Advanced Skill #2: Immunity to Shock

This is going to be a very short lesson. The idea is simple, but the practice is going to be more than some of you will be willing to endure. It is the kind of thing most Yogi will master in the first few years.

Here is the idea. One of the ways people loose lucidity is a reaction, often refered to as getting too excited. Your brain catches on to the fact that you are in a dream and the body responds with adernaline. It amps up the body and you are suddenly awake. Also, if you make it past that, and get lucid, you can still have an adernaline reaction to things in the dream. This causes the dream to be confusing and adds things like a rush of fear or worry, that can spoil the mood.

How to prevent it? That is what this lesson is for. The need is to learn to control your adernal response and overcome the 'normal' way of reacting to stress. Any of you who are fighters (boxing, mma, and such) or who have had basic training in an army setting, will have learned this by now. For those who still need to develop the ability to suppress adernaline and change our response to sudden suprise I will just suggest a couple ideas. use them, or make up other ways of reaching the same goal.

Try this one if you want the fast track to the skill. Learn to not react at all to sudden cold water. You do not want to be the one who inches into the pool. You want to be able to keep talking in a calm voice and show no discomfort walking swiftly into the pool. Here are the steps I took to get there:
1: In the shower slowly adjust the water to cold. Build up over a few days. Just go until your body flinchs or your brain reaccts with a sudden powerful impulse to pull away or stop.
2: Speed up how fast you can adjust the temp to cold with out such reaction.
3: Run the warm water over the crown of your head, when you feel ready. Suddenly shut off all of the hot water at one time. Try to breath normal. Go ahead and make silly whooping noises, or any reaction that helps, such as stamping your feet. You need only endure this for a few seconds.
4: Repeat 3, but try not to react. Do not move on to 5 until you can turn the water to pure cold all at one time, stay calm with out flinching long enough for the cold water to rinse any warmth off you head and neck.
5: Develop the skill so that you can then calmly allow the stream to hit your back and slowly down your spine to the bottom.

Do not worry about subjecting yourself to even a few minutes of cold! The point here is not to develop endurance or any toughness. The goal is a retraining of how you respond. This must be repeated for about a month, at least 3 times a week. By that point your brain should be adapting.

I will just give one more example. I think the idea is more important than how you do it.

In the second example, I have used sudden loud or unpleasent sounds as training. Does the sound of nails on a chalk board create a bodily reaction from you? Train yourself to get over it. Can you turn your back and have a friend do something very sudden and loud with out you flinching? Learn to stay calm when guns are fired or fireworks go off behind you suddenly. this is not something i can really teach from far away, but I hope you get the idea.


The whole idea is to train yourself to not flinch or over react to sudden intense stimuli. Train your body not to produce large rushes of adernaline when suprised or shocked and you will no longer loose lucids to excitement or shock. You will also not have the feeling and mood of your dream redirected due to your body producing chemicals as a response to exciting events.

This thread is now open for question or comment.

Here is the first feedback:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by PKJacker

Thanks for making this post, I had this problem where I would keep waking up from dreams since I would get too excited, then I tried this for a month or more (didn't keep track of exactly how long I did it) and it worked great!

Also this helps me not only with dreaming, but just with everyday life in general with being exposed to sudden high pitched sounds and things that I wouldn't be able to stand before I started this practice.

---

This is timely, as I'm starting to douse with cold water after a workout in the shower. Where I live, however, the cold water is barely above freezing, and I tried it once on the crown of my head and had a horrible headache for hours afterwards. Hopefully the exercise can be run without the crown of the head. I get a strong reaction on my sides so hopefully that will serve as well.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by FryingMan

This is timely, as I'm starting to douse with cold water after a workout in the shower. Where I live, however, the cold water is barely above freezing, and I tried it once on the crown of my head and had a horrible headache for hours afterwards. Hopefully the exercise can be run without the crown of the head. I get a strong reaction on my sides so hopefully that will serve as well.

---

You are going to actually try to reprogram your neurons, eventually you should be able to have very limited response to even the ice cold water on the crown. But take as long as you need to get there. If you want another spot that has about the same effect, then turn around and have the cold water hit between your shoulder blades and neck.

I've been doing this every time I enter the shower for about a week. For one thing it's a good willpower exercise :). I tell myself "my brain controls my reaction...I'm dreaming....my brain controls my reaction...I'm dreaming" and try to stay calm and level. I say this out loud too to make sure I can speak with a level voice. I haven't needed to "whoop" or dance around.

I've continued doing this almost every single time I'm in the shower, at least once a day, and several times when in the sauna area of the gym. It takes some will sometimes to do it! Sometimes my voice will still get a little shaky and I'll sometimes take a shuddering breath or two initially, but I find I'm better at restoring calm more and more quickly. No stomping or whooping required. I will also usually visualise the situations in dreams where I most want to stay calm in right when I turn on the water. Since the water temperature here is fairly slow to change, I'll step aside, let the water get fully cold, shut it off, then step back under the shower head and turn it on suddenly.

Great work Fryingman. This one is a life changer.

Two months into this and I now very rarely get a shuddery breath at the first blast of cold water on dry skin: I remain calm, and can speak without problems. I still tell myself "my mind controls my reaction" -- and I actually spoke this out loud in one lucid when entering into a situation where I traditionally lose dreams. It helped a bit! I continue to do this every single time I take a shower (at home or at the gym), except showers right before bed.