Josh: July 2008 Archives
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.
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.
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.
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.
