Mental Health, Mindfulness, Meditation and Mastering Dreams

This may have already been covered in various ways in the forum, and I may not even have this in the right section, but I had some thoughts here I wanted to share from my own personal experiences.

For a moment I want you to picture yourself meeting a blind person, someone who has never seen anything with his or her physical sense of sight. Imagine yourself trying to describe sight to them, the process of using the eyes, of seeing. Kind of silly right?

OK, now imagine you are a dreamer, questing for Lucidity. You want to walk in the spiritual realms and tap into spiritual energies. How are you going to truly understand the energies you encounter on a spiritual level if you have never developed any sort of sense of these energies?

This is why in order to be a better dreamer, to be a Lucid Dreamer, to be, as Moss puts it, an Active Dreamer (the ultimate goal I think) you absolutely must learn how to be mindful and how to meditate! Now I'm not talking about breathing a particular way. In my own experience, practicing Qi Gong and Tai Chi, meditation is a process whereby you slow down, you breath, slow and deep, and you are fully present in the moment, otherwise referred to as mindfulness or the unification of your conscious and subconscious selves.

Ultimately what is going on here is that most of us come from backgrounds and lives in modern society where the physical realm, and our conscious selves, are given the greatest importance. Your unconscious self is relegated to the realm of dreams for anyone who doesn't tap into it through any kind of creative or artistic ability. Even if we are creative and artistic, using our subconsciousness more, we still place greater emphasis on our conscious self, what I will call the physical parts of ourselves. We pay little attention to the spiritual parts of ourselves and the energy that drives the physical parts of ourselves, call this your spirit, soul, consciousness or some combination of the three.

When you practice Tai Chi or moving Qi Gong (I use Matthew Cohen's Fire and Water DVD) you begin to actually feel the energy coming into you or traveling out of you, and it is this awareness that develops the your spiritual abilities. Additionally you are getting physical exercise, which gives your brain certain chemicals you need, and if you do this in a group you receive additional needed chemicals from physically interacting with others. If you can do this outside you get the sunlight you need to develop the melatonin you want later in order to fall asleep quicker.

The last thing you learn, and this is the key in this kind of exercise, is how to, "Move in the stillness" and be, "Fully present in the moment." As I read or heard in a source which escapes me right now too often most of us are performing a task but our mind is 10 steps ahead on the next task. We are not fully present in the moment. We are not practicing mindfulness. Our unconscious and conscious selves are not unified. We are on auto-pilot. This can even affect our Lucid Dreams making them appear to blur by around us at a much faster speed then we want. By practicing Tai Chi and Qi Gong we slowly, over time, as we perform the movements, teach ourselves to slow down and be fully present in the moment. When we focus on a task we are focused completely on that task. We give it all our energy and concentration.

Once we reach this point we can truly meditate, We can slow down our breathing, relax every part of our body and focus our thoughts inward, or simply on our breathing. When we picture a light or mist moving over and through us we can further relax ourselves, remove negative energy from our bodies, and fill ourselves with positive energy from above us or the earth, cycling that energy back into the earth to be purified. We can see this energy in our mind's eye, sense it, feel it. It is ephemeral but very real to us. Even now, after I performed my exercise for the evening, I can feel the strength of my focus as I write this and the warmth of the energy emanating from my hands

Eventually when we dream we are more aware of our surroundings. It's easier for us to tell we are dreaming. We can detect the kind of energy entities we encounter in the spiritual realm may have. The spiritual realm becomes just as real to us as the physical realm. If you can reach this state it will enhance your dreams, your Lucid Dreams, and your spiritual abilities, allowing to do things such as astral projection or remote viewing. A whole new world of possibilities opens to you.

To get there you need only discipline and focus, to exercise a certain time a certain number of days per week and not alter it until it becomes a habit (3 weeks or so.) You need to practice slowing down, becoming aware of only your breath, in the beginning stages of meditation. You should try to become aware of every part of your body. Peter Ralston covers this in his very hard to read, but excellent work, "Zen Body Being." You should also try to become proficient at creating mental movies, as described in Maxwell Maltz's, "Psycho Cybernetics." I highly recommend you purchase these books, read them, and add them to your library.

I wish you well in the development of your spiritual senses, and your adventures in the spiritual realm!
- DreamBliss

Deathbliss, do you practice 'All Day Awareness' sessions in addition to your meditation, or do you find that they both commingle into the same activity with the same common goal? Is there any major distinctions between the two?

I'm in the middle of a name change. I signed that post wrong out of habit. Changed it because here it's DreamBliss. My earlier name had a lot of negative connotations I wanted to get rid of. Confusing I know.

