that.

Learning anatomy and the hows and whys of your movement is essential. There is no time at which you are not moving; and there is no time at which you are not meditating. Meditating is merely using your awareness. So if everyone is enlightened the question becomes -- to what degree are you acting consciously with awareness?

Something I have just learned recently that is very important is not to over focus on certain parts of your system to the detriment of others. You do not want your consciousness to become fractionalized because you over focus on your heart and spend no time meditating on your tongue.

Any time you cannot move your body in a particular way, either because you are stuck in some painful pattern, or because you have simply lost awareness of part of your body, your system has to create neural workarounds for the lost awareness. This is not mumbo-jumbo science. If you lose awareness and the ability to move your levator labii muscles your body will have to create new neural pathways in order to restore that movement. It is possible for you to restore movement to this muscle; this is a great exercise to do as it only takes a few days to accomplish. What the hell is the point? Well anytime you can't move part of your body means you have lost a corresponding internal and external awareness -- no matter how subtle -- and part of the picture will be missing for you.

Yoga, Pilates, Z Health, meditation, awareness techniques, NEW Energy Ways, weight lifting, swimming, bike riding, and so on are examples of movement practices -- they are tools that can help you, but no single tool is necessarily the entirety of your tool box; you need to come up with your own integrated practice. Doing yoga without any awareness is not going to help you. Just doing a movement without awareness is going to create more imbalance in your system by strengthening already strong muscles and further weakening already weak muscles.

Movement Pattern Exercises and Diagnostics:
1. Create a list of problematic (habitual) mental patterns. Work on eliminating or changing these patterns to your liking.

2. Create a work log of problematic physical patterns. Identify tight, numb, or painful areas through stretching, movement, applied pressure, massage, etc. Make sure to include self massage and explorative or what might feel like novel stretches in your analysis and do not overlook stretching your fascia. Identify nasty, problematic, or numb states through meditation. Notice how your movements and states are related. A very slight shift or re-alignment in posture can create a huge shift in consciousness.

3. Identify which movements are good for your system; merge or place your awareness into a pose, stretch, or movement and notice how it shifts or changes your consciousness or state of mind. How does it make you feel, better or worse? At what level does this shift occur? This is in fact more of a long term practice than a single exercise.

4. Connect problematic areas with metaphors and terms of the body planes and various body parts. An initial list of terms can be found here. I plan to add more terms later. The basic idea is to connect your physical pattern with your overall movement in life. If you constantly find yourself over-reaching for glasses of water or when picking up things around the house then you would ask yourself, "How have I been over-reaching in other areas of my life?" Ideally it would be best to connect both mental patterns and physical patterns through body term metaphors, but it may be easier to start with physical patterns.

5. Look up the problematic physical areas in the Trail Guide to the Body book. Learn anatomy. The book Yoga Anatomy is a good book for learning which muscles you use during a pose.

6. Be around people that can help find your own customized process and who also know anatomy well.

7. Write everything down.

Where is your awareness?

2008-06-15T23:53:26Z

How you feel, your state of consciousness, is directly related to where your awareness is. You can radically alter your state of consciousness simply by shifting your point of awareness. Of course this takes practice and to get to the stage where you can do this effectively may require some de-conditioning of habits.

So, where is your awareness right now?

Being totally identified with someone else’s feelings means that your awareness is not in your body! If you’re an empath and feeling spaced out all the time and don’t know why it is probably because your awareness is perpetually outside your body. The guide map of my experience as an empath is very simple. Let’s start with the body. Your body contains all these different states of consciousness and feelings; it contains many many different levels of consiousness. In order to change your state of consciousness all you need to do is focus your awareness on a different part of your body. As you do this repeatedly those states will start to refine and get smoother and more pleasant.

I never “turn off” my empathy. My technique for “turning it off” consists of placing my awareness entirely within at least one part of my body – then my state of consciousness shifts completely and I feel my own feelings in that part of my system. If I place my awareness in my stomach I feel much different than if I place it in my heart. There are, as previously mentioned, many layers to the stomach or heart so you can choose the depth to stay at. I flood my awareness with the state in that part of my system, by focusing entirely on it, and it effectively filters out anything else I might pick up. This is a great way of relegating your state, but it is a very poor way to take into account a total body or total system awareness. So please note this is kind of a beginner's approach.

I do not “push out” or “push away” someone else’s feelings as might be done with a kind of shielding technique. I re-center my point of awareness onto my own body and then start experiencing a different state. So it would be more accurate to say that I “pull myself into my body.” Pulling my awareness into the solar plexus part of my stomach does have a pushing away effect on people though.

After doing this self-centering of my awareness on a part of my body the only empathy I feel is related to blockages. I will then only pick up on reflections of the blocked states I know are in my system. So if I know I still have a bunch of issues and areas in my chest that are full of anger states then I will pick up anger from others in one way or another. This is a form of unwanted empathy I call unconscious projection.

The problem here is that if you haven’t been aware of your body consciously before then you will probably have a lot of crap, unpleasant feelings, and blockages to work your way through in order to get to anything pleasant. Additionally, it may take some time and work to even become aware of your body initially. Numbness, pain, white energy/electricity, fear, anger, voidness, shame, pride, lizard or doglike feelings, and so on may all have found their way into your body somehow. All of these blockages are stored in your body/mind system and you can go through them with your awareness, layer by layer. When you go through them in this fashion they evaporate. Unfortunately, if you have years worth of repressed or unexpressed feelings then this may take a while. These blockages are mirrored across your whole system in a holographic fashion. So if you find one nasty state in one part of your system it will usually be mirrored in at least some discernable way in other systems. This is the dark side of meditation and Law of Attraction that no one talks about, which is not surprising; you would probably be unable to sell your book or product if you said, “After years of dedicated focus observing nasty feelings and blocks without judgment, you too can have amazing things in your life!”

So the same layer by layer movement of awareness that you use to experience things empathically outside of your body can also be used within your own body.

You also want to be careful about shifting too deeply in a haphazard way. I notice that if I spend a few weeks shifting my awareness all over the place in my body and try to go too deep then my head feels like it gets these tiny cracks in it. Obviously you need to rest. You wouldn't expect to lift weights everyday for weeks without rest periods. Also expanding my awareness too far out of my body will produce giant cracking pains that span the length of my entire face.

Now there are other forms of awareness movement you can use within your body aside from the layer by layer, paper stack like, forward movement. Robert Bruce’s NEW energy ways has a bunch of different techniques for moving your awareness inside your body simply and powerfully. This is the point at which you really need to step back and take things slowly, one step at a time, or else you can really hurt yourself. I accidentally raised my body temperature several degrees for a few days because I did excessive awareness movements in my navel; that was frightening. It felt like I had raised an excessive amount of energy into my mental system and my mind felt "fried" -- like it had these painful cracks in it for a couple weeks. Obviously it is a good idea to start with the basics first and not rush ahead.

Finally, a level by level analysis and awareness of your system is just a starting place; a better practice needs to be integrated with an overall total awareness in addition to a deep movement awareness. Knowing how your whole system works together is necessary, but that is for another series of posts.

Empath Resources

2008-05-24T18:30:29Z

Forums:
http://empathcommunity.ning.com
A great and accessible community for empaths.

http://groups.msn.com/SkilledEmpaths
This forum is somewhat quiet, but there are many posts worth reading.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Empaths
A very active forum devoted to Jad Alexander's Book of Storms.

http://empaths.tribe.net

Websites:
http://mysilentecho.com
The Book of Storms is the life work of Jad Alexander. He obviously poured his heart into his work and it is worth checking out. His system was highly customized to his own perceptual constructs. Although some of the material may be confusing with titles like "delta of theta" he also has informal categories that break it down into easier to understand terminology.

http://www.eliselebeau.com
Elise Lebeau has some good exercises and manages the forums at ning.com.

http://www.rose-rosetree.com
Rose has been studying deeper perception and empathy for 38 years. Her students manage the forums at MSN.

http://www.empathysymbol.com
This is a symbol that represents empathy; you can use for your website, project, or jewelry to increase awareness about empathy.

Books:
Empowered by Empathy by Rose Rosetree
If you're an Empath, or think you might be one, then this is the first book to get your hands on; it has lots of good techniques and I highly recommended it. Lots of prior experiences will start to make sense after reading this book as well. Rose has a list of 22 ways to ground yourself. There is also a rare balance between personal experiences and practical techniques in this book.

Blogs:
http://universalempath.com
http://www.rose-rosetree.com/blog
http://www.oceanofperspectives.com
http://eliselebeau.typepad.com
http://myjourney11.wordpress.com
http://www.theliterature.org

Articles:
http://www.helium.com/items/544074-feeling-little-empathicpart-whats

Additional Resources:

http://astraldynamics.com
Robert Bruce's NEW energy ways system. If you are a seasoned empath looking to expand your horizon this is the place to check out. Astral Projection, OBE, energy movement, etc.

http://forums.astraldynamics.com
The astral dynamics forums.

Awareness through the Body by Aloka Marti and Joan Sala
In terms of awareness exercises this is a great book; it only comes second to creating your own exercises. The book is written by two teachers whose aim is to teach children how to expand their awareness through simple exercises. You have to specially order the book from the authors in India. I highly recommend reading more about it here.

Awareness Exercises: The Union of Mind and Body
These are beginner awareness exercises. I highly recommend them for expanding your awareness.

Z Health R Phase
These are body awareness exercises.

Visualization

2008-05-09T17:34:29Z

Visualization sucks. There I said it. Almost every grounding technique I have seen out there on the internet relies on visualization; but what about the rest of us that have trouble with the visual system? My ability to visualize is amazingly powerful, but my ability to access that state of mind is extremely weak. I have to be in a near sleep state to even get there.

For beginners there is an aspect of visualization that can be disempowering; I just realized the following idea recently myself. First ask yourself what is the purpose of visualization? The visualization itself is just a way of directing your consciousness. In other words, a grounding technique that "roots" you into the center of the earth with cords of light is less about the what you see and more about the effects the technique has on your system. The visualization is just a way of directing your consciousness to get the desired effects. However, if you are overly reliant on the auditory system then there is really no need to visualize at all; you can direct your consciousness purely with your will and language alone.

There is no need for me to visualize at all to accomplish that particular technique. I just use my willpower to move my consciousness to the desired location. And that is what the visualization is doing as well except no one actually ever states that explicitly.

The downside to being so overly reliant on the auditory system is that you are not going to receive much info from the visual system. Another downside is there are higher level techniques and states that will be totally unavailable to you.

Robert Bruce has a great article from Astral Dynamics on visualization.

One interesting thing I noticed about visualizing is that my mind can more easily visualize an object that I have repeatedly seen versus an object, which may be very similar, that is relatively new to me. Obviously an object which you see repeatedly throughout your day will be more internalized than one which has not been seen as frequently. An example of how marketers take advantage of this fact can be seen here.

Visualization Primers

These techniques are primers to help your system get into a more visual mode.

Dan Scorpio's Mirror Exercise:

http://www.angelfire.com/nd/danscorpio/union.html
This mirror exercise was the first awareness exercise I tried and it was very profound.

Peripheral Vision and Third Eye Stimulation:
http://forums.astraldynamics.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=12360

Imagery in Sports and Physical Performance By Anees A. Sheikh, Errol R. Korn

Cal's fluid technique:
This is a simple primer technique and seems to have great benefits according to the guy that wrote it all up. The amount of enthusiasm in his posts suggest that his technique is worth seriously investigating thoroughly. I have noticed that it tends to relieve quite a bit of eye tension.

Get off the computer:
Being on the computer too much creates a huge amount of tension in your eyes.

Word associations:
Say a sentence to yourself in your head and instead of just hearing the sentence also see/create a picture for each word.

Visual system overlay:
This technique comes from the book Monsters & Magical Sticks and can be applied to the audio or kinesthetic systems, if you have trouble with those, by just reversing the order the steps. First identify your "out of conscious" system. For this example we are of course assuming it is your visual system.

Part 1: Literal overlay

Sit outside and meditate on your output system (auditory in my case) then your secondary system (kinesthetic). Then lastly meditate on the out of conscious system (visual). What the hell does all that mean? Well for me that means first I close my eyes and meditate on everything I hear; then I meditate on my body and how I feel; lastly I open my eyes and flood my awareness with visual stimulus. So if you are primarily a kinesthetic person and not auditory then you just switch the order of the first two and still end with visual.

Part 2: Mental overlay (speeding up the process to access the visualization state)

Do the literal overlay process several times in reality.

Then shift to doing it in your head through imagination. (This is the point at which most hypnotists actually start)

Then repeat the process multiple times in your mind in a row at a quick pace. Speed up the pace as fast as you reasonably can. I am told you have to do 100,000 repetitions of this before becoming really proficient in your ability to access the visual state easily. By speeding up the process mentally you can accomplish ten repetitions in the time it took you to do one before though.

Unwanted Empathy

2008-04-19T00:37:00Z

In my experience there are three forms of unwanted empathy. You are not a victim, although you may sure feel like one if you regularly experience unwanted empathy. In truth you can take control of your amazing ability and free yourself from being at the whim of other people's emotions and states of consciousness.

Being Ungrounded:
The first form of unwanted empathy is when your awareness is so completely out of your body that you pick up anything and everything you happen to be around or focus on. The poet Eugenio Montale describes this effect well when he says in his poem Boats on the Marne:

Bliss of the cork abandoned to the current
that melts around
the upside-down bridges

Except with unwanted empathy it may not exactly be bliss that you experience; especially if you drive on the freeway. This kind of unwanted empathy is so intense that when you are around drunk people you yourself feel drunk and may even experience a hangover the next day. This is not so much unwanted empathy as it is being completely ungrounded. Ask yourself, "Do I want to be in my body? Is there a reason I wouldn't? Are there feelings in my body I would rather not be aware of?" Are you consistently doing things and going places that you don't want to? I know that personally the process for my consciousness to "float" or start to leave my body is when I feel like "I don't want to be here."

There are many grounding techniques out there to help with this kind of problem. Ideally you should be able to shift your consciousness, and change how you feel at any time, within a range of states available to you within your body.

When you "ground" or pull your awareness into your body (i.e., shift your awareness to states of consciousness that exist inside your body) then this type of unwanted empathy will cease. It may not cease completely though, which brings us to the next form of unwanted empathy.

Unconscious Projection:
The second form of unwanted empathy is when you are fully grounded inside your body as much as possible at your current level of awareness and still pick up remnant emotions from others. This indicates that you have feelings stuck inside yourself that you are not fully aware of. On an intellectual level you may "know" that they are there and causing you physical discomfort, but you have not really experienced them yet so they cannot be released. You will repeatedly pick up these feelings from other people going about your daily business, however you will not pick up other feelings at all. And you can, of course, assume that people ARE having other feelings than the ones you repeatedly pick up at this stage.

The word e-motion: energy in motion. Emotions move. When energy becomes trapped into body tension patterns it cannot move freely. Locate the feelings in the body and go into them with the intent to fully experience as much as you can for that session, however long. The intent to release or get rid of the feelings from the start is in my experience a form of resistance to experiencing them -- that may not be the case for you -- but it can become an obstacle if that is all you focus on. Osho mentions this as well in his heart meditation. A more detailed and in depth dissolving technique can be found in this post at the astral dynamics forum. Going layer by layer through all the stuff trapped in your system takes a long time it seems.

I am currently investigating techniques for working on this kind of problem.

Social disturbance (conscious projection):
The last form of unwanted empathy that I have experienced I would categorize under the title of social disturbance. This kind of empathy is when you tell someone something that they are not ready to hear or they are way too scared to deal with and they get very upset and "return" those feelings to you. If you persist then the feelings will be amplified. This category could be lumped in with the projection category since that is what it is; however, with this form you are consciously aware of the exchange in real time. This is the easiest form to eliminate; simply refrain from doing and saying things that you know are going to seriously disturb people. For example, not everyone can intellectually integrate the descriptions of your experiences into their inner framework.

Empathy Test

2008-04-10T17:31:07Z

I have created a simple empathy test based on the Gatha series exercises. You may want to meditate for a few minutes and clear your system before starting the test. In the future I will be creating additional types of tests as well as adding more of the kind featured here.

While watching one of these videos in the quiz it occurred to me what the girl's name was almost immediately -- simply from past experience with someone almost exactly like her. It also occurred to me that each name is like a kind of sculpture cut out of consciousness. Think about the programming terminology: namespace.

This test is not a survey style quiz; it is an exercise designed with the intent to help hone and increase your empathy. It can definitely help you narrow in and identify a more social kind of empathy. Recognizing a person's eye movements and what patterns they run may also help you.

If you are already an experienced empath then this test will probably not help you! Merging your consciousness with random people is most likely not going to help you and may even be dangerous. Alternatively, you can take the test without merging and just rely more on other sensory cues like body language and eye movements.

Take the empathy test now!

Meditation

2008-03-24T03:09:55Z

Most discussions about empathy are always focused on external stimulus and what is happening to you. As if all you can do as an empath is receive states; that kind of thinking puts you in the position of being a victim. But what about creating, or accessing, your own states of consciousness? How do you do that as easily as you feel the energy of others?

How do you generate your own states of consciousness, states of emotion, states of mind, states of intellect, and states of body at the snap of a finger? The answer is: the ability to focus your awareness with intent. In other words, through "meditation" and anchoring. All of the aforementioned levels have many sub-levels; some say there are thousands, millions, or even an infinite number of sub-levels. The Coming Home Technique is a great place to start learning about these levels.

Empathy is an amazing way to gain access to new states of consciousness; it can be as simple as shaking someone's hand or just being in their presence. If you gain access to a new state be sure to name it and add it to your Hall of Doors, a technique which I describe below. However, meditating on external objects is not going to help you if you are constantly used to being in an expanded state; you need to meditate on your own system, i.e., your own body. This will also help you get more grounded.

A central idea in rolfing and body work is that emotional tension is held in the body and executed as a pattern of muscle holding. If you know a point of tension in your body then meditating on that area will take you down into many levels of different experiences. There are many layers just like when you use empathy. These may not be pleasant. However, the most interesting thing I have noticed about meditation and empathy is that when I access a certain new states of consciousness inside myself I can then feel them from others on the environmental level.

Contemplate that when it comes to states of consciousness read and write access are the same.

Myths:
Contrary to popular belief, blocking out "distractions" is not always a good idea. In some meditations you may benefit from more external noise. Increasing your awareness of that noise duly increases the internal awareness on the next levels of body and mind.

How do you stop your mind from wandering or thinking? Some people call this the "monkey mind." When you play baseball do you think, "oh god I can't have any thoughts that aren't about baseball"? No, you get to business and do the best you can. If you can complete a simple task like making a sandwich then your intent is strong enough to meditate. Set your intent to focus fully and be done with it. Some random thoughts or thoughts about what you feel are fine and are not going to prevent you from having a great experience.

Enlightenment is bullshit. There is no enlightenment. There is enlightening, but no enlightenment. So what the hell are all those gurus talking about? Some of them have permanently expanded their awareness into the void. The void experience is one of the most important experiences you can have; it helps you cut through everything -- to eliminate all the bullshit and all your so called "problems," which you see were never there to begin. I could not have started to experience any of this stuff I am writing about without first having a taste of the void.

But how is it going to help you if that's the only level you explore? Staying only in the void, in this embodied form, is a limitation. Ram Dass says, "He who clings to the void and neglects compassion does not reach the highest stage. But he who practices only compassion does not gain release from the toils of existence. He however how is strong in the practice of both remains neither in samsara nor in nirvana. He neither remains in the void nor in the world." I have seen some "gurus" that look completely blissed out on the heart level -- they are nowhere near grounded. Actually, I am a bit jealous of them!

Where to start?
From the void level there is no meditation, nor is there any meditator. From another perspective you could say that there is no time at which you do not meditate; you are always using "your" awareness which is everywhere at once. The mass mind level is the television and now the internet. You can tap into the same states inside yourself and feel the same way. That is what "mindful meditation" is all about - zoning into the mind level and staying there; if you want to tap into that level then why not just turn on the tv? There are many other levels to explore. The best place to start meditating is to just focus on one part of the body. It could be your stomach, your heart, your tailbone, etc and experience what happens.

Meditating with your eyes closed is good to start since that will definitely increase your focus on your internal awareness. I have been told however, that eventually you will want to have your eyes open so you are not shutting out all that sensory awareness. In other words you want to be able to reach the same level of awareness that you can get with your eyes closed when you are walking down the street with all kinds of distractions.

I met an interesting guy named Marty recently. After talking with the guy for an hour or so my vision gets this weird purple after-effect on every white thing that I look at. He is a very high person; it's great to finally meet someone with a deeper level of awareness that I can learn from. He gave me several new techniques and exercises, all of which are listed below. In addition to these he also recommends Z-health R phase, which is basically a full set of body awareness exercises. I have been reading several books he recommended and will post some reviews later.

What do awareness exercises have to do with meditation? I had a dream one night where I entered the internal space of a martial arts expert. What I saw was many amazing, custom made, almost supernatural looking, tools to shape physical reality. Awareness exercises are necessary tools for you to use and create in order to shape the inner reality.

Meditation Techniques

Hall of doors technique:
Create in your mind a hall of doors. Initially it will have no doors until you add them one by one. Each door has a symbol, color, number, writing, picture, or any combination of these on it. You can use this as a pre or post meditation tool to explore your vast consciousness. The idea is that you name the level of consciousness that you experience as a way to get back to it. Once it is named, pictured, or otherwise identified, then you can always return to that state of consciousness by opening the door. You do not have to be good at visualization to do this technique; you could simply write down your hallway on a piece of paper, but be sure to keep it in your head as well. This technique is a kind of anchoring technique and allows you to go to any state of consciousness in your hall of doors at the snap of a finger. This technique is an indispensable one.

Marty's two point technique:

1. First pick a point in your environment. Focus on that until you feel comfortable. Now focus on the entire environment at once. Now pick another point and focus on that one until you are comfortable with it. Next focus on both points at once. Next focus on both points and the whole environment at once.

2. Now focus on the tip of one of your fingers for several moments. Then focus on the rest of your body. Then focus on both your finger tip and the body all at once. Now expand the focus on both the environment and body levels.

Ping pong goggles:
Take a ping pong ball and cut it in half. Place them over your eyes. Meditate with your eyes open, looking into the white of the balls. Alternatively, you can get some ski goggles and paint the inside white or any other color and use that as well. This exercise is a stepping stone between eyes closed meditation and eyes open meditation. Officially, this is called the Ganzfeld effect; it was discovered by arctic explorers in snow blind conditions. It is a mild form of sensory deprivation.

Awareness Exercises

Finger tracing:
Hold both index fingers pointing away from your body, side by side, about 1 ft from your body at waist level. You want to trace the finger with your eyes, but without moving the head at all. Trace a half circle upward with the right index finger and then back down the way you came. Then trace the other side of the imaginary circle with your left finger and trace it back down the way you came.

Eye compass:

First you want to create a compass like this one somewhere on your wall. You can use a piece of string, tethered to the center, and go around in a circle to make sure all the points are even. I sliced up some cork with a band saw and then stuck them on the wall with earthquake putty; but tacks, tape, or some simple stickers would work fine too.

After creating this compass, the actual exercise is to sit down and move your eyes around the compass. First use the center dot as a reference. So after looking at each dot go back to the center dot. Go clockwise. Then counter-clockwise. Write down what you experience after each set. Try just the bottom three dots; then try the top three. Try left to right and up and down. Try all combinations of dots you can think of with the center dot reference restriction. Later take off the center dot restriction. What do you notice? Write it down. Specifically, write down the sets and dots that give you the most difficulty.

V – K – A detection exercise:
Most people usually speak in one sensory mode: Visual, Kinesthetic, or Audio. The exercise is to identify this “conscious output system” or “how we attempt to communicate our experiences to another” (p. 54, Heller, Steele) by watching videos or holding a conversation with someone.

Examples:

Visual:
I wasn’t seeing new people
It looks clear to me

Kinesthetic:
Out of hand
Felt I hadn’t had
Shake things up
Interact (3x)
Feel the wind
Best feeling
Comfort

Auditory:
I hear you
Sounds good
I like the rippling sound

Eye Pattern Detection:
First watch someone speaking and identify their conscious output system via their speech. Then identify their unconscious input system, i.e., “the ‘programs’ [people] use to generate their conscious experience” (p. 66, Heller, Steele). Although, it seems that you are not directly identifying a program but rather the sensory mode which that program runs through or on. You recognize this mode via a person’s eye movement. This is for right handed people. For left handed people the following is reversed. For "cross brain dominant" people you just have to ask them questions and determine which primary systems they use by the resulting eye movements.

Up to Left: Past VISUAL
Up to the Right: Constructing VISUAL

Down Left: Internal AUDIO (Internal Dialogue)
Down Right: Past KINESTHETIC

When the person is facing you these movements will, of course, be reversed from your perspective. Your left will be their right. “As a general rule, when someone is experiencing a present kinesthetic experience, s/he will tend to look in the general direction of the listener and make physical contact to their own body.” (p. 68, Heller, Steele)

Additional exercises coming soon...

Dream Techniques

2008-03-06T01:47:00Z

You can use your dreams every night to acquire information about yourself and others. Dreams can help you explore parts of yourself that may be a bit more hidden from your awareness in your waking life. Dreams can give you direct access to guidance that you would otherwise have to pay lots of money to obtain in the real world. The first thing to do is start keeping a journal of your dreams. Even if you remember your dreams well it is important to record them so you can go back after some time and review, identify patterns, etc. If you don't remember your dreams at all then journaling/recording them immediately after you wake up is best the way to get your mind to start remembering.

Learning more about yourself with these techniques can help you become a better empath by increasing your internal awareness.

Visiting people's internal space:
It is possible to obtain information about other people by using a kind of "dream empathy." Basically what you do is visit their internal space in your dreams.

Your awareness will be more lucid in these places; you will know you are dreaming. You may also receive verifiable information about the waking world. I won't rob you of the opportunity for new discoveries by telling you exactly what you may find, but I will say that if you do the technique successfully there will be no doubt in your mind as to the "realness" of what you experience. Be prepared to be amazed.

Write down your intent of whose space you want to visit in your dream journal. Tell yourself several times before you go to sleep that it is your intent to go there.

Entering into someone's internal dream space usually requires you to find their "hiding place." You may have to climb up a ladder and go through a hidden panel or go in through a back door. The person's personality will give away their hiding place. However, this "transition" phase in the dream may be much different for you.

Be careful because some people's internal space is guarded. Another reason to be extra cautious is that some people's space is in fact very disturbing. Don't "play" around with this technique.

Asking you guides:
You can ask your astral guides a question or for help through your dreams.

Set your intent by doing the following:
1. Write down your question in your dream journal before going to sleep.
2. Write down the location (time is optional) that you will meet your guide at.

I have success using locations that aren't too specific. In other words something like "a house" or "a school" will give your mind ample opportunity to incorporate the setting into your dreams, whereas a more specific setting like "Joe's backyard by the lemon tree" may be too specific. However, you may be different and need to use an exact location. Find out what works for you! Setting the location is very important though; I was told specifically in my dreams that the overall intent should be like making a real appointment you will not miss.

Your lucidity when you arrive at the location or meet your guide will be high.

You will know when you meet your guide(s). All kinds of weird shit usually happens when I do this technique.

Meeting your energy centers:
You can also ask to "meet" your chakras or energy centers of your body. Chakras are a metaphorical way of discussing the endocrine system. You may have varying degrees of lucidity with these dreams. Asking to meet your heart or your root or any other center will give you a lot of information about yourself. You can use this as a way to filter out your previously recorded dreams and dream symbols. Your dreams may make more sense when you direct your mind into a context of a particular body part. If you receive any names be sure to write them down immediately! And never share the names with anyone.

Asking to meet parts of yourself will help clear things up during meditations on those respective parts of yourself. It is a great way to give yourself additional guidance and knowledge about your meditations. It can help you tremendously with directing and prioritizing what part of yourself you may need to work on, strengthen, or meditate with.

Feelings and Trips

2008-02-04T23:37:00Z

Feelings and Trips:
Here is a description from my experience of the feelings I frequently get. These descriptions are pretty personal and may differ vastly from others. These are mostly general feelings with some trip reports as well. Detailed trip reports of specific places or organisms would probably be more useful so others could visit and report their feelings or findings as well. The truth is that you do not need drugs to trip. All you need to do is project your consciousness with your intent. A drug acts like a wedge in your consciousness that temporarily expands your awareness into the shells (layers) of its chemical space, or spirit, and beyond. With drugs you have no control of your ability to "come down" at your discretion. By projecting your consciousness you can more or less return to the body when you want, depending on how far out you go and how good you are at grounding, although you are still tripping and there are many unknowns. So, by first floating, losing some awareness of the body, and then projecting, you can travel in your consciousness to wherever you like.

I would make a distinction between a "trip" and general empathic feelings. Usually just going about your daily business in an expanded state of awareness and picking up on some people's feelings, but with no real intent, is standard empathy/clairsentience. Once I start to tell myself to project into some tree or star or spider and start experiencing the discrete and distinct levels of that space then I would call that tripping. The line is, of course, not entirely set in stone.

Anger:
If someone is holding anger in their belly area I feel a stinging fiery burn it in the left side near/underneath the belly button. If someone is holding anger or sadness in the heart/chest area I feel a mild but uncomfortable burning pain in the left side of my chest.

Sometimes when there is just general (chaotic) anger or frustration I feel like my body is being pierced by 100 tiny searing hot needles spaced out like the polka dots in this picture. I call these barbs. This kind of searing heat feeling is similar to when you are outside in cold weather with no shoes and then come inside and take a hot shower. I feel this when listening to many rock songs; it could be described as feeling like white noise or "staticky." If people are really angry then these barbs can stick in you for a while.

Some people who may not be following their heart or for some other reason they are drenched in a very lava like burning feeling. I get that from some people. Ever hear the phrase your "blood is boiling" -- well that is what it feels like.

Mad Dog / Grounding:
When going into shells of pain I have felt some weird perk/holding in the lymph/mouth area. It feels like a dog looking down at a toy it is going to destroy. It feels like you just want to rip apart flesh with your teeth. (sides of mouth kind of go up to expose the teeth, like Dick Cheney pictures). The desire to vomit, expressed/felt in the mouth area, may be present. This is what I feel when I set my intent to ground into my body fully. I have been told this is due to frozen blockages. I am not quite sure if this is true yet.

Liars:
When people are lying, judging me, or feel in someway violated by something I said then I get a flush of shame. It is kind of like a flare of heat in my facial area.

Pride:
This is a band higher than shame as it feels like a slightly different kind of heat.

Whole Body Shame:
In one of my classes several years ago I did not do the entire reading for class and neither did many other people, which was quite obvious from their responses to the professor. I remember the professor asked me some question and I just sat there and didn't say anything. I felt a huge surge of shame and embarrassment throughout my whole body. It felt like a huge release. After class several people came up to me and basically told me how they didn't like the professor. When people refuse to really express themselves in a group then it can overload an empath and comes out through them. Now I understand why I was so irritated and even very angry by one particular group of 30+ people; their mass consciousness was a disturbing entity. There are many other similar stories about this kind of thing.