I have absolutely no idea what "All Day Awareness" sessions are, but I'm curious. I never got all the way through Ralston's book, too hard to read and too many holds at my library, is this from there? I have tried some of the earlier exercises, trying to feel every part of your body starting with your toes. If this is what you are referring to I would say that it enhances my Qi Gong exercises, and if it enhances that, it should enhance meditation.

Well we can look at this another way. To truly meditate you need to relax, right? You can relax much quicker if you can feel when all your body parts are relaxed. You can even put your body to sleep. None of this is possible if you aren't aware of your body and able to feel each part.

To push this even further I think becoming fully aware of your body will make it easier to deal with pain in your body and any distractions while meditating (such as phantom itches.)It should also make it easier for you to push your awareness outside of your body, which will aid in Astral Projection. Finally you should be able to take these exercises in some form and build complete awareness of your spiritual body, which should aid in Lucid Dreaming and Astral Projection.

Ideally you should find a way to incorporate body awareness exercises into your normal exercise routine, and follow that up with meditation. This will be the route I will go.
- DreamBliss

Ah, my bad about the screen name. I should have paid attention to it plastered up in the lefthand corner of the post! "All day awareness" is actually something I read in a thread by King Yoshi. Here's the link: http://www.dreamviews.com/f49/all-da...gyoshi-113253/

The gist of it is being more perceptive about the fine details of your environment. It suggests taking breaks out of your day to be as observant and aware of your surroundings as possible to help aid your awareness in your dreamworld. So I guess it would be different from meditation in a sense that you're more connected to your external environment? I don't know. Though I practice meditation, I'm still fairly new to it, so I've yet to streamline my techniques for reaching a higher/purer meditative state. Are there any guides to meditation you'd recommend in addition to the books you've recommended above?

Also, what exactly is Qi Gong? If you don't mind me asking. I'm sure I could just go look it up on the internet, but I rather hear the definition from someone who actually exercises it!

I'll look into the All Day Awareness thing - sounds good. I read something similar in, "Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams", a horrible, horrible book as a few PHd authored books tend to be. From it I did take away one useful fact, and that is a person should be in touch with their feelings in order to be more consciously aware. Something like that. Now that I know what you are referring to I can tell you the theory behind this.

When you are habitually aware of your surroundings in waking life, this habit will transfer into your sleeping life. You start the habit consciously, and the subconscious, in time, also develops the habit. This helps you because if you are, whether conscious or not, habitually aware of your surroundings you will find it easier in a dreaming state to recognize you are in a dream.

For example in waking life you might see one of those cute fuzzy caterpillars going across the road. That's normal. You notice it, the event registers, no matter how menial it may be. Later in a dream you see a glowing rainbow colored caterpillar cross a road. You notice it, and you realize that caterpillars don't normally glow, and (unless you're really high) you realize you are dreaming, and can use this event to wake yourself up inside your dream and become lucid. That's what this method is for. It requires a lot of time and patience, it could be months before you see any results.

As for meditation I am reading, "Meditation, an In-depth Guide" by Ian Gawler and Paul Bedson. It seems well written and so far its readable. It approaches mediation from mostly non-religious viewpoint which I prefer. Thich Nhat Hanh has written numerous books on mindfulness meditation and these may be good but I have not read them yet. Yogani has a "Deep Meditation" audio book I'm listening to. The guy is just reading his book to you, which is annoying, but if you can get past that the teaching is very, very good. I'll post more sources as I find them.

Hope that helps!
- DreamBliss

Whoops! Forgot to answer what Qi Gong is. Simply put its a form of meditation, standing, seated and moving, normally taught along with Tai Chi or as a part of it. I'm not entirely clear myself what it really is. I think of the moving Qi Gong (pronounced Chi Kung) that I do with Matthew Coehn as Yoga, minus all the pain! :P

It's slow, gentle movements that when you watch them, like Tai Chi, you think, "What kind of workout is that?" but when you begin to do them you see that it is indeed a workout. It's not Seal training, no. Hard physical workouts are like chisels on stone. Sure they chip away and break the stone, but Tai Chi and Qi Gong is like water. Over time it also works on the stone, but the end result is far more beautiful and gentle. It comes down to resistance VS flow. 50 situps and 100 pushups followed by a 2 mile run is resistance. It requires effort, force. Tai Chi, Qi Gong and other martial arts, even Yoga to some extent, is flow. It is flexibility. It is a gentle pushing towards. It is in short, the best way IMO to do anything in life, especially meditation.