Nervousness/Fear:
If people are nervous about making small talk I can feel it in my stomach right below the belly button. Usually people are hesitant in this situation so I can feel it several seconds before they open their mouths to chat. It is possible for this nervousness to change to fear if I say something they can't handle. (This can be something very innocuous for some people.) My stomach feels very black/dark when this happens.

Peace:
Last time I felt this deeply was with a spider. I think it was heavily in my navel. Very peaceful there.
One particular favorite tree of mine is very peaceful too. More in the heart and head with the tree though. Very much in the bridge of the nose. It makes me feel a kind of mild enthusiasm. I saw a woman that was pregnant recently and I felt very peaceful just looking at her.

Bowling ball head/Brain Dynamo:
This one is almost impossible to describe. It is like a mix between emotion, feeling, and sensation, but not actually any of those things. It feels like a slab of granite or a bowling ball moving slowly inside your head. "Brain Dynamo." I have felt this on two occasions visiting a particular person's head space. I felt this several times spontaneously in my own head space a long time ago. I also felt this sensation upon exiting my cat's head space so it seems to be a head space specific feeling. More investigation is needed to make any real conclusions about what this is. Finding a bit more of a distinct pattern of coming into it and going out of it would probably clarify things.

Traveling into my cat's head space was brief but interesting. Sometimes animals will look at you in an innocent way. When I entered my cat's head I felt as if I was inside that feeling but looking outward as if that feeling were my own. Then I left and felt the bowling ball head feeling and then I could tell that my cat was pissed because I started to get a bunch of the above mentioned anger feelings near my feet/legs, which I get when she is mad and near that part of my body. If I leave her outside too long or do something else that pisses her off I get the same response without fail, every time. I decided not to go into other beings minds without asking first now.

Cats can have a very thin presence. They can be difficult to detect if they want to be. Their presence can permeate space very evenly.

Tripping Among the Stars:
To do this I just go outside on a clear night and look into the stars and tell myself to project there.

The first time I did this I was high for three days and I felt quite a bit of anger. This was before I learned how to ground and come back down to my body even a little. This was at a time when I was reading about siddhis (spiritual powers) and was curious about them. After tripping with the stars I had a dream where Osho appeared by a stick of RAM. There was also someone from my high school there who had a very depressed/negative attitude throughout his life. The depressed guy was basically saying, "Oh he thinks he can fly in real life because he can fly in a dream." Osho's message to me was basically, "at least you have the sense not to try to gain siddhis." This was before I actually realized that being able to expand my awareness and merge with things is more than I can handle already! I was doing it without knowing I was doing it. Funny enough, during that dream I was flying a couple times and the conversation between the three of us was about flying.

The second time I did this I felt somewhat thin and also very high. I went and laid down on my bed and it felt like my whole body was buzzing.

The third time I did this, Feb 3rd, I felt stinging pain in my left nostril. I was pretty spacey and just started laughing, sitting at my computer, for no reason at all. Just giggling. After getting ready for bed I thought, "Ok trip is over time for sleep." I laid down and attempted to ground myself back into the body. However I started feeling like I was having 100 thoughts per second and then I heard some sitars and Indian men talking. I just apologized for entering this space. I felt a small rush of fear that stayed in my stomach. It occurred to me that by entering a star's consciousness I am actually entering the presence of a very high being. It also occurred to me that expanding like this is not something I should toy around with so casually. The idea of me being "in control" of the trip was pretty much eliminated. These beings can very easily tell when you enter into their space. It is probably akin to a drunken person busting into your house at 3am and making a racket. A clear intention the requisite respect is something to think about before tripping/projecting.

An interesting side note to this last story was that my nose still had quite a bit of pain on the left side the next day; it was a sharp stinging kind of pain. I must have still been in a very expanded state because that day I had a funny telepathic experience -- something that never happened to me before! My interpretation of the nose pain is that my body was telling me I was expanding beyond my capacity.

Changes in Pressure:
Many people experience this. I am not sure why. One time I was in a restaurant and two very large people were sitting to the left of me. After they paid the check they both stood up at once and I went deaf in one ear for several seconds. It felt like the pressure in the whole space changed. I have also, however, experienced this when there has been no noticeable drastic physical change in the space around me. So something more subtle may be occurring in these instances.

White Crown:
Sometimes when my friend Matt or my sister visit me I get a kind of tapping on the crown of my head. It feels pleasant. Recently, a pregnant woman smiled at me and I felt the same thing